The wait for football's next great is delightful

Overused, hollowed out and thrown about idly like confetti. That’s what the word “great” has been reduced to these days.

- Rohit Brijnath Assistant Sports Editor

Everyone’s “great”, just ask a fan about his team or a player about his clubmate. So everyone tries to qualify the word. Now there’s the all-time great. And the greatest of his generation. And the uncommonly great, who share a name with an animal which eats leaves and twigs.

The G.O.A.T.

Naaaah, Pele was prettier than that.

The truth is some talent on a football field just naturally transcends classification. It’s great without needing to say the word. Talent like Zinedine Zidane, for whom a documentary maker used 17 cameras just to track him in a single match. Just the Frenchman brooding was considered art.

Or talent so outlandish it leaves us breathless and on the edge of incoherence. Like Uruguayan commentator Victor Hugo Morales’ outburst on Maradona’s second goal versus England at the 1986 World Cup.