Dear Paul Pogba, I’m sorry – Contrasti Magazine

Dear Paul, I’m sorry. Lost among a thousand useless things and swallowed by this disgusting and repetitive news vortex, we have left you out. We’ve allowed your afterword to look like this: a big front page headline and little else. We labeled you, branded you. We made you cannon fodder. We have allowed our thumb to overtake our minds and we have simplified the complexities of reality, deluding ourselves, as always, into understanding it. And so we set you aside, like something lying in the corner and forgotten.

But then we were alone in the gray of our routine and thought of you, of you what were you? it is at what you have shown. Your first goal against Napoli with your left foot, your dribbling, your extravagant hairstyles. Your appearance as a child, your running, your class. Everything reappears in a convulsive, disorderly manner: distant images are now close to us and forever entrusted to eternity. And a feeling of fear permeates us: the idea that You probably won’t play again It is an evil that for us smacks of condemnation.

So it’s true: (maybe) we won’t see your technique in tight spaces and your ability to dominate spaces and opponents anymore. We will no longer enjoy the intoxicating taste of one of your destinations and we will no longer witness your unlikely celebrations. Above all, we will no longer experience this incredible thing Ability to make every single soccer gesture easy and perfect at the same timean act that cannot be reproduced and therefore inimitable.

The truth is that a weak flame within us continued to burn untamed. The hope that I could return to what I once pampered and calmed us like the view of the sea on the horizon. And then we waited for you, who forgives you for every misstep and every wrong decision like a father who watches his son from a distance and turns a blind eye to his umpteenth screw-up. A few good games from you for the national team were enough to break us from the habit of your absence and bring back improbable dreams. In a place that was yours alone. It’s ours. And that ultimately we weren’t ready to close. We would have continued to wait for your return to the limits of rationality, perhaps in vain.

Speaking of which Football innocence.

Because you were one of the few who could open worlds and windows in the deadly void of modern football. From those who create new spaces where none should be and who make football a religious experience. Because yours were not just games, but erotic bodies that you gave on the field and that we would never tire of worshiping. They play football as the epitome of pleasant experiencesWe look at you to enjoy the taste of forgetting our lives. You and we, now common victims of a fate that we have to accept despite ourselves.

Her career was a bit like a universal story, a youthful love that everyone has experienced firsthand: the butterflies in the stomach at the beginning, the great promises, the difficulties along the way. And a tragic end. On the other hand, we all know that first love ends like this: we wonder whether we will love each other again and struggle with a thousand feelings of regret.. A thousand ifs and buts, unresolved questions to which there will never be an answer. A bit like yours, Pogba. Eternal conflict between what could have been and what was. Eternal talent, perhaps never truly expressed and therefore terribly ours. A shared story for special people. A story to forget, not to tell, a bit complicated. A false story.