Monthly Archives: October 2011

Someone who can tell you far more about Higuaín, about contingency, about football and beauty, however, is the subject of our newest man crush, Santiago Solari. He has a new blog in El País called El charco (‘the Pond’), referring to the Atlantic, and it’s amazing. We had to doublecheck when we saw the name attached to such a fantastic piece of prose. Is that..? Could it be… the Santiago Solari who delighted us so ten years ago dancing up the left wing for that awesome, hard-working, downright loveable Real Madrid team? It was, and, dear tired, harassed, perpetually titillated but never rewarded reader, it made the reading all the sweeter.

It’s quite simply the best thing we’ve come across in ages and it’s written by one of the players we have only slightly less of a thing for than Pablito Aimar. It’s an ideal version of pegamequemegusta, without our halfway house wit, our verbosity, and, dear lord, the sheer tediousness of 5,000 word posts. His first article was titled Function and Form. A discussion of aesthetics and football, it includes lines like:

Football is not art as art is neither its goal nor its essence. Nor is beauty.

and

It is wholly frivolous to try and treat a football match as if it were a Flemish masterpiece.

You’ll have noticed the tone, the eccentric, starchy register, the assurance, the perspicacity. In many ways he reminds us of his compatriot and fellow Real Madrid man, Jorge ‘Vincent Price’ Valdano, who’s also given to mystical ramblings about time and space, and a slightly odd vocabulary. While a treat, it makes it harder to translate, but we’ve given it a go. Continue reading →