Gazza painted his artistry all over the 1991 FA Cup and his stupendous free-kick influenced the game for yearsFootball is an unstoppable continuum, a whirling dervish of love and hate, life and death, frequent tedium and the greatest excitement known to humanity. Because we care so much for it it feels like it cares for us back, but the painful truth is this is our imagination and self-respect saving us from acknowledging that actually, football was there before us, it’ll be there after us, and while we’re there it exists as though we don’t.Occasionally, though, we have bestowed upon us an event that grabs us by the lapels and shrieks indelibly into our souls, the entirety of the cosmos consumed by the wonder of the game. “It tells us something we’ll always remember,” wrote director-screenwriter Randall Wallace when considering what makes something epic. “It makes us walk out of a theatre and whisper into our own hearts, ‘I’m changed.’” Continue reading...