Opinion – The World Is a Ball: 90 seconds of Rodrygo’s glow disables Uefa check

Surprisingly, due to the magnitude of the feat, very few media outlets reported how much time was between Rodrygo’s first and second goals in Real Madrid vs Manchester City, in the Champions League.

Goals, at the end of the second stage at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, which will be remembered forever because they allowed the super champion Real (13 titles), inoperative until then, to turn the semifinal match and take it to extra time.

In it, the Spanish giant scored once again (Benzema, from the penalty spot) and consolidated the elimination of Pep Guardiola’s Man City, who had the game under control most of the time.

Rodrygo, the ex-Santista nicknamed Rayo (the “y” refers to the spelling of the attacker’s name, which has that letter instead of the traditional “i”), did the unbelievable in exactly 90 seconds.

At 44 minutes and 20 seconds, he got ahead of the Portuguese Rubén Dias and deflected with his right foot the touch of Benzema that came almost from the bottom line, after Camavinga’s launch.

At 45 minutes and 50 seconds, he again took advantage of Dias when he headed towards the goal defended by Ederson, a cross by Carvajal that had before Marco Asensio’s deflection.

Rodrygo was fated in that game.

A minute and a half led to the role of savior of the homeland for the 21-year-old, dressed in the number 21 shirt, who had entered the field in the 23rd minute of the second half and who until these two well-aimed finishes had done almost nothing, lost that he was as long as the rest of Real’s colleagues.

Those 90 seconds, which will be remembered throughout Rodrygo’s career, bewildered not only everyone who watched the semifinals, whether in the stadium, on TV, on the radio, or on the internet.

Uefa itself, which organizes the Champions League and which plentifully pours statistical information (very interesting and curious) on its website at each round and each game, was bewildered.

To the point of being unable to answer an intriguing question: was the interval between goals, scored by the same player (in this case, Rodrygo), the shortest in the history of the competition?

That’s what I asked the entity about those 90 seconds. The answer was this, in a tone of inoperability/inability: “We have checked internally with the relevant departments about your query. We don’t have that statistic”.

Perhaps UEFA’s so-called “relevant departments” – do you need more than one to handle statistics? – one day, if they do a thorough check, they can get the answer.

Without it, what can be said is that Rodrygo’s goals weren’t the ones that occurred in the shortest break in a football game.

There have been at least two cases in recent years, both in North America, where the same player has scored twice in a gap of less than 90 seconds.

In July 2015, Vancouver B’s Victor Blasco scored in the 43rd and 44th minutes of the second half in a victory over Seattle B in the United Soccer League, a sort of second division of Major League Soccer (MLS). There was a space of 1 minute and 18 seconds between goals.

In August 2020, American Jordan Morris was even faster, recording his goals in less than a minute. It took him 58 seconds to double the net in Seattle’s 3-1 at Los Angeles FC in the MLS, attests to Jeremiah Oshan on the Sounder at Heart blog.

That said, it is quite possible that Rodrygo’s goals were the ones in the shortest range considering a match of such importance: a semi-final of the European Champions League.