Goal is freedom, says Germán Cano, Brazil’s top scorer – 05/19/2023 – Sport

With his son Lorenzo, 4, on his lap, Germán Cano, 35, doesn’t think twice. The Argentine, Brazil’s top scorer in 2023, knows how to explain what it feels like to score a goal.

It’s a feeling of freedom.

“When I see the ball inside, it’s beautiful. It’s different from everything else. There are several sensations in contrast, but it’s a liberation, the feeling of freedom”, says Cano.

There are 24 scored this season, two of them in the Brazilian Championship. The number may increase this Saturday (20), when Fluminense faces leader Botafogo. The striker’s team can take over in case of victory, depending on the result of Palmeiras, who visit Santos in Vila Belmiro.

The price of freedom, for Cano, is patience. It was like that throughout his career. He needs to bide his time, on the field, to take chances – and those chances may be scarce. He had to wait for the opportunity, which did not come, at Lanús, his favorite team. When he was a boy, he was professionalized at the club on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but he did not get a place in the squad that had two legends of the association: Lautaro Acosta and José Sand.

Patience was needed when he suffered a serious knee injury in Mexico. It was a long nine months of waiting to return to the pitch. Or the time needed to be able to show what he could at Independiente Medellín-COL.

As everything has its reward, when the explosion of goals came, Germán Cano was ready.

“I’m a guy like that, calm. Things happen when they have to happen. I’ve had a very long career, but I’ve always been calm. I let things happen to me and I knew how to enjoy it. If you’re well in your head and working, everything comes. Having patience is fundamental. My moment came at the right time. I think that patience is fundamental for every player”, he analyzes.

The Argentine had never heard the phrase by Dadá Maravilha, that the top scorer is not exactly a football player. He is a scorer. Like a goalkeeper, it is a separate job in a team.

“I agree with that. I’m living a beautiful moment in my career.”

Fluminense has already won the Carioca Championship this year, appears as one of the best teams in the country, in the fight for the Brazilian and dispute the Libertadores, where it made 5 to 1 in the River Plate of the Maracanã, with goals of Cano. A result that caused astonishment in the Argentine press and drew even more attention to the top scorer who, a scorer after the match, said that his team had given him a “chair” of football.

“I think everyone understood what I wanted to say”, he dismisses, so as not to foment controversy.

Cano is a key part of the squad that presents the most beautiful football in Brazil today, where Fernando Diniz won his first major title as a coach and appears as an alternative for the selection, if the Italian Carlo Ancelotti continues to deceive the CBF. Cano calls him “differentiated”, able to take from athletes what others cannot in the name of team unity, in the philosophy of everyone attacking and everyone defending.

When he mentions patience, Cano also means being happy with what he has achieved. Goals are no longer in your head that are players’ golden dreams. It was yours too, one day. Playing in Europe, defending the national team, being in a World Cup.

In the latter, at least, he was present, but as a fan. With his family, Cano spent a month in Qatar and watched Lionel Messi take Argentina to the title in 2022.

“It’s something that will stay in my heart forever. It was a beautiful experience, I wanted to get on the field. It was something inexplicable. This was my first World Cup. I always thought I’d watch one, but I never managed to”, he recalls, citing who was waiting for the selection to pass the stage, to extend the stay and get tickets. As long as Argentina was alive in the tournament, he would stay. It went all the way.

He shrugs off not playing for a European club.

“I look forward, not back,” he summarizes.

The experience brought him other interests. He started playing golf (another sport that requires patience) and took a sommelier course. In his cellar, he has Argentine and Brazilian wines from Rio Grande do Sul.

They are hobbies. His job remains the same as what makes the Fluminense fans cheer and Lorenzo celebrates in the Maracanã stands when he sees his father make the L, the initial of his son, with thumb and forefinger.

“Germán does things as if he works in an office: I come here to score goals and goals is what I’m going to do”, defined Octavio Zambrano, Cano’s coach at Indepediente Medellín in 2018, in an interview with Folha in 2020.

The Argentine top scorer in Brazil listens carefully to his former coach’s decision. He nods in agreement.

“I think Zambrano defined it well. I give my all on the field. His definition is very good”, he concludes.