This week’s gesture is – inevitably – a gesture Federico Dimarco. This is a backhand shot raised from the baseline to McEnroe which Empoli-Inter decided. This is a smear van Gogh at the end of the Starry Night. It’s the weasel that does it Ryan Gosling Emma Stone in La La Land before everyone goes their separate ways. Dimarco’s gesture contains football’s deepest secret, a beauty that has always captivated us.. We have seen this time and time again, once, twice, ten and many times. And we never tired of admiring its magic. We focused on the turns that the ball makes, perfect in their roundness, so perfect that they seem to want to reproduce the stunning harmony that regulates the worlds. We emphasized the ease of the Inter defender’s shots. He doesn’t attack, he just kicks, without any visible effort.
. We imagined a shot as if dozens of such shots were taken on the beach when we were playing with friends. We realized that DiMarco had this goal in mind even before he scored., because sometimes that happens. DiMarco already saw the ball, which was right there in the top corner, before his foot even touched the ball. We have studied the body posture and it is exemplary. This is the pose of a person who is waiting for the ball to end there, not twenty centimeters forward and not twenty centimeters behind. We all agree that for this purpose – Dimarco is already on the podium for the best goals of the 2023/24 championship.. From what we have seen so far, and from what we will see before the end of the season. The extraordinary thing about this gesture, let’s say: one of the extraordinary things is that DiMarco does not add any power to the football he is about to give. It is as if he were proposing to trace an already existing parable.. It’s a kick delivered almost absent-mindedly, but not at all distractedly. DiMarco, as many of us have said and written, has such footage. There were other goals with similar goals – or goals with similar dynamics; but never was it so full of purity. And it is the purity of the gesture that we value here.. As if with a kick, DiMarco freed himself from all unnecessary excesses, peeled off the peel, as they do from a peach or an apple, in short, he left the excess. This is the prerogative of those who have an intimate and trusting relationship with the ball, like DiMarco.. The beauty of his shot is that – with the best of intentions – it could have been this and only this: what a wonderful goal, what a consolation football can give us when someone pulls a gesture like that out of a hat.