The Barcelona midfielder sat alone at the Nou Camp’s centre circle until 1am in the morning. I wonder what was on his mind.
I wonder what was going through Iniesta’s head as he sat there, engulfed by the silence, the blank tile seats, the almost empty pitch. I wonder if it was the first time he had been in Barcelona’s historic stadium on his own.
I wonder if he thought about Xavi and Busquets, the two other points of the Bermuda Triangle, old comrades from past wars. How often he had tessellated with the two of them, vacuuming in any ball or low-flying aircraft and hiding them away, never to be seen by anyone again.
I wonder if he thought about Lionel Messi, the player he has spent the vast majority of his career exchanging subtle nods and glances with, always waiting for the moment to come.
“Now, Andres.”
Messi would imply more than say with a sudden burst into space, scuttling at warp-speed like a desert beetle on the sand dunes. Then it was down to impulses and synapses; passes he has played thousands and thousands of times, the same weights and directions, the same outcomes, chess pieces on Scalextric track.
He would always find Lionel Messi, or at least always find a way to find him.
Sometimes it was as simple as a straight line through ball into the negative space between defenders, a physicist splitting atoms. Sometimes it was more complex than nuclear fission, and in those rare cases he had to use the other Barcelona players like a periscope uses mirrors, bouncing light from one another, searching for the final image existing somewhere above them.
I wonder if he knew it was the last time he’d ever touch the grass, and that’s why he had removed his boots and his socks, too.
Did he need to feel the turf between his toes one last time to remind what it felt like at the very start, a small village boy enrolling at La Masia’s dream academy, before the boots grew heavy and the legs started to fade?
I wonder if he thought about anything else other than football, the game that pretended to define him even though it never really got close.
He was positionless, a wide forward that didn’t stay wide and a centre midfielder constantly offset, just to the left. He was an attacking midfielder that didn’t score goals.
Well, he didn’t score the unimportant ones.
I wonder if he pictured the standstill Subbuteo drive against Chelsea at the last or the volley against the Netherlands even later still, the only player capable of setting up his own glorious finale with a back-heel in the centre circle 125 minutes into the most nervy World Cup final in recent memory.
After that all he had to do was drift forward, knowing that the moment would come as it always did.
I wonder now, as he drifts away once more, whether he thinks there will be another. I wonder if he’s glad it’s nearly over, or just glad it even begun.
I wonder if he just wanted to feel what it was like without a football at his feet, where it had always been.
Without it, I wonder if it was the very first time he’s ever felt alone.
