a morning lalloa fan of Lano whatever, he felt he was dying. For him it was still Sunday and most of them were asleep only to wake up on Monday and start another week. It was 3:38 am and he felt it was time to say goodbye. It wasn’t a panic attack. He needs more than half a million pesos, which he doesn’t have, to operate two hernias that swell when he’s standing or sitting. He has been lying down for two months.

He does not tell his mother, with whom he lives, because he says he is sorry for how he suffers for him. She tells it to another audience. He decides to tell what happens to him on Twitter. There he comments on football, posts about Lanús, feeds crack with fans of banfield and he – had – blocked Dario Cvitanich. There, then, a thread begins to settle accounts and clarify things before his departure, which he believes is coming. It is not a saying. Lalo felt he was dying.

“Well, this will be my goodbye. I have been disabled for 2 months I am in bed and I can not even get up because of 2 hernias that attack me, I can not even stand in any span of time and in hospitals not even a ball … I have no money my old woman retired, it’s big and it’s ugly to see me like this “splits into the first 280 characters.

The hernias are new. Difficulties, no. Lalo was born with a enchondromatosis deformations that did not prevent him from walking or doing “anything,” as he explains. Among the problems of the disease, the muscles and bones are compromised. Lalo has shorter arms, for instance. The novelty is the hernias in the navel and in the abdomen area. Those have been with him for two years in excruciating pain that he describes as cuts.

In his farewell, Lanús appears in capital letters. Garnet is the axis of Lalo. That’s where things happen. Your DNI reserves the identity with which you intend to process your transaction. While @ lalogranate14 tweets or retweets almost anything that has to do with the Lanús club, the national team or reminds Banfield fans about aspects that differentiate them from their club. But there is no more time for Chicanas, because Lalo no longer feels that way. He wants to clarify everything before it’s too late.

It was not yet four in the morning and the notifications began to ring. Each bell carried a handful of self-help code characters. A cascade of arrobas that reminded Lalo that there is someone on the other side and that sometimes even hashtags can shelter moods. Eight minutes after undressing in front of everyone – or at least in front of that virtual universe that sometimes sculpts reality – he added another publication: he thanked the expressions of affection, which had multiplied, silenced the phone and fell asleep.

That night that changed everything

While he slept, Lalo’s thread went viral. There was already a consensus: you have to collaborate, open an account on which donations are made, and a number has emerged to make transfers. The story had transcended the limits of Twitter and already had space on Instagram. there she saw her Dario Cvitanich and was moved. Virtual media didn’t occur to him and he transferred money. Sure, not what was necessary and he kept thinking: what he had just done wasn’t bad – it was good – but it wasn’t enough. He felt he could do something more and it occurred to him to donate a T-shirt so that Lalo could organize a raffle and thus obtain the necessary sum.

The former striker emerged and retired to Banfield, passing through Boca, Racing and Ajax, among other clubs, got to work and decided to propose his idea to Lalo: he had a Lanús jersey with which he It was changed Giuseppe Sabbia and he felt it was the right way to finish collecting the money. But I couldn’t do it: Lalo had blocked him.

It is normal, it is accepted, that identity in football is defined by the other. The antagonist is a complementary part of the trait that defines the average sympathizer. To express devotion to one’s own, it is necessary to indicate what is foreign. And social media is more blunt: if you don’t like it, you can get rid of it.

Invisible to Lalo, Cvitanich still wanted to materialize his idea and turned to the owner of the story he had just met. “He blocked me, I don’t know why”, he wrote and told him about the shirt and the lottery. The news began to grow with the detail that it was a Banfield emblem, aiding a supporter of Lanús. Aware of the gesture and warned of the block, Lalo has unlocked Cvitanich.

“This goes beyond t-shirts”

“The next day I woke up with messages from all over. I had blocked her for a nonsense, for a joke … the crazy thing is that she ended up looking for me. Just like Fierita, the Banfield fan. The Banfield and Lanús fans together to help me, I can’t believe it. For me it is a caress to the soul », Lalo recognized, moved.

Then I spoke to Lalo, who told me that so many Banfield fans had shown solidarity and I thought that this went beyond the shirts and I also left one of my own. It is not a shirt, I would like to say that the South is united. Today we are all here to help Lalo, to recover his quality of life and luckily the people are very supportive “, distinguished the former football player.

Never -but never-, Lalo imagined that one day after greeting on social networks because he felt his death was near, he would end up helping him Cvitanich, the one who scored two of the five goals Banfield scored against Lanús at Fortaleza in 2008. The player who screwed the most that afternoon now had something for him.

The folklore of football – that nonsense that is often used to justify intolerance – does not prepare society to understand the gestures of humanity. Simple, sensitive and full of empathy that is often said to be absent among people.