there is no realization more unnerving than the one that follows a series of sharp twinges in your heel as you're casually walking down the street. at first you believe it to be no more than a rigid relationship between your sock and your shoe, and so you wriggle your ankle around to reconcile them.
you're wrong. your heart drops to your calves, you now digest the fact that there is, in fact, something terrifying afoot. there is a tenacious pocket of skin that has given up in fighting your new pair of shoes. a crevice of hate punishing you for your ignorance. there it is, in all its dreadful glory. a blister.
the only difference legendary french midfielder jean tigana has with a blister is that he is never outside your eyeline. there is no easing into his game, there is no reasonable discretion, in the same way there is no, at least perceptible, reason for the exaggerated pain of a blister. but there is also no heedlessness, nor does he ever lose himself in his overflowing ardor.
there are some players — masterly, cunning, almost all-knowing — who can comfortably be described as omnipotent. there are others — stout, kinetic, relentless — who are practically omnipresent. jean tigana was something different entirely. he was both.
it was this omni-potence/presence, the ability to consume the length of the pitch in stinging pain while physically occupying a fraction of its dimensions, that made him a blister.
jean tigana was something you had to find a way around for your team's own good. not through, around. every movement he made was simply a continuation of the last one and that meant losing the ball to him was cause for a counter-attack every single time. the yugoslavs did not get wind of this before their euro '84 matchup against france, and they, miserably, tried to go through him.
unnamed slavic midfielder gets the ball on the half-turn and instantaneously drives forward at pace, not directly towards tigana, but when the game shrinks around someone walking in any direction is practically considered an affront, sort of how displacing your feet more than half a foot inside a crowded concert is a direct insult to the people around you. he realizes he's trapped, he's in a coffin and tigana is the soil around him, he makes a cheap attempt to turn around and pass back. poor soul.
what he doesn't know is that if jean is in front of you he's also behind you, and he's somehow also over you and under you. the slender frenchman uses his judgment, or his capacity to remain indefinite across space, to get low and under the massive yugoslav and not just win the ball, but to, in catenation, retrieve it and slide past an entire midfield in vivacious but somehow also gallant fashion.
the concept of a blister is always far easier to forget than when it's actually there, making your foot feel like it's bulging out the back of your shoe. it's almost impossible to resolve, you can either:
what we tend to forget is that the game is human, or at least it's made up of humans. sometimes it has no idea how to resolve something, and so it slaps on a band-aid and soldiers on. the band-aid it put on to sweat out tigana has been there since time immemorial, and it's rotting at the seams. the game is about to see the blister it's allowed to grow for 30 years.
it is commonplace to say a modern midfielder can "do everything" on a football pitch. zé lucas can do absolutely everything there is to do on the pitch. he can dive into a tackle just as he can trap the ball and dance out of a press seconds later, just as he can then play a 40-yard pass over defenders straight into his winger's path. he habitually pulls out 10-second sequences like these that deserve an entire highlight tape for themselves. they say a jack of all trades is a master of none, but this kind of mastery is one of one.
lucas is something impossible to place on a tactics board unless you buy the biggest magnet ever manufactured. the kid dominates the brasileirão at the age of 18; and he's playing for sport recife. when, not if, he gets picked up by a big club, his finite universe will become something boundless.
it was clear in the u17 world cup, a tournament which saw him be probably the best midfielder in the tournament by a sizable amount. it's easy to see his unquantifiability and gravity but he doesn't just exist on a plane, he creates a continuum of movement. much like tigana, every action is a result of the last one and the cause of the next one. there are no crevices and much less pauses.
watch him clear the ball from the box over his head and immediately sprint towards it, leap into the goliath-esque opponent à la 2006 cannavaro and unreasonably win even though he's about two-thirds the size of his opponent. watch him track the runner, after his impotent striker lost the ball, and ambush him with a slide tackle from 5 yards away. all of this in the same spectrum of movement.
we have rewatched this clip maybe 50 times and remain without interpretation. there is no logical or sensible position to explain how he's not just at the scene of the play, but he is the play.
jean tigana came second in the '84 ballon d'or rankings and the world forgot him. now his clone is out here collecting their debts.
this is what happens when you call a tumor a mole.
the game had been ignoring the problem on their hands for 30 years. jean tigana was an early warning sign. zé lucas is the sign it's already too late.
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