The Argentine dragged Roma to the semifinals with the sole force of his talent.
The seven days that separated the two legs of the Europa League quarter-finals must have been an endless wait for fans of the Roma. On April 13th in Rotterdam the team suffered another depressing defeat. One of those dark evenings, which we now recognize belong to cabal of Romanism. In the 26th minute Dybala went off injured and only seventeen minutes later the captain, Lorenzo Pellegrini, had kicked the penalty on the post for a possible advantage. As in the conference final eleven months ago, Feyenoord controlled the match with a zen-like calm, as if their players were walking in the mountains on a summer afternoon.
I started this piece talking about the time that got rough between the two games because I can’t stop thinking about a sentence in the On the Shortness of Life which I read a few months ago. It is a classic Seneca aphorism, which you have surely already heard, but I try to think about it anyway: We don’t get a short life, but we make it short. We are not poor, but squanderers”.
Here, if it is true that many of us waste the time at our disposal, we certainly cannot attribute this vice to Paulo Dybala when it’s on a soccer field.
SEMI-FINAL!!!! A sought after, wanted and deserved victory with an extraordinary group!! Go on like this MAGICAL ROME! 🟡🔴 pic.twitter.com/SzuYid66Qk
— Paulo Dybala (@PauDybala_JR) April 20, 2023
In the 77th minute Roma took the lead 1-0. Anthony Taylor has just disallowed the goal that would have earned qualification for a push from Abraham and Dybala, who came on for four minutes, still hasn’t touched the ball. On a somewhat unrealistic launch of the Feyenoord defense, a nuisance to the flexor tears Chris Smalling’s face. The game stops. Ibañez, who was the first centre-back on the bench, had come on just four minutes earlier, replacing Llorente. Mourinho was forced to spend the last change: Çelik came in, almost out of rotation after his horror show in the match with Cremonese that had eliminated Roma from the Italian Cup. The Turkish, nominally a right full-back, comes in as a left centre-back.
When the game restarted, Feyenoord kept the ball. He finds himself in Roma’s frontline and doesn’t know what to do until Szymanski, almost exhausted, crosses and finds Igor Paixão’s detour in the heart of the area – right in the area that should have belonged to Çelik.
An ice age seems to have arrived at the Olimpico. It took the public a while to process the shock: in five minutes Roma went from qualification to elimination without even realizing it. There are ten minutes to go and Mourinho’s team tries to close Feyenoord in the area: they attack with their heads down but don’t have the opportunity to really worry Bijlow. This is where Dybala’s sublimation of time begins, a personal show that showed us how it takes players like him a few minutes to change the direction of games that last one hundred and eighty. The Argentine tries to tie up the game on the frontline but something doesn’t go right. On the other hand, only seven days earlier he had been hurt and he hadn’t played against Udinese on Sunday.
Around Dybala’s injuries there is an inextricable aura of mystery, we find him before our eyes with increasingly fragile muscles, in precarious conditions, but we don’t really know the reason. He took to the field with his thigh wrapped in a disturbing blue ribbon. Why was Dybala there? Does football deserve such a deep and atrocious physical martyrdom? Perhaps we won’t be surprised anymore when we see him play walking on his left leg alone, the origin and at the same time the end of a talent that we might not have understood before yesterday.
Around such big and handsome players, bio-mechanically perfect, like the ones we are used to seeing in football in the 1920s, Paulo Dybala is a disharmony. A number ten with the instinct of a centre-forward, yet a body too delicate for both roles. Perhaps this is the first aspect that fascinates and at the same time worries Dybala’s game. Its ability, that is, to get around the limits of the body to pursue an aesthetic value.
Let’s take the 85′ volley. The ball reaches Dybala after a scrum in the area and the first thought of him is the shot. I should say it’s a horrible conclusion, almost ten meters out of the mirror of the goal, and indeed it did.
