Today, 22 days ago, at three in the morning, I was in front of the Carlos Tartiere. We had lost the final of the playoff against Espanyol and watered the penalty with cider So, after crowding around the cathedral square in Oviedo, where a clueless orchestra was giving an intimate concert without understanding that the city was in mourning, we decided to go and welcome the team to the stadium. There were three of us – one wearing an Onopko shirt, so you can see the fifth – and the master plan was to give the team some affection and, above all, talk to the coach, Luis Carrión. I thought we would be practically alone and that there would be a chance for a head to head with the mister to convince him to stay. Going down the ramp I was preparing my motivational speech to kick Grupo Pachuca out of the park and the next day they would only have to finalize the agreement with the most prosaic details of the money. When we arrived, it was packed with kids who could have been our children. The bus finally came down with the players, coming from the airport, and about 400 people sang to them. We will be back. That’s when the tears started to fall, but they didn’t come out when the referee blew the final whistle, or even when I called my father to tell him that we were still in the Second Division – he gets very nervous and doesn’t watch the games until I tell him about them. The fact is that, with all the fuss, there was no chance to talk to the coach, who, at the end of the game, had promised: “We will try to get through the match together and get up together, that’s what we have to do.”
At six thirty on that Monday morning, at the Oviedo train station, it was easy to distinguish the people from Oviedo who were going to work in Madrid, oblivious to the drama, and the Oviedo fans who were returning from defeat, who recognised each other and communicated without speaking, shrugging our shoulders, greeting each other with our chins. And the hardest thing was still to come: seeing our coach with another woman.
The soap opera went somewhat unnoticed with the excitement of La Roja, everyone looking at the Euro Cup of farewells. Surely, they will not have even realized that in those days, #LuisCarrion was trending topic —a Principality and an island tweeted a lot and very quickly—. In this dramatic sport, you don’t even have to have the ball rolling to suffer, they can break your heart in an office. I confess that I have dealt with breakups in real life much better than this one.
Without my friends and I being able to intervene, Carrión met on Monday at the Reconquista (well chosen for a last meeting) with the main shareholder of Oviedo. He left saying that he had not made any decision, but the language was a textbook example of a breakup. He was going to leave us. The “we” died —he was already speaking in the third person plural— and the complimentary expressions left little room for doubt: “They are incredible people (…) it is a winning group (…) I have a lot of affection for them.” Nothing good has ever come after a “I have a lot of affection for you.” I take this opportunity to ask forgiveness from here to those who at some point heard that dreadful phrase from my mouth. I never more.
I watched the match against Albania, but it was like seeing the green and reliving the moment when they had left me at the altar, which is the closest thing to being 90 minutes away from going up to the First Division after 23 years of waiting. What if they had ruined football for me forever? After a few minutes, I tried Croatia-Italy, to see if, absent the emotional ties, it was more bearable, but the drama continued: Modric missed a penalty and the Italians scored in the last minute. What was happening in the world? As God squeezes, but does not suffocate, Cazorla announced that he would play one more year with Oviedo, and I dared to put on the Spain-Germany game in the background, glancing sideways. The therapy worked. On Tuesday I worked up the courage and watched the entire semi-final against France. Magical. How can you not reconcile yourself with the most important of the least important things when you see that kid with a braces score a goal for a museum? It was so beautiful that it should be kept in a display case, so that we could go and look at it on days when we were down. And it couldn’t have been scored by “someone else”, as he hinted, little rabidManuel Gavilla, spokesperson for Vox in Andalusia. The son of Mounir and Sheila had to be included; the neighbour who has filled the balconies of a neighbourhood in Mataró (Barcelona) with Spanish flags; the baby that the penultimate genius, Lionel Messi, anointed in a bathtub for a UNICEF charity calendar 17 years ago. In a week where we heard so many public figures say stupid things without blushing —“The criminal is the police”; “It’s simply Stalinism”; “Vox is not going to be an accomplice to rapes, robberies and machete attacks”— the hero of the Roja, the one who would shed light and restore our pride, had to be a Spaniard called Lamine Yamal.
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