One of the first things you notice in David Silva’s farewell is the pitches. Dusty pitches. Muddy pitches. Then perfect pitches. Almost as perfect, by the end, as the timing, the passing, the ease of it all, something about him that was almost ethereal. “Today is a sad day for me; today it is time to say goodbye to what I have dedicated my whole life to,” he says quietly. The video is short and understated, and there he is: a tiny boy and an adult not very much bigger, three decades of footage. Places change, the context too; the player doesn’t.
When Silva arrived in Eibar in 2004, he was 18. He was 5ft 7in, had never played a senior game and came from Arguineguín – population 5,004 – in the Canary Islands, land of dry, hard pitches and tidy, slow, technical players. Not the kind of footballer, or fighter, supposed to play up there. On loan from Valencia’s B team, Eibar’s fitness coach assured those who hadn’t seen him, which was all of them, that he could play, but he didn’t look quite right. What’s he, this small, timid kid, doing here? In the second division, in wet, cold Eibar, the embodiment of, well, something else entirely.
