AS Roma and the art of the goal celebration

On Tuesday night, in the Champions League, AS Roma overcame the odds and Lionel Messi to score three unanswered goals against Barcelona to progress to the semifinals. It was an exceptional performance of attacking enterprise, energy, and imagination. But perhaps more importantly, it was also a masterclass in the art of goal celebration.

Because when you think about it, right. When you really think about it. When you step back from the moment and cock your head to one side and take a cool, calm look at the state of things, it’s just possible — perhaps, maybe — that sporting celebrations are one of the greatest things that people do.

After all, the world affords us, its citizens, limited opportunities for shared, spontaneous moments of joy and triumph. Most of our days are spent not shouting, not screaming and not jumping around, distinctly not subsumed within a heaving mass of beer and limbs and flags and scarves. And perhaps that’s a good thing; perhaps it would get tiring, or even boring. But when it happens, it happens wonderfully. And when it happens like it happened for Roma on Tuesday, it’s quite the spectacle.

Taken as a collection, Roma’s three goal celebrations form a pleasing and exemplary triptych, a study in how to manage emotions through a comeback. The first goal, a poke home from Edin Dzeko, is greeted with calm determination. Dzeko does the required: gathers the ball, pumps his fist, and trots back to the halfway line, accepting praise but deferring delirium. Is it on? Not yet. But it’s closer to being on than it was a few moments ago.

Cut to the second goal. Daniele de Rossi — whose own goal in the first leg was a thing of absolute wonder — has tonked home a penalty. Now it is on, and De Rossi is caught between the demands of the professional and the passionate. So he does both: he grabs the ball, he pumps his fist, he runs back to the centre circle … and then he has a massive scream in the general direction of the universe. He’s got a good face for a scream, too. Purple skin set against a slightly gingery beard.

And the comes the third, when everything explodes.

Let us pause, here, at the moment of explosion, to consider one of the great and universal human gestures: holding your head.

There is a moment, shortly after the third goal has gone in, when almost everybody is doing what they’re supposed to do. Barcelona’s lot are all staring in betrayal at the ball, at the floor, or at each other. Meanwhile Manolas and most of his colleagues are sprinting off to have a dance. But there, on the corner of the box, is one lone giallorosso, wandering vaguely towards the corner flag, holding his head, looking entirely blank.

It’s a gesture of extreme potency and, it appears, astounding flexibility. For at this moment, at least two Barcelona players are also holding theirs, which suggests that this is nothing so simple as “Yes!” or “No!”. Instead, it can be both, or neither. It doesn’t say anything good or bad; it simply says: this is a lot. A lot. Too much. So much that this head must be held together, lest the sudden expansion of reality take a dangerously literal form, and this brain clamber out of these ears.

For something so obviously spontaneous, it’s odd how often the same things seem to happen after big comeback goals. There is the late arrival to the scrum, flinging himself onto the top like a surfer. There is the defender, hugging the goalkeeper, both having realised that at this moment they just need to be held. There are the kisses for the camera, there is the defender on their knees, and there is the substituted great, staring into the middle distance, his disappointment laced with powerlessness.

Every component is utterly instinctive, yet also an echo of the great comebacks that have gone before. We might, perhaps, take this as evidence of a grand shared humanity: in those moments when we are nothing but truly ourselves, we are also one inescapably another. Alternatively we might wonder if football has developed, over time, a grammar of such moments, a series of forms and conventions that must be observed.

To be honest, though, there’s probably only so many things it’s possible to do with your body when your brain has suddenly clambered out of your ears.

Incidentally, it’s at moments like this when stadiums with running tracks — often derided, particularly in Britain — really come into their own. The track becomes a staging ground for … well, for anything and for anyone. Manolas sprints into an ever-expanding tangle of substitutes, coaches, physios, officials, friends, family members, acquaintances, hangers-on, ballboys, passers-by, photographers, a bus load of lost tourists, a couple of minor royals, British character actor Toby Jones, a small mariachi band, and a man riding an elephant.

And there in the middle of it, the goalscorer, now entirely cut off from the light, struggling for the breath to keep on screaming.

The ideal time to score the big comeback goal is, as Manchester United knew very well, the very last minute. Roma, the fools, left a whole eight minutes between their goal and the end of the game, ensuring that the odds and Lionel Messi had a chance to come back at them. As Peter Drury put it on the UK’s BT Sport commentary, after he’d finished banging on about Greek gods and Roman ruins, “Di Francesco does not know where to go.”

For this is the trick ending to the comeback celebration: the moment when the capering about stops and the game carries on. Suddenly, everybody that was screaming is now putting their best serious faces on, arranging substitutions, making ‘keep your head’ gestures, pointing importantly. Somebody always gives the crowd the big ‘come on’ gesture; somebody else always goes around clapping in their teammates’ faces.

It’s doubtless all significant stuff, but it’s also a statement. Two statements. There’s the one meant for teammates and the crowd: We are in control here. This is ours. We have got this. We have done this. And then there’s the other one, screaming out through every gesture: Eight minutes? That’s ages. Oh gods. Oh gods.