There are moments where football unfolds itself, like the answer to a really dense, inscrutable riddle, the game surprising you by turning its belly up for to you to rub, reminding you: There’s a reason for all this hullabaloo. This game of ours sometimes becomes a crystalline creature of angles and motion and love, and in that form is capable of a heady, resonant beauty. We worship mindful of this possibility, which is to be hoped-for but not wished-for-aloud. The higher beauties cannot be summoned. Transcendence is fickle, and arrives when it will.
In the 30th minute of Wednesday’s U.S. Open Cup match against FC Cincinnati, our very own Boys in Rouge, Detroit City Football Club, transformed briefly into the conduit for some of the higher beauties. They’d gotten dragged for part of the opening half-hour, but they’d lived through all of it unscathed, and were now surging back into the game; fully loose and warm, not yet exhausted. The hosts had also tossed a lot of energy overboard in failing to capitalize on their early dominance – now that a burst of speed from any of five players would be enough to deny City its chance at transcendence, none of them had it in them to give. Fate had cleared the path to beauty.
The whole thing started with Omar, of course. Omar Sinclair, right/centerback, free kick assassin, long-throw hurler, had spent the first quarter-hour or so desperately tracking Cincinnati’s very sprightly Jimmy McLaughlin, all while wearing his characteristic expression, which rests somewhere between amusement and irritation. Freed by a shift to a higher defensive block, he responded with hard-eyed glee, pressing guys hard and jumping into lanes, and it was the his opponent’s anticipation of his pressure that clicked the switch from ‘mundanity’ to ‘TRANSCENDENCE.’ Omar’s bodying up put McLaughlin off his stride, leaving the FCC winger’s attempted long switch to the City left side a bit limp.
Meanwhile, Elliott Bentley has been laying in the weeds, sunk back in with the centerbacks, looking for switches. He’d intercepted one about 10 minutes before in just this way, laying deep and identifying a weak pass, but this one is even weaker, so he’s able to take his time to see what’s happening. He’s got Rafa Mentzingen showing in between two midfielders, and he’s got Danny Deakin. Rafa’s wanting the ball over the top, or to feet, it’s hard to tell. Danny is glowing, pointing to his feet, a couple inches off the turf, his eyes like lanterns, alight with the possibilities he sees all around him; Elliott gives Danny the ball and sprints wide to the left wing, not wanting to miss whatever was about to come next.
Understand how little it would take to upend this – one touch off just a bit, one run that unfortunately coincides with another guy’s, one stumble, and none of this happens. But all of it did.
Danny has the ball, and he’s glowing and levitating a little, but there’s still a lot to do. He surges forward with the ball held comfortably on his left foot, waiting for the first pressure before using Elliott – now on the wing, not missing a thing – for what looks like a one-two, as Danny surges into the left channel for the return pass. But Elliott and Rafa conspire to add another bit of contrary motion to this fugue of footballing beauty, the former picking out the latter’s infield run, Rafa darting into the center, drawing the rest of the Cincinnati midfield on a tidy run forward before completing the transition into attack by finding Danny, now in full stride in the left channel.
The rest of Danny’s part in this group miracle was fairly mundane. Surrounded now by the songs of choirs of angels, glowing, levitating, his lantern-eyes driving defenders before him, he took one touch – waiting for the defense to converge, which they sort of did, seeming flummoxed by the whole glowing-eyes-floating bit – then two, before shifting a cross that was more of a simple pass to our last actor in this passion play, Shawn Lawson.
Danny was glowing because he saw this chance coming. Shawn *is* the chance; it’s perfectly his, plausibly his. Cincinnati’s resistance could not be lower – they’re running around with their arms in the air, air-raid sirens going off in their heads, skittering between bad decisions like malfunctioning robots. Such is the power of the magic which is being unearthed here. And Shawn Claud surveyed this wreckage, this defensive disorganization, and concluded, as it’s best to let one’s opponent continue to fall apart if they are doing so, to delay playing the ball from Danny for as long as possible.
As Shawn allowed the ball to trickle across his body to his right foot, Cincinnati’s defenders performed an impromptu Keystone Kops revival just in front of him, two defenders colliding, the keeper out too early, making his finish – when it finally came, rolled undramatically inside the near post – nowhere as difficult as it promised to be just a second before.
There will be many more goals this year, but there will be few that feel as perfect as this one. Omar, Elliott, Danny, Rafa, Shawn – thank you. Transcendence ain’t for sale, which means that 20 seconds are nothing less than priceless.
The best look at this goal is presented in .gif form in this tweet: https://twitter.com/DetroitCityFC/status/997288158185242624
