When thrones and underpants are forgotten…

SOMETIMES, in sport, you have to take risks. Not just the obvious, like driving, riding, skiing or, as we have recently been so tragically reminded, even sailing very fast. There are the gambles: bringing on an extra attacker with scores level, making a break with two laps to go, trying to clear the outfield with a fielder on the boundary. Nothing ventured, fortune favours … thus it was that father and son risked their holiday savings on a Spanish ticket agency website, in a gamble for seats to see Real Madrid against Barcelona. We flew, and checked into our (cheap) room not knowing if the promised courier was just a scam. We waited, stomachs churning like a penalty shoot-out, while the agent on the phone explained a mix-up because our hotel was part of a chain and the tickets had gone to the wrong one ... We killed time at the Prado (I mistakenly called it the Prada, and Alex thought I wanted to see a handbag exhibition) and then, glory hallelujah, the tickets arrived and we went from artistry on the walls to artistry on the pitch, in the magnificent Bernabeu, next to the Madrid ‘ultras’ with their huge banners depicting lurid medieval warfare. And the best players in the world began to score: Zidane, Raul, Eto’o, Ronaldinho, with a swerving free kick, the original, Brazilian Ronaldo, and Michael Owen, tucking away a defence-splitting, ducks-and-drakes pass from the man of the match – David Beckham. Not stuck on the wing, waiting to take a corner, he controlled the flow of the game, commanding the ‘Galacticos’, never wasting a pass nor missing a tackle. And when the golden thrones, the goldenballs, the hairstyles and the underpants are forgotten, and the names of his kids have unstitched from his boots, we’ll remember an English footballer, matched with the greatest of his generation – and, on one day at least, playing better than all of them.