Jesús de Miguel, when the game stops simulating

Death is a threat that is always there, but in places where it is not expected, encountering it becomes especially brutal. A stadium is prepared for joy, sadness, rage, injustice, pride, humiliation. All from a certain innocence, because we know that nothing that happens there affects the essential things in our lives. There is something naive in that passion and naivety does not know what to do with death. He finds no explanation, not even words for such a shock. As always when two things of different nature collide.

Because football is the complete opposite of death. Death does not admit revenge nor does it give you the consolation of a next season. Football is life: an emotional summit that breaks with everyday life because, as a game, it is a refuge that keeps us safe from reality. There is life in the passion of this absolutely vocational profession; There is life in dreams, which only know how to look forward and which a player renews each season; There is life in the solidarity of a team that is always a protective army that provides security. But all those perceptions today seem absurd, insignificant, because an unexpected reality suddenly attacked us from behind to shatter that wonderful fiction we call football.

No one and nowhere is safe from an accident. Perhaps, our inability to explain chance moves us to look for culprits. It is difficult for us to admit that a misfortune of this magnitude does not have a person responsible. A collision between someone looking for the ball against someone who, anticipating a collision, tries to defend himself, is part of the unpredictability of football. An urgent and innocent action to which the consequences become tragic. Life is full of them. Not football, and that is why our confusion. Let's not look for blame. For so much pain, one victim is enough.

There are places that we just pass by, and others that stay with us and to which we return again and again. There is something about me that stayed in Tenerife more than thirty years ago, an identification with the club and with the island that keeps me attentive to its joys and disappointments. It is the force of football, which crosses destinies and creates bonds forever. Something mysterious, a kind of sentimental kinship that keeps us connected and that, when a tragedy occurs, brings us even closer.

What Jesús de Miguel suffered increases my feeling of attachment. As if someone to whom I was united by the same identity had left. It goes there, then, my emotional pain towards his family and towards Club Deportivo Tenerife, from its president, my dear Felipe Miñambres, to the last fan.