the world of football likes to forget. it has no interest in what it leaves behind. it only digs and buries. we went back to the ruins to try and find gold. all we found were mirrors. there was nothing in them except everything.
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england received hoddle and spent twenty years not knowing what to do with him. then brasil gave the world tiaguinho and now the world is standing there, holding the same gift, with the same blank expression on its face.
the winger was supposed to be extinct. triple-marked, suffocated, bred out of the game by airtight systems and paranoid fullbacks. the obituary was written, the funeral was held. nobody told césar miño.
every footballing generation produces players who arrive before the language to describe them exists. history is written by the victors, and this group falls at the hands of discordant managers and tactical crusades without fail. history erases them. outlier exists to write their names down before the letters become ruins.
we connect the forgotten to the untrod. the past is not nostalgia here. it is the future.
"those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— george santayana
"i never predict anything and i never will."
— paul gascoigne
"what is past is prologue."
— shakespeare, the tempest
"some people think football is a matter of life and death. i can assure them it is much more serious than that."
— bill shankly
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