Pools without lifeguards

One of the funniest things about the theater done by Roberto Soldado this Saturday while the promotion was being played, wasting precious time that his team needed afterwards, pretending to be hit and protesting to the referee as if Afinsa had just ripped him off, is that so many people have came out to attack him for his ideology, apparently close to or inspired by or inspiring the famous Vox political party. By emphasizing his affiliations, it seems that Soldado, in case he is from the PSOE or Sumar party, or being a Corsican nationalist, has a license to do whatever he wants in football because he is a political friend. As if politics were more important than soccer; as if ideology could condition what happens in a field, the most sacred thing in the world after the cradle of a child.

Having made this clarification, let’s go to the terrible facts that are being judged. Roberto Soldado ‘dies’ in a Levante-Alaves game without anyone killing him, and he does it knowing that his rivals have seen him, his teammates have seen him, many of the fans have seen him and, even better, they are going to review him in the VAR and everyone who wants to will see it. That he is looking terrible, that if nobody believed his fall live, imagine when he sees the rest of the world in slow motion. And here is what is being resolved in this serious matter: what goes through Soldier’s head when he writhes in pain under the gaze of thousands of people who know they have done nothing to him. They know, as even fans of pool players know, that this collapsed man is only hiding on the ground and sometimes much to his regret, because there is no longer a dignified way to lift him. He has not achieved what he wanted thanks to the trap, and thank goodness, but there is something worse: the trap has been discovered and he claims things after 25 years in the elite, as if he had not learned anything. He is going to protest to the referee as if he were the director of his premiere at the Teatro Provincial de Pontevedra, forcing him to repeat the sequence.

It is not new and it is still astonishing, in all teams, that there are players who want to pervert the result through one of the most humiliating deceptions, other than the goal with the hand or more vivid tricks, which consists of playing the victim. It is a perfect correspondence with what happens outside the field, where an aggressor has more prestige than a feigned victim, someone who wants to continue within the system taking advantage of it while trying to benefit from it by demanding punishment for an invented crime. Hence, we must return to the initial question: what goes through the head of a player who pretends to be dead when he has to get up and continue as if nothing had happened? Do theatergoers lying face down on the grass dream of electric sheep? Who was Cristiano thinking of when he raised his arms after the wind sent him to the canvas? Is there a better tribute to emoji of the little face glimpsed between the fingers than that of Busquets in his famous action against Inter Milan, when he ordered an interista to be sent off and then, not satisfied with that, wanted to see him from a preferential place showing his squirrellike face between his hands?

A soldier is a repeat offender because there are sins that, once committed, it is impossible not to repeat. Even if they are as ridiculous as this. There are things in life that, when you try them and they feel bad, you can’t stop repeating them until they feel good. They never do. One never recovers from the first ridicule. But you have to respect his formidable respect for his rival: whoever plays the fool always ends up benefiting whoever makes him smart.

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