Eduardo Galeano wrote that he was a beggar for good football. He went to the stadiums, he said, hat in hand, and across the grounds of the world he begged for alms: “a pretty move, for the love of God.” He didn’t care which shirt the miracle wore. He cared about the miracle.
Football is an art, even if it is played with the feet. And like all art, it is born of the need of those who have nothing.
Maradona understood this better than anyone, because he came from Villa Fiorito, from the dirt pitches where the ball was the only thing in abundance. His left foot was not a technique: it was an answer. A way of talking back to the world from the mud. When he lifted the ball against England in 1986, he did not score a goal: he wrote a manifesto. First the trick of the humble —the Hand of God— and then, minutes later, the masterpiece no cheat could ever have dreamed.
The game of duty against the game of sun
Galeano feared that the history of football was “a sad voyage from beauty to duty.” Football-as-spectacle, football-as-business, the football of numbers and sponsors, kept gaining ground over football-as-celebration. The left foot against the spreadsheet. The nutmeg against the pass-completion rate.
Today the World Cup returns to the Americas —to Mexico, the United States, Canada— and the question remains intact. Will we watch the football of the accountants, or the football of the madmen? The one that is measured, or the one that is danced?
De Zurda is born of that doubt. And of that hope.
Why this blog
We write de zurda —with the left foot of Diego and from the sidewalk of Galeano. Not to repeat scores —algorithms can do that— but to defend the idea that a match can be a poem, and that a poem needs no one’s permission.
We will tell this World Cup the way you tell a story around a fire. With analysis, yes, but also with memory and anger and love. Because in the end, as both men knew, football cannot be explained: it is prayed.
And here we remain, hat in hand, begging for a beautiful play.