Stand in the area | Sports

Great interview in the Relevo newspaper with Diego Tristán. Tristán was a riotous striker, an extraordinary animal in his best years, which he himself estimates at three or four. In those years, with Deportivo terrorizing Europe, Diego Tristán was one of the best forwards in the world: unpredictable, beautiful, radically brilliant. Among his many virtues, he had one not particularly valued: intermittence. Sometimes a god like Messi comes out, who is not intermittent, but the heirs of those gods conceive the amazing play on a specific afternoon, at a chosen minute, in a special game. Tristán, like Guti, like Djalminha, ruled in his time and even more, in his life: they are players who did not submit to the rigors of soccer, and by living outside of that slavery they became exotic, free birds, of which the opponents did not know what to expect. Birds that flew when no one was looking anymore. “Will Tristán have the day today, or not?” the defensemen wondered. And Tristán perhaps answered the question in the 67th minute after spending the entire game scratching his belly: he had it, he left three rivals lying on the ground, knocked the goalkeeper to the ground and scored on an empty goal. It was a pleasure for Tristán to always see him on the field, whether he wanted to play or not; sometimes he hit it at 92, but he would last the play in your head for a week.

In the interview with the Relevo teammates, the striker says something valuable: “Nobody stops in the area anymore. I saw Butragueño and I loved it. And I tell the kids on my team: you can think, you have time, enjoy”. Tristán always had more time than anyone in the area. The reference to Butragueño is not free. For years I was obsessed with the fact that the Vulture was my childhood idol. Not Hugo, not Michel. I found out later that it was because of that: because of what he did when he approached the goal. He received the ball inside the area, lowered his arms and began to think. At the moment when everyone is in a hurry, when everything is vertigo, when the defenders cannot touch you because you fall to the ground, when your teammates run, get unmarked or ask for it from all sides, Butragueño would stop the ball and run. He was the different player of Madrid de la Quinta, a unique player. He exploited the genius of the pause and silence in the middle of a highway. Tristán knows what he is doing when he quotes Butragueño. Time is a trap and he put the cheese.

A few months ago, in an interview with EL PAÍS, Ronaldo Nazario confessed that his most comfortable and calm moment on a soccer field was when he faced the goalkeeper alone. In that moment of panic in which the entire stadium was rising and the goalkeeper was waiting for him with his heart rate skyrocketing, the striker dedicated himself to the first essence of football and the main reason for his popular success: the game. Not the competition, not the title, not the victory, not even the goal: the game. Playing with emotions, with time, with deceit, with the look and with the legs; play with the ball Players who have a good time on the field sublimate football. It is true that they are not regular, it is true that from one year to the next their physical condition drops dramatically, it is true that if they play a lot on the field it means that they play too much in life, which shortens their career, but four seasons of Guti, Djalma or Tristán weighs, and leaves in the memory, more than twenty seasons of any.

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