Miracle man Cazorla dances on as last of Spain’s pioneer generation
A few years ago the American novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a book about a man with the power to stop the world around him. In this state, called “the fermata”, his hero is able to peer into people’s pockets, examine their sock drawers, set in order, solve and – this being Baker – indulge in a series of energetically detailed 12-hour onanism marathons, while the physical world waits for permission to pick up where it left off.
Watching sport at all levels it can seem at times as though there are athletes out there with a version of this power. You know the kind of thing, a way of reading the planes of movement around them and scampering along in front like a seabird running ahead of the surf. Although without, it should be said, the energetically detailed 12-hour onanism marathons, and a bit more in the way of perfect through-passes, switch-hit ramp shots, crosscourt dink volleys and all the rest.
Watching Santi Cazorla play for Spain against Romania this week it was hard to shake this sense of someone with an unusual grasp of time, with that extra little beat in all his movements. Just having Cazorla in the team is like having a cheat code. At one point he shimmied from left to right, an enormous defender at his back, then turned and casually drilled a howling, flat crossfield pass to the feet of his right winger.
A bit later he simply stepped out of the way and produced a dummy so unmannered and old-fashioned it was all the man behind him could do to fluff his shot straight at the keeper. In between, Cazorla held the ball and shifted it on, moving always inside his own sliver of space, his personal fermata. This is his footballing superpower. But it’s not his only one.
The most remarkable thing about Cazorla playing for Spain is the fact he was playing for Spain in the first place, or indeed for anyone at all. Each time his endearingly pouchy face filled the TV screen there was a sense of category-mistake going on, a glitch in the machine.
Cazorla will be 35 in December. Two years ago doctors feared he might have lost his right foot after he developed a gangrenous infection to a serious achilles injury. He needed so many skin grafts he had to use the part of his forearm where his daughter’s name had been tattooed.
He didn’t play for Spain for four years, played only 12 games of football between November 2015 and August 2018. And yet there he is now, racking up more goals and assists combined than any other midfielder in La Liga this season, and performing brilliantly in a Spain team who have won their last two games by an aggregate 12-0 score. This is in its own way a kind of sporting miracle, a resurrection story.
But then Cazorla has always been a transgressive kind of footballer, one of those increasingly rare sports people whose physicality seems to fit some other model. He’s 5ft 6in tall and weighs 10 stone, a healthy height and weight for a well-developed 13-year-old boy. He remains an amiable, slightly goofy figure, resembling in close-up less a hyper-toned modern athlete, more a very clever gerbil with a pocket watch and a tailcoat who knows how to fly an air balloon and drive an old-fashioned car.
What is his best position anyway?
Cazorla has played as an inside-forward, a winger, a deep-lying pivot. At times he seems to demand some new positional label – ball chaperone, dribble goblin, midfield stroll magnet – such is his skill and intelligence, his ability to walk just out of reach of athletic reality. It is a lesson in any walk of life. Sometimes not fitting the standard categories really is an advantage.
This isn’t quite an outsider story. Cazorla also found himself on the right side of history as one of the boys of 2008, a Spanish generation that really did change the way footballers were expected to be. In less digitally joinedup times Spain were still a bit of a surprise. I remember watching them in Innsbruck against Sweden at Euro
2008, a first glimpse in the flesh, and being struck by the sight of Cazorla and Cesc Fàbregas coming on for Andrés Iniesta and Xavi, with David Silva and David Villa still on the pitch.
This was a ferret-like, puppyish team in a time of power-football, one that turned its nose up at the idea of physical collisions and danced instead through the spaces in between. Uefa didn’t even keep possession stats in 2008. Four years later it did. Everyone did. This was now a way of understanding the spectacle, the last really big idea, the last ideology to have consumed the sport.
Cazorla had been a surprise pick in that team, and remained something of an irregular afterwards. But he is now the last of them, the only one of those pioneers not retired or in the process of shuffling off. He remains much-loved in England too, and not only by Arsenal fans, where he was at times the most strikingly effective midfielder in the country, a visitor from some other time and place.
There is a chance he could be back in the line of sight next summer as a member of Spain’s team for Euro 2020.
Should the seedings play out, Cazorla could even end up facing England in Rome in the quarter-finals. If so, he would be the most fondly welcomed of opponents: the resurrection man, last of a very particular type, and a footballer who still seems to carry around his own personal wrinkle in time.