If an illusion lasts exactly 53 seconds, how do you handle the 54th second? How do you overcome the disappointment that comes from the fall of illusions?
Anyone who has never played goalkeeper – in a soccer match – has never experienced the concept of being “wrong-footed.”
As a kid – I who was and still am in life and in soccer a number 11, a left winger – through a bizarre twist of fate I found myself playing goalkeeper. This all happened in tournaments with seven-player teams.
It was “seven-a-side soccer,” without the offside rule.
This means that if the opposing midfielder, launching the ball high, bypassed the defense and set the striker in motion, you’d find him right in front of you: it was just you, the goalkeeper, and him.
The goal was inevitable. Unless you threw yourself at the ball, between the attacker’s legs, risking getting hurt.
I conceded five goals one Saturday afternoon, on the soccer field behind the Parish of San Pio X, in Verona. I was 13 years old.
Being wrong-footed: when the ball goes where you don’t expect
It’s not five goals that hurt you. If you fought as a goalkeeper like a lion, saving even the unsaveable, you’re not the problem.
The problem, in seven-a-side as in eleven-a-side, is the midfield that doesn’t filter. The problem is the defense that doesn’t intercept and gets fooled by the opposing striker.
The goal from being wrong-footed is, instead, something else entirely. It’s anguish. It’s bewilderment. It’s the darkness of the mind. And you fear that you, only you, are the problem.
Being wrong-footed in soccer is a technique that consists of putting an opponent out of position, for example the goalkeeper.
It’s done through a deceptive movement or a feint, thus creating free space to exploit.
Imagine a magician who distracts the audience with one hand while performing the trick with the other: that’s how being wrong-footed works for a goalkeeper.
The attacker shoots the ball toward goal. You, the goalkeeper, expect to see it go high to the right. But instead it rockets low to the left.
You’ve leaned and thrown yourself in one direction. The ball has instead gone the opposite way and you find yourself, like a fool, out of position.
So much so that you end up thinking, while bewilderment takes hold of you: “What happened? How could this have occurred? And what do I do now?”
When love wrong-foots You
Many years ago, in my early university years, one Saturday evening I go out with Giulia, who was a couple of years younger than me.
It’s a warm summer evening. I take her, with my Citroën Diane 6, to the Torricelle, the hills above downtown Verona.
We stop in a clearing, talk intensely for several minutes and, suddenly, I draw Giulia to me. I’m convinced that, just like me before, she’ll let herself go. And that she’s happy to have me with her.
It had been a pleasant evening. I had talked to her about Philosophy, since I was studying at the University of Padova. She had told me about her singing auditions, since she liked to sing and had a beautiful voice.
As always happened between us, we had moved from culture to intimacy.
But not that evening. Giulia pulls back. She looks me straight in the eyes. And she says: “You come, we spend an evening, we have a good time. You draw me to you. You kiss me. I melt. Then you disappear for weeks. Then you show up again. Then you disappear again. I think about you, I miss you and it hurts.”
That evening I felt the ground crumble beneath my feet. It was as if the car had vanished. And I found myself wandering in space.
At the same time, I felt like the most wretched man on the planet. I inserted the key, pressed the ignition button of the Dyane, and drove Giulia home.
The escape route from the 54th second
Waking up from illusions, without having the desired result, is like experiencing a situation of being wrong-footed.
There too you ask yourself: “What do we do now?”
Escape is one of the ways to handle the awakening after the fall of illusions. We find it difficult to accept reality, which clashes with what had deluded us.
The 53 seconds of illusions had lulled us, in the certainty that we would reach the point of joy. We would have won. We would have been happy. Everything would have gone as it was supposed to go.
We had taken surprises into consideration. However, they were nothing more than evanescent hypotheses. Little more than shadows.
Escape – like silence, withdrawing into the shadows, missing an appointment – offers us the way out from the disappointing awakening, at the 54th second.
It is not, however, the best choice. Above all, escape is not a choice we can carry forward forever.
Not even Dante Alighieri, the fugitive Ghibelline, could run away forever.
At a certain point, the 54th second presents us with the bill. It’s the bill of the most bitter of solutions: the truth of our defeat, the certainty that illusions have fallen, and then the sad end of a lost match.
Maurizio F. Corte
(Part 2 – to be continued)
- Maurizio F. Corte, professional journalist, media writer and media educator, is adjunct professor of Intercultural Communication in the Media at the Intercultural Studies Center of the University of Verona and educational coordinator of the Master’s in Intercultural Competence and Management
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