As a child he must have been like those who accompanied him to the Camp Nou, his last night on that lawn. One of the two boys caressed his shield, as if he were asking about his father to the same entity to which he says goodbye. He gave him some directions, kissed his hair, placed him in the field, left the two boys safely, and left, with the seriousness of a captain of the heart to business.
A grandstand awaited him that he drew from the depths, especially about minute three (sempr3), the applause that his long history deserves. That same hobby crossed him out of seeing him in recent games, perhaps encouraged by the fact that the club itself (the coach admitted it) was degrading him before he himself gave up the medals.
When he did it, three days ago, when he polished the shield but settled his sentimental account with the field of play, those who made him slip from the lineups, rushed in praises that carry lemon and pepper and syrup, in similar doses. The unanimity of the night wants to erase the recent past, when it deserved Pique the nickname of the famous German center-back, a name that the stadium chanted as if there hadn’t been those screams like fists.
But I imagine that the shield that the boy was caressing had scars still bleeding from the minutes when, being in the field, he was the target of that knife of ice that is drawn when someone already decrees that you are not useful but part of the bench.
It must have been like those children he took to the field. A happy boy with questions. This was also the case in Barcelona’s adolescence and, of course, when already in the joy of friendship, he got together with friends to listen to everyday bravado, jokes that he also told, questions that wanted to know more about the lives of others.
Related news
It would seem that then, that smile with which he inquires, with which he also greets opponents on the field, was trained in those times. An extraordinary player, a frank, spiritual person, much less given to the vice of winning (money) than to winning titles, to which he contributed greatly. With the Spanish team as well, and we should remember the songs of repudiation that he suffered in our stadiums every time he put on the red and yellow shirt in the years after 2017. From those times comes my greatest affection for Pique and by Guardiola, precisely, because one was attributed a militancy that he did not show and the other was denied his right, in a democratic country, to want for his land the destiny he pleased.
In those meetings with the girls and with the boys, some older than him, sometimes he the oldest of all, he asked to know, he prepared himself for a world that would soon be serious, like life and as that verse of Jaime Gil de Biedma. That dryness that finally chewed the Camp Nou to reduce its degree of influence on the Barca of today (and of yesterday, don’t forget) is now a food to be digested by those who let him be, alone, the one who would turn the air around to turn his farewell into a way of loving Barça . Always, sempr3, we will have it in our hearts.