How Football by Barney Ronay

Author:Barney Ronay [Barney Ronay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

9

Colombia, and the End of All That

3 July 2018

Rademal Falcao has a graceful way of moving, as you might expect of someone nicknamed – when anyone remembers to call him it – El Tigre. Even after 120 minutes of being jounced and jostled by a heavily perspiring Harry Maguire, Falcao still has something glossy and feline, a sheen of star power as he walks from the centre-circle to the edge of the penalty box. It’s twelve minutes before midnight in Moscow and the thing everyone secretly knew was always going to happen has indeed begun to happen.

It’s a strange feeling witnessing a penalty shoot-out live in the stadium, with a sense of things running away from you, of too much information to process. This is how it feels watching from the press seats, which are so close to the pitch at the Spartak that we can hear the players’ shouts even over the noise of a last-sixteen tie. Falcao still has that air of preternatural calm around him. But then this is a footballer who made his professional debut aged thirteen, who has played in six different countries, survived two potentially career-ending injuries, scored 256 goals, and is still here aged thirty-two, strolling up to take the first penalty like no one’s watching.

Jordan Pickford bounces manically on his line. Falcao just stands and looks at him for a moment, then spanks the ball with startling power straight down the middle as Pickford dives off to his right. Later Pickford would say that Falcao’s penalty was the only one that threw his pre-match planning, the only one that went the other way.

England are behind for the first time at this World Cup in a significant game, 1–0 down in a penalty shoot-out. The air seems to sag, to fill with some heavier substance. Harry Kane walks briskly, spots the ball, shimmies for a moment, feet battering the turf, then skips up and hits his penalty low and hard past the dive of David Ospina. The ball is struck so sweetly it clanks back off the bottom of the frame of the goal and flies up into the top of the net. England’s players barely break ranks, or flinch, or celebrate in the centre-circle. They’re not supposed to. This is part of the plan.

*

Three weeks into this World Cup there still weren’t many England fans in Russia. In Kaliningrad Gareth Southgate had called the last-sixteen game against Colombia England’s biggest for ten years. But only 2,225 made the trip in the end, officially anyway, and Moscow had been grey and grizzly and quiet in the build-up. Russia’s defeat of Spain had been followed by a wild night in the capital. People swung from the street furniture. Cars blasted out Moscow hip-hop. The squares and boulevards were packed with booze, dancing, fun, disorder and various other things that might well usually be forbidden around here. Most of the time this World Cup did feel like a controlled environment, something calculated and carefully parcelled out.

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