Ramón Masats Spanish, 17/03/1931–4/03/2024

A seminarian in a full black cassock is horizontal in mid-air, arms outstretched, fingertips inches from a football, having thrown himself across a goalmouth marked by a rough wooden post. His shadow is printed on the dirt beneath him. Behind, on a bare expanse of ground, a dozen more men in cassocks stand about in twos and threes; farther off there are leafless trees and the raw new apartment blocks of a Madrid that is still being built.

The delight of this picture, made in 1960, is that the cassock is a terrible thing to keep goal in and he is doing it anyway. The garment has become a wing. He is not being ironic about his vocation and neither is the photograph; he simply wants the ball, and wanting the ball has lifted him off the ground in a way that no amount of devotion would have managed.

Everyone else is failing to notice. That is the detail I keep coming back to. In the middle distance, men who presumably watch this every afternoon are standing around discussing whatever seminarians discussed in Franco's Spain, while behind them the shadow of a diving goalkeeper lies across the dirt like an angel. Masats got one frame of it. The players got a Tuesday.