Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Ringlets

They called the successive figure eights Uruguayan players drew on the field moñas, ringlets. French journalists wanted the secret of that witchcraft that cast the rival players in stone. Through an interpreter, José Leandro Andrade revealed the formula: the players trained by chasing chickens that fled making S’s on the ground. Journalists believed it and published the story.

Decades later, good ringlets were still cheered as loudly as goals in South American soccer. My childhood memory is filled with them. I close my eyes and I see, for example, Walter Gómez, that dizzying bushwhacker who would dive into the swamp of enemy legs with ringlet after ringlet and leave a wake of fallen bodies. The stands would confess:

We’d all rather fast

than miss a Walter Gómez pass.

He liked to knead the ball, retain it and caress it, and if it got away from him, he would feel insulted. No coach would dare tell him, as they say now: “If you want to knead, go work in a bakery.”

The ringlet was not just a bit of tolerated mischief, it was a joy the crowd demanded. Today such works of art are outlawed, or at least viewed with grave suspicion, and are considered selfish exhibitionism, a betrayal of team spirit, and utterly useless against the iron defensive systems of modern soccer.