I’m taking advantage of the league break to read the book ADN Barça, by Paco Seirul·lo (Roca publishing house). It’s 446 pages so dense that I only understand the most obvious ones. Seirul·lo’s erudition manages to capture Cruyff’s thinking. The proof that it is not the capricious delusion of a charlatan: the book begins with two prologues, by Pep Guardiola and Jordi Cruyff. They are authorities who, like Seirul·lo, connect with this Barça in exile, absent or expelled by the other Barça DNA: the one that is unable to preserve its talent and needs to extirpate it from its own body.
Guardiola thanks Seirul·lo for his eloquence and ability to synthesize Cruyff’s grammar. Both he and Jordi celebrate Seirul·lo’s contribution of concepts – honest analysts and impostors alike – such as: phase space (EDF), game space (EDJ), countermovement or semantic patterns of communication. Seirul·lo incorporates graphics that alternate the obvious with lucid findings about the phases of the game. Cite Morin, Aristotle, Descartes, Lao Tzu or Weber to establish analogies and make the speech more understandable. The ideas are linked with a logic that begins in the game system (don’t lose the ball and, if you lose it, don’t give it up), to the attitudinal habits and the commandments of recovery or training motivation.
And we talk, of course, about the ball. Seirul·lo develops a whole treatise on the effectiveness of the touch and the pass, totem of the Cruyff mythology. And speaking of mythology: it also references the Jano players. The analogy: Janus was a god with two faces that allowed him to look forward and backward simultaneously. Examples of Jano players: Xavi and Iniesta. In practice, this connects with the experience, which any fan may have had, of verifying that there are players who anticipate the movement of teammates or opponents and always find -Laudrup- the ideal space to advance the game. From time to time, Seirul·lo recreates himself in more dense concepts, as when he claims that Cruyff was the great representative of, olé, “the epistemology of the past”. It is not an opportunistic book and will remain as a corpus of the Cruyffist credo. And for readers who, like me, have not managed to assimilate all of its substance, we are left with the challenge of re-inciding, as good parishioners do, in reading and in faith.
To compensate, I also took advantage of the break to watch the series Coppola, the representative (Disney). It tells the most turbulent years in the life of Guillermo Coppola, representative of Diego Armando Maradona. Part of the content of the series comes from the book Guillote, acá está. This is my life (Planeta, 2009). Trickster, nice, liar, charming, intelligent, egotistical, virtuoso of survival instinct and firefighting, Coppola is embodied by the extraordinary actor Juan Minujin and maintains all the interest of a series splendid What kind of guy was Coppola? In the memoirs, he writes: “For a long time my member was the wallpaper of a computer. I once took a photo of it in all its glory and that image circulated as the eighth wonder of the world. It’s not something I made up. They are flowers that I have been feeling over the years”. This is indeed a semantic pattern of communication and the rest are fists.
