‘The end of day,
she is playing like a child,
and penance is the play,
fantastical and wild,
because the end of day,
shows her that some one soon,
will come from the house, and say -
though play is but half done -
‘come in and leave the play.’
Upon A Dying Lady – WB Yeats
An electoral candidate, they say, campaigns in poetry but governs in prose. But here in the unctuous, base and very political world of professional football, was a man who played – and governed for 24 years on the pitch – with all the grace and romance of one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful rhyming couplets.
Paulo Maldini might appreciate Yeats’ sentiment – and all the more maybe on the occasion of his last game of ball on Sunday before he dots a full stop at the end an extraordinary playing career.
A working life sketched in the vivid vernacular of a boy’s own comic book – seven Scudettos and five European Cup wins with his dad’s team; a family man who returned home to the same woman and club every night, though he could have had his pick of either.
The excellent Run of Play (via Sport is a TV Show) sums it up colourfully and brilliantly:
More than any other footballer he seems to have sprung from the serious imagination of a child. The world he belongs to is not the rough, touchy, deceiving world of grown-up risks and chances but a world of lucid justice and simplicity.
And the tragedy of this is that his growing old gives the lie to the vision of the world that his career almost made us believe in. Beauty isn’t goodness and power isn’t wisdom, even if, in the world’s haphazard mergings, they might briefly coexist. Blessings are arbitrary, even if they sometimes fall where they’re deserved. Still, illusory though it may have been, the fullness of the congruence he achieved made him a consolation, and we’ll remember him for that, and it will color what we mean when we say he was better at what he did than anyone who ever played the game. Almost without trying, he made us perceive a world that was better than the world we knew.
Tears on the keyboard. But, as ol’ WB expressed in Sailing to Byzantium, things ‘perne in a gyre’ or to paraphrase wildly and manipulatively, things come in cycles. And though The Senator was probably not thinking about Serie A soccer or Italian football dynasties, well, maybe he was. We’ve had Cesare, then his son Paulo and behold below the next in line to the Maldini mantle. I give you five-year-old Daniel owning Clarence Seedorf.