But also Dybala’s most frustrating shotsthose who not only don’t worry the goalkeeper but end up scaring the Roma fans, they are as graceful as few. Look at how he plants the leg that he couldn’t use to nail himself to the ground, how he rotates his torso and arms to channel the ephemeral power that remains in his body into his left foot. Dybala plays football with the authenticity of swans sitting on their nest by the pond as they seem to take pleasure in their nature. His elegance is detached from any superstructure, it involves only himself and the ball.
Dybala is a unique player because he forces us to reevaluate the ethical parameters with which we watch football. In his style even an obscene shot like this becomes an aesthetic manifestation. «Dybala’s control and left are two works of art» as Stefano Borghi said in the commentary.
Almost two minutes after that shot, Roma had to go back up the field and on the right Celik, back in a more appropriate role, only managed to extend the ball along the touchline. At that point Dybala’s physical resistance to the Feyenoord defender’s thrust is needed to protect the ball and switch sides to El Shaarawy with the habit with which I get out of bed in the morning to go and prepare my breakfast.
The action develops in the Feyenoord area, where El Shaarawy places the ball on Pellegrini. At that point the Roma captain makes a first pass for Dybala, who is marked from behind and is about to fall. The Argentine hooks with the inside of his right foot, managing to turn around to face the goal with a pirouette around the ball, as if replicating a step by Fred Astaire. Dybala is already about to put his ass on the grass of the Olimpico and manages to stop the impact with the lawn only by planting his left arm to block inertia.
Falling goals seem like a heroic gesture to us. As spectators we feed on the adrenaline with which the players give life to increasingly extreme gestures to indulge their instinct for goal, victory, happiness. With only one thigh functioning, the other medicated to the extreme to be able to give him those few minutes on the pitch, Paulo Dybala scored a goal that told us all about his talent. He broke the narrative around him, that of the handsome yet indecisive player, with a gesture that will become the epitome of his career in Rome.
Dybala’s goal came a minute from the 90th minute and allowed Roma to drag the match into extra time. We will remember the match for the mental strength that José Mourinho forged into the team, which today has a fighting essence that we are not used to associating with Roma. Yet however we see it, it was Dybala’s match. The game of his left foot capable of everything – yes, even to frame the ball in the crossroads from the edge of the small falling area – and of the spiritual strength with which he managed to go beyond his immanent limits.
Just a few minutes after the 2-1 draw, social media started talking about the other goal, the one that Dybala had scored against Lazio in 2018 in the same goal as the Olimpico. Even then Dybala had kicked from the ground in the heart of the area, finding the crossroads with his left foot. It was March, and for the first time since that last minute victory – does that remind you of anything? – Juventus had returned to first place in the standings. Of that Juventus championship we remember Higuain’s goal at San Siro, but this by Dybala was just as important.
HISTORY rewritten by talent:
PAULO DYBALA.2023 vs Feyenoord
2018 vs Lazio— Paride Pasta (@paride_pasta) April 20, 2023
Try to watch the two goals side by side, and then try not to believe the theories of the TV series Dark (2017-2020) on the cyclicality of time.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Dybala’s match didn’t end with that goal. At least the pass from a winger should be mentioned with which he catches the Feyenoord defense in a counter-time and sends Abraham on goal in the second extra time, before Pellegrini’s tap-in arrives. A pass to-la-Aimar after a goal to–la-Higuain. In just over forty minutes, like the great performing artists, Dybala has condensed all his exceptionality. When we want to talk about him, about the mark he left on football, we’ll talk about this game again. Of this goal.
«It was one of those victories that people will remember for years.” Dybala said in the post-match with teary eyes. It’s hard to stop thinking about that sweet and finally radiant smile. After difficult years, in which his talent was questioned due to his physique, Dybala «he was looking for the lost joy, and he found it here» as Mourinho said later. In the summer he had been welcomed to the Square Colosseum of EUR like an emperor. “Not even in my wildest dreams would I have imagined something like this.”
In the meantime he has contributed to changing the way of living in Rome. From a theater of the absurd, where bad luck and decadence entered your lungs through a sad air, the Olimpico has been transformed into an arena overflowing with bodies ready to exult without hesitation. If things went like this, it’s also thanks to Dybala’s left-handed. At his being hope and ecstasy merged in a wave of happiness.