This is the most disrespectful soccer move I’ve seen in years

This morning I was sent a video of one of the most disrespectful moves ever seen in a soccer field. A friend and I named it the “Weeping Jesus” because it was the first thing he said when he saw the video.

I have to thank Andre for bringing this wonderful moment into our lives. I’ve seen and chronicled many disrespectful moves in soccer — Andre’s tweet was a response to a running Twitter thread that I have called “Nutmegs as Great Philosophical Arguments” — but this move is a first and it’s so damn beautiful that no description can really do it justice. It’s a great work of art, resonating in your soul and imagination.

The Weeping Jesus is a move that I think appeals to anyone who loves the game. It’s practical: the attacker, who we will only identify as “Sauce God” from now on (obviously he has an exponential amount of raw sauce), gets past his defender and keeps the ball in play. It’s creative. Sauce God achieves that goal through a method hardly ever seen before. And it’s rude as hell. You can practically hear Sauce God telling the defender to “get the f—k outta here” and laughing at him as the ball sails over his head. I mean, he stepped on a bouncing ball to get it airborn and completely bamboozles the defender who seemed so sure that he was going to make a tackle. Things like that only happen in animes.

The Weeping Jesus is such a wonderful move that even the defender himself has no choice but to be moved by it. Look at how he reaches out his left arm after being victimized. He obviously wants to foul Sauce God as the ball sails over his head, to re-establish some sort of agency in his life, which has come crashing down around him. He wants to let the world know that he didn’t go down without a fight. But he doesn’t foul Sauce God. He can’t. It would be crude to do so. Instead, the defender pulls his arm back and accepts that to be the canvas of great art, even at the expense of his individuality, is much better than the purposeless existence of most humans. So our defender, who we should now call Lazarus, then exits the screen gracefully, never to be seen again.

Though it’s not a nutmeg, I think the Weeping Jesus deserves it’s own philosophical argument. It fits well with the words of Carlos Castaneda: “The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.” The Weeping Jesus gives us both the wonder and the terror of life. Sauce God does the unimaginable and poor Lazarus loses his human life in the process.