I was on a football pitch with Real Madrid.  I was very centrally located.  The ball seemed to go back and forth quite a bit, then side to side.  I recall looking back at the defense as the ball went across from left to right; I gave some hand gestures to the defenders to hold their shape and shift/slide over without changing the distance between them.  I was content with how well they executed that move.  Then our team got possession of the ball, and I was involved in some Tiki-Taka style passing as we moved up the pitch into the opposing half.  I remember I made a particular touch where I felt my feet were not perfectly sorted, so it led to something of a stutter-step, and the pass felt errant, but fortunately I had a teammate in the vicinity who was able to collect it, so the play kept going.

Then there was a couple plays where a young Zinedine ‘Zizou’ Zidane basically bossed and bullied some guy on the other team.  Zizou was wearing all black, which was in contrast to the rest of the team wearing the traditional white uniforms.  There were two specific plays that I recall: one was a set-piece, then the other from open play.  The two guys got into a bit of a tangle, then Zizou flipped the other guy over his head like a pro-wrestling move, then momentarily pinned the guy underneath him and appeared to whisper something into his ear, just to punctuate the affair.  I watched the referee closely to see if he objected to any of this ‘testy’ behavior but he kept the whistle in his pocket.  Play continued.

Suddenly there were about three or four new players on the field who were basically wearing mostly white casual clothing– like random men and women in their 50’s and 60’s.  The ball touched one of them and went out of bounds.  I gave a brief protest to the referee– What’s this nonsense of having a third team on the field? Who gets the ball if they hit it out of bounds?  The game is obviously not set up for three teams! The ref gave an impotent response with a shrug, like Hey, this is out of my hands.

Suddenly I was walking in a narrow corridor along the right edge of the park, off the field and on the other side of some structure. It seemed to have a gradual incline.  It was with a group of guys.  I was holding a nearly empty to-go cup of coffee.  We were discussing what had happened with the third team being on the field earlier.  A comment was made about it just being a sign of the times, etc, like we now live in an era of ‘inclusion’ or something like that.  So it was just something to accept and deal with.  I threw my coffee cup in the waste bin.

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