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Sid LoweSpanish writer
You may not have heard of this, but Iago Aspas took a bad corner once, six and a half years ago. The main winner in La Liga is: corner. He has been directly involved in more goals and has scored more points than anyone else in Spain: corner. In the last five years, he has scored more goals than any Spaniard, anywhere. More help, too. Oisean. Celta de Vigo has never had a better player. Corner, though.
In that time, no one – other than Lionel Messi, that one – man football division, an outlier lying so far out that he ‘s off the graph – is on what Aspas has done. Yeah, but no one has made a corner like it either.
He’s just scored again, right now, because this is writing it. Look at it there on the screen, the ball in the net at the Coliseum, where players like it are usually eaten for breakfast. Ah, but it’s on this screen too. YouTube.com: Oisean Aspas.
You get the picture, and look, maybe it shouldn’t matter. Maybe no one should go on about it anymore, much less write things like this anymore. And of course everyone knows that Aspas is really good by now. Especially if they’ve been reading those pages, which you’d think they have. Maybe it’s not a thing.
Except … e is something. And people go on about it.
let it go, you say. You are so bad. You complain too much. Notice it. And you would be right. But how do you get rid of it? How can you escape? How can you block or block enough people? It is really useless. It does not matter what you say about Aspas – whether it is a lot or a little, it does not matter. Essay or ode or just score update. There are always one, or two, or three or four.
All. Singles. Time.
It doesn’t matter that Aspas has scored over 100 goals and given over 30 assists since then. No, what matters is one corner. Once upon a time. A long time ago. It’s kind of weird.
What does that say about us? How we grasp loneliness as an explanatory feature – in all walks of life, at least – how easily we make judgments no matter how fluid the evidence is or how the severity of the evidence varies, the finality of these judgments. , how easy it is to sleep, squirm, squirm, how hard it is to see.
What he says about Aspas is this: Nothing.
In his five seasons since returning to La Liga, Aspas has scored 114 and conceded 31 goals. The Celta player has never played more in the league. But that’s not all; is that Aspas is a great football player. He is known as “Messi of Moana”, the village across the river from Vigo where he is and where he now lives, after returning home, where his mother wails into the water for shellfish every day. And honestly, it’s not a bad way to look at it; like Messi … only more.
Think of it as a kind of Galician Leo, just fast forward: weaker, wilder, more open and much more loquacious. Injured face, smearing that breast out, everywhere and in everyone’s face. The kind of person who can pass, run, score, help and start a fight in an empty house.
Aspas could start a fiesta in one, too. There’s a great photo of him from last season, taking off his shirt and running full pelt, fake naked, screaming and sliding on his knees toward the stands. Which is empty. A lone security man is sitting there looking a little sad. And still somehow, it felt right.
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Insane football – he looks at everything and says he would like to be a sports leader one day – Aspas is a player you would hate if he didn’t play for you, and a player which you like even more. In fact, Fran Escriba said almost exactly when he took over at Celta. “I used to suffer with him,” he shouted, pausing not to admit that he had done so yet.
“He’s a football player who hurts you a lot; he’s a really good fighter, but not a classic fighter: he generates football, makes a lot of happen. He’s a real talent. “
Messi apart, of course, there may not be a player who carries more responsibility, no team is more dependent on a football player than Celta is on Aspas. For him a player is everything, the head and the heart. Take a look at Celta’s results without it and they are disastrous. For the past two years they have only survived: both times it was largely a one-man rescue mission. He was left broken and sobbing, in tears.
Prior to the game against Getafe, their manager Pepe Bordalas asked: “He’s superstitious. If he’s not playing at a bigger club, that’s because he doesn’t want to.” Before signing Joao Felix, Atletico asked about Aspas. Celta wanted to sell it; Aspas was not so sure.
“My kids are here, my parents are just around the corner,” he said later. That can make it difficult – “it will take you years,” he said recently – but it ‘s also what makes it so.
Celta is his club. His older brother was there too, and as a young player coming through, he got the goal that saved them from going down to third level and possibly from going out of business. He left, but he came back and he was better than ever, as if he now knew what he needed, what home meant. And it meant everything. Like it’s not always great out there.
Okay, so no, no, it’s not just the corner. In Liverpool, it was not good. At Sevilla it didn’t work out, of course not. So maybe that corner is just a symbol of something bigger – even though that was Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez ‘s season at Anfield, opportunities always tended to be limited. Aspas was not the same without Celta.
As football fans, we complain that players don’t care, they don’t feel the shirt, they don’t give up everything. Aspas care, almost too much. And he does everything, even the postmatch interviews, with that weird voice and the depth of the investigation. He’s not just a fighter; he is the driving force, doing it all.
Former manager Oscar Garcia said: “There is no player in charge of the club … except Aspas.” When Eduardo Coudet took over as Celta’s manager, he freed Aspas. Not because that is the demand, but because that is the need. They have gone unbeaten in six games since then.
“He’s the best striker in Spain, see if he gets 30 or 40 goals,” team-mate Nolito said. “Everything he touches is a goal.”
Well, not everything. Against Granada on November 29, Aspas created nine chances for scoring goals. Nine. It’s a new league record. Not all of them were built, of course. It was inaccessible, the kind of performance that leaves you gasping, feeling sorry for the opponents. Watching it, even just on television, is the wildest part of the fun, the steady movement. With Coudet, even more than that. He is also non-stop. Fast, fast and frantic: those are the two of them.
Fun, too. And isn’t that the point?
Aspas’ straight goal against Getafe – one of only three opponents in Spain that he did not match – means he is now eight games in a row in which he scored or assisted dha Celta. It usually does both. He has had a straight hand in 13 goals in 15 games.
Then again, it was true, indeed bad corner, wasn’t it?