Another normal goal from Lord Bellingham | Soccer | Sports

My father says that Bellingham’s goal at Diego Armando Maradona seemed normal and ordinary to him. It is, at least for a superlative and advanced talent at his time like the Englishman. He explained it himself at the end of the game. “The ball came to me and I went towards the area. He was trying to look for Vini and Rodri… And when I saw that a gap was opening up for me, I kept running,” he said. The Maradonian epic of the Azteca Stadium is not intuited in his story, far from it. If anything, it seems paradoxical to us that it is an Englishman who does not stay by the wayside and crosses the rival team’s chest until injecting poison into its heart. It’s a great goal, no doubt. But we’re talking about Bellingham. And that is why my father must be indulged in that self-imposed lack of wonder that he seems to have adopted as a shield against what is yet to come.

In each action of the five, a sound was repeated that does it more justice than it seems. “The old San Paolo,” someone said, I don’t remember if it was one of the commentators or any parish resident. And then I thought that everything seems old at the Bellingham Pass, how can a mammoth of steel and cement that seems to be held together with invisible threads and pins not seem so. On Tuesday it endured an earthquake. Or the explosion of a foreign volcano, also with a song name, but one that invites you to shudder for no more than a second, which is the time that goes from a tremendous goal to surrender. “And when I am one against one in the area I have a lot of confidence,” continues his autobiography of the moment. There will come a day when so much trust and normality will seem absurd.

It’s not that Bellingham is Messi, nor does he intend to be. And it seems obvious that he doesn’t need it: in football, even in life, you can be so many things without having to be Messi or Maradona… If you had to compare him with someone, which is a much more demanding and less precise task than defining him, You could think of an alloy of Pete Sampras and Lebron James, neither of whom passes for being a footballer. It remains to be seen whether Lord Bellingham is. At the moment it only seems that way (we will still have to wait for the relevant tests to be carried out in a laboratory), although it may also seem like a thousand other things: an astronaut, an android, a pirate, a political commissar, a guitarist, a meteorological effect, the Higgs boson… Also an individual who forces me to use too many ellipses in the same paragraph, which is a way like any other of transforming vice into virtue.

“It was good,” the improvised scorer of this post-Benzema Madrid emphasized his story of that generational goal in the old San Paolo stadium, now a little older after the future had passed over it. Simplicity and normality are children of the same father. Jude Bellingham’s name is Mark and he is a police sergeant who has scored a whopping 700 goals in 900 games for West Midlands Police FC, an amateur club made up of police officers from the city of Birmingham. He would get along with mine. Mark Bellingham has a son who makes the exceptional normal, while my old man takes advantage of any hint of confusion to disown me and affirm, with complete normality, that I am the son of a maiden.

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