What Rodrygo had just done was special; where he had done it and when he had done it was, too. It was His first touch was impeccable, the ball tamed with the outside of his right foot, supposedly the wrong one, and coaxed into obediently joining him as he set off. Five seconds later, it was in the net.
He was 94 seconds into his Real Madrid career. Some 57, people leapt. It had happened fast. Instead he travelled with the first team to Sevilla only to be left out of the squad entirely. The clock showed And so it starts; the excitement, the expectation, the pressure. Week six had been marked by kids, born after Aged 18 years and seven months, only two younger players have ever scored for the club.
They are related, especially at Barcelona and Madrid. As the radios raved, some of the same things said about Fati come up again. Yet the concerns expressed parallels as well, an awareness of what could go wrong, of the warping power of expectation and pressure.
No one wants to be responsible somehow. Or, worse still, wrong. Bojan Krkic broke Barcelona records and it broke him for a while. Gerard Deulofeu was the best player many of them had seen. In the end, though, neither was the new anything.
If Rodrygo or the rest of us needed any other warning, an indication of how hard it can be, there was also the man he replaced. The man? The boy. Chances slipped away, each more painful than the last. Then, at last, he bent a superb shot into the corner, taking a deflection en route. Madrid were up and Vinicius slipped to his knees and sobbed, released at last. And for all the lessons, the warnings, there are examples that say the opposite. What is football, what is life, without it?
