Stoke City 0-3 Leeds United: True Meaning
Spontaneously, like a unicorn had fired it from a glitter cannon out of the field's crowded left, the ball was in space on the right, and Stuart Dallas was through to score.
The temptation to carve every word Marcelo Bielsa says onto stone tablets puts Carlos Corberán, his translator, in a difficult position.
Salim Lamrani had the job last season, as he did for much of Bielsa's time working in France. His approach, as an academic expert in the relationships between language, politics and power was to reach beyond Bielsa's words and rummage somewhere nearer his soul. He may not always have been accurate, but he was convincing, a chorus echoing the soloist's song.
Corberán is not an academic but a football coach, used to transmitting Bielsa's instructions to young footballers, not transmuting the thoughts of a football coach into what many listeners take to be the words of a god. His practice is to be literal, and his accuracy has been called into question by several Spanish speakers, who fear the nuances of Bielsa's words are being lost.
But if an idea is powerful enough you can communicate it without being accurate. Literary modernists called it the objective correlative and it can be a sort of grail; the idea that you can find a word, phrase or sound that so entirely encapsulates an emotional state that its listener experiences that feeling exactly. It's easiest to understand in music — sad songs make you sad — but more difficult to achieve in language, especially if you want to evoke a 1:1 emotional match. If you've ever struggled to explain to someone how you feel, you'll recognise wishing you could just say one word, like 'Becchio!', and have them understand everything you feel all at once.
So when Carlos Corberán translates Marcelo Bielsa by saying, "Pablo is someone special in giving the last pass, or the instruction, of the ball," he is probably not accurate. But oh boy, can't you feel it? What else did Pablo Hernandez give to the ball but the last instruction, as it touched his boot for just a moment on its journey from Jack Harrison to Stuart Dallas and into the goal? "Pablo is someone special." That's what I felt too, when I saw it happening. I don't know what Bielsa was actually saying in Spanish. But I'm feeling him.