Events at Cádiz show how football can shine in displaying its humanity

Cádiz fans have seen Jeremías Conan Ledesma out of his goal and sprinting across the grass before, just not like this. It was Saturday evening and he had been beaten twice, first by Frenkie de Jong then by Robert Lewandowski, but this was something else entirely and they were on the same side now. The goalkeeper set off in silence and ran towards the bench – the Barcelona bench – where Carlos Nogueira, the physiotherapist, threw him a small, red box. He caught it, turned and headed back again, as fast as he could, holding tightly. When he reached the end, pulling up alongside his goal, he threw it into the stand. Inside was a defibrillator, urgently delivered by hand.

Briefly Ledesma raised a thumb, an enquiry, a hope, looking up at the stands, but it was not returned. His eyes fell. And so he stood quietly, helpless and just waited not knowing what else to do now, like almost all of the other 20,000 people there. It was a long wait. By the time they restarted the game and played out the final minutes, it had gone dark and Antonio, a 68-year-old Cádiz season-ticket holder, had been taken to Puerta del Mar hospital less than a kilometre down the road. He had suffered a cardiac arrest and had been dead for 10 minutes, but they had revived him. He is stable, in ICU.

On a weekend of 30 goals, including Lewandowski but also Nico Williams’s thunderous first ever, two from José Angel Carmona – the youth-team defender – which might have rescued Julen Lopetegui from the sack at Sevilla, and Fede Valverde’s comic-strip strike against Mallorca; on a weekend in which Villarreal conceded for the first time this season and Real Betis scored it to go top of the other league for everyone else, it was the image of Ledesma’s run that was