There are a few of those around actually.

After that it was difficult for the Inter forwards and not helped with Inter midfield's total relinquishment of control of the ball.

I do hope there will be a sequel.

That said, Martha, you're right about his tendency to switch off (and Ursus, I think it's a brilliant observation to connect that to his tendency to break continuities) and it's something that a real portait would have to represent. One of these days I'll do a sequel. I wanted to use him to represent the idea about accident and intention, but there are so many other things to say about him (among them the great points that you guys have made here) that this barely scratches the surface.

He doesn’t even always want to be a footballer; he just wants to be Zlatan, on his terms, and his terms alone.

This is wonderful, and absolutely right. And, like you, I'm ok with it. (It's odd, I don't get angry with him in these moments, I just worry about him. Surely a sign I've gone around the bend.)

Rather than pressure, I would say it is adversity that triggers the switching off (an excellent description of the phenomenon, another form of breaking the continuum, but without any of the potential for magic). It happened in the loss at home to Roma last year too, and last night it seemed as if it began as the ref gave the impression that he was applying diametrically opposed sets of rules at the two ends of the pitch, and was completed when Materazzi went off and Ibra realized that it was not going to be a night full of chances.

As to your last point, I found him a completely maddening player when he was with Ajax and Juve, and sometimes was among those hurling invective at his failures at the beginning of last season. What I've realised since is that no external force can ever change him, he really doesn't give a flying what anyone else thinks, says or does. He doesn't even always want to be a footballer; he just wants to be Zlatan, on his terms, and his terms alone. And given how breathtakingly sublime those terms can be, I'm very much at peace with that now (not that he cares).

It's strange, given everything he done to this point in his career, but I think there's still a little boy inside him that needs, somehow, to grow up and take responsibility; I have no idea what can make that happen.

How bittersweet it was to see this on the top of the page the morning after Ibra failed to show up in Inter's most important match of the season. He does that sometimes (and this morning he was snapping at Materazzi, which he also does sometimes), but he is also capable of doing things on a football pitch that I have never seen anyone else do. Things that I couldn't even conceive of until I saw him pull them off.

And for that reason, he has another transcendent ability. He stops time.

One of the essential elements of football is its near-constant movement, with virtually all of the players being in motion (no matter where they are on the pitch and what their relation to the ball may be) and with time being kept by a clock that doesn't stop. In an almost relativistic way, Ibra is capable of suspending that time/space continuum. It doesn't really stop, of course (or at least I don't think that it does), but to those of us who have the honour of seeing him, time stops just as surely as it did for Michael Jordan hanging in mid-air or for Barry Bonds in the split second before his bat made contact with the ball.

There is a tangible break that one could characterise in poetic, musical or visual terms, depending on one's proclivities, and it changes the breathing patterns of the up to 80,000 people in the ground. What often follows is a collective sigh of disappointment, and more than a few cries of invective aimed at his disdain for the simple, but it is the potential inherent in the break that makes us all come back, and allows us to suspend belief in the laws of physics the next time the ball is played to him.

Ibra the body should not be able to do what he can do (a la Zidane) and yet I get the feeling that only he would be capable of doing it.