From the Messi playbook: Micky Van de Ven's goal gives Tottenham timely jolt

"LONDON -- Unless you are the sort of person who wants to stand on the streets of Pamplona and feel the snort of a raging bull on your face as it passes within an inch of your precious flesh and bone, opportunities for real-life thrills in the modern world are increasingly hard to come by. The dulling effects of relentless scrolling mean we now experience these primal charges through, for example, 10-second clips of a mechanical crusher squashing various household items into smithereens. They're good, but they're not real."

"You've already seen it appear on your feed, reduced and repackaged into shareable content that you can post in your Whatsapp groups. A quite good centre-back scoring a very good goal against a quite mediocre team. However, for those present at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Tuesday night it was viscerally real. Watching Micky van de Ven with your own eyes, rampaging from one box to the other past scrambling defenders, before drilling a shot past the helpless goalkeeper was stop-you-in-your-tracks awesome."

""To be honest, I saw a little gap in front of me, so I was like: 'OK I'll start dribbling now and I will see if they can catch up.' And then I saw the space every time more and more and then at one point I felt like: 'I'm through now, I'll go for goal now.'" To be fair to him, it did all happen quite quickly."

Modern life and endless scrolling have dulled many opportunities for real-life thrills, pushing people toward brief, repackaged online moments. A natural fascination with displays of power and awe—linked to dopamine responses—helps explain why such moments captivate. At Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, centre-back Micky van de Ven produced a rare, visceral spectacle by dribbling past defenders and firing a goal that stunned those present. Van de Ven described seeing a gap, committing to dribble, and deciding he was through before shooting. The goal came with perfect timing in a match already won, and it followed recent off-field controversy involving him and teammate Djed Spence.

Read at ESPN.com