Pedri and the wolves

At minute 10.37 of the game there were eight Costa Rican players between Spain and the goal.

At minute 10.45 there were five and they were scared.

What happened in those seconds was thunder.

Marco Asensio stepped on the ball with his back to the goal in a sensitive area, the residential neighborhoods of the field, those lands that are not near or far, places where he still has a snack in the middle of the afternoon until one day, on the other side of the road, a brick breaks a window.

In football, the expression 'three quarters' has triumphed;

Actually, that area is the area where everything happens, where one team knows if they are defending well and the other knows if they are moving the ball just to move it, like the rich move money without knowing why, or if there is a criminal objective. In hands.

How do you know the latter?

When the ball is not controlled:

when the ball moves to one touch.

For this reason, when Asensio stepped on it with his back to Costa Rica, nothing predicted the vertigo.

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He released it quickly to Gavi, who returned it to a touch, and Asensio, again without stopping it, to Busquets, who opened it for Alba.

After releasing it, Asensio began to run to the left and unchecked it from him, clearing the edge of the area so that two things would happen: that Dani Olmo left his position as finisher to that of midfielder, finding himself alone, and that Alba saw him.

Gavi only had to take two steps to receive the ball and release it by raising the ball, which he touched an opponent and deflected it a bit -a dirty pass, sometimes, is like a dirty bomb: more destructive- getting rid of the few Costa Ricans who they were already on the way.

Dani Olmo did one of those controls that define a way of being on the field and in life;

he lowered it towards himself, hindering the rival already surpassed with his body, and stung Keylor Navas.

Few things more beautiful in football than a control.

A soccer player begins by knowing how to stop the ball: whoever doesn't stop it doesn't move it.

And whoever also stops it and converts control into a first touch, or directly a dribble, moves his team and moves the opponent.

Olmo stopped the ball by putting it ready to shoot, and his shot blew up the game.

The game was always Pedri's, especially in the first part, the happy corkage of the 20s, an era of jazz: youth and champagne everywhere.

Pedri always had a second to think, which in him is half an hour, and for Costa Rica that second weighed on his legs like a concrete block.

Players like Pedri are not defined by quality, nor by physical background, nor by intelligence: they are defined by time.

For them every second without marking with the ball is an eternity;

the closer to the area they are, the more they distort space and time, and therefore more disorder, plunging them into chaos, the opposing defenses.

Pedri, an elite player in the midfield, can become a vintage player touching the area.

He's a shark fin moving like radar while the opponents dig in,

Goals began to fall, up to 7, against a stunned Costa Rica that saw what Spain could be on the field, a team built on the foundation of the world champion: fast ball, if possible with one touch, until they unbind the rivals and begin to clear the way to the goal, skipping lines while opening the cages for the greyhounds on the wings or for the illuminated locksmiths like Pedri on the inside, the place where the legs accumulate and it is almost always at night, where the opposites are squeezed like the turtle formations of Ancient Rome;

the places where Pedri and Spain fall like cluster bombs.

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