More on Zidane

Posting on Johnny Flynn, writing about people in their element, got me thinking about ol' Zizou. Here's a couple from the archives I wrote when I was working in Madrid.

Zidane COMES BACK (vs Mallorca, 9/05)

Zidane comes back
with a sultry beard
and more shaven crow’s peak.
Tan as if his convalescence was ages beside Homer,
playing keepy uppy with bleached pebbles,
conversing with a mutual gentleness, an irascibility,
volleying into the sea.
White shirt like the angel icon Adidas know he is.
Roman-
Algerian
angular
bunch
upright
slouch
of angel
willed back.
Children looking in at the bar window think mortelle and
join the Santiago Bernabéu as it holds
its 80000 breath
willing the ball to him him him
gasp
he leaves it.
It runs to Julio Baptista.
The better attacking option.
Human
perpetuation of will and
bunched enchantment of 80000
plus us.

----

Zidane GOES AWAY (vs Italy 7/06)

In terms of me, well
46 degrees today in Spain and looking around a cathedral in Toledo and reading the paper on the train and things at work are ok
you, there,
surrounded by 60 odd thousand
in significance-rich, history-compact Berlinstadion where
all the world’s eyes look and want
to be
you.
You are your own. Sharing your darkness. Rolling away. You spreading light doing things that cannot be done. You are why
we heroise.
You are our
mythic functioning.
What sadness did you intimate when you headbutted Marco Materazzi?
quite gauchely, in his chest, nearly tripping.
Yes what racist shit did he say and yes did he pinch you and had he been niggling all game
but, where did that come from?
Your last match.
The last visible point of your humble glittering.
The World Cup had been an unexpected epilogue, you were done for and physically and emotionally not right but you began again to be lit, to beguile, to conduct.
So suavely,
and the strain shown on your face
hauling ten men to the Final,
wrapping the rope about your wrist, and bleeding something for you must,
and doing it with grace,
a grace we lack… And then this.
You could have held it together.