I knew the iconic scorpion kick but nothing about the player, so I watched a highlights compilation.
In many clips he ends up near the halfway line, opponents throwing themselves at him to get the ball, like crazed soldiers flinging themselves on a live grenade. His ongoing presence in this segment of the pitch seems to bewitch most midfielders into just chasing him, like dogs with a rabbit. He’ll manage to offload it to a relieved teammate and then hightail it back towards goal. The zoom on the broadcast is cropped quite close to the action, so when the camera follows the new play and shifts quickly across his run, he enters and exits the frame in a split second, and you think ‘hang on who’s that guy in a completely different kit going the other direction?!’. He enjoys the same type of frantic screen presence as a wide-eyed pitch invader evading stewards. It’s almost as if he’s the protagonist of an early nineties video game where the point is to go on solo runs as the keeper and amass points by bamboozling opponents, and your manager too.
There’s no doubt Higuita has that extra gear, available to the select few, where he can embody himself to the full of his ability and achieve the prefix of ‘peak-’. He has the entertaining, but worrying for teammates, habit of expertly drawing fouls in the centre circle. Which brings me to my next point; I’ve never seen a goalie dive so much.
You can watch a 30 second time-lapse of this artwork being created here.