It almost always happens in the five minutes after a match ends: everyone knows why one team won and why the other lost, often with explanations that tend to have some kind of correlation, but not necessarily. I mean, one can believe their team lost because of the referee and at the same time declare the tactical superiority of the opponent, or their mental strength, or the cunning of their forwards. If football has anything good, it is an extensive catalog of clichés that can be placed here and there depending on the result, interchangeable with each other, all equally empty as soon as the next match begins.
The financial strength of betting houses could be called a small great miracle: we are not all millionaires here because we don’t want to be. Because five minutes after being eliminated at the Metropolitano, everyone seemed to know that Barça is not enough to compete in Europe with this squad, with those ages, with such center-backs, with the defensive line so advanced that even suicide is part of the explanation. It is curious how some sentences come together in football. Or how light expressions that almost never explain much are given the value of law, but offer satisfaction. That the Spanish league champion is not enough to compete in Europe, but the fourth-placed team is – almost twenty points apart – is one of those incongruities that only football allows us. Go to a murder trial and explain that the Olympic 100-meter champion never had a chance to catch the victim, but his neighbor, who lost a leg years ago due to diabetes, did: let’s see how the jury looks at you.
Pep Guardiola, who must know something about defeats, spoke this week about the small details as a differentiating element in a two-legged tie. Details that one cannot control for the most part, because football is such a lively sport that at the first slip-up it leaves you dry. Two centimeters up or down, to the right or left, turns – or not – the same play development into a goal. A slip can send you to the ground at the worst moment, even if you are playing the best match of your life. And a referee’s misjudgment could have the same influence on the final result as a goal in the top corner or the saving stop of the holy goalkeeper. None of these factors can be calculated beforehand, but we find a greater explanation, a fatal design, as soon as we hit the mat.
Football will always be a game to which, with a lot of work and some luck, you can barely subtract a more or less large portion of uncertainty. A game in which a team can shoot forty times on goal with none from the opponent and lose the match: for that own goals were invented and for this too we will find a reasoned explanation, though not reasonable. Because five minutes after the match ends, any mystery is solved by millions of vocational coaches who will be right until the next kickoff. The story always arrives late, but it arrives forcefully, as if in the center of chaos there were a perfectly defined plan: that is why we will continue confusing explanations with consolation, which is all one needs – if their team loses – five minutes after the match ends.