In the overwhelming silence | Sports| The USA Print

I don’t know when I heard it the first time. I don’t know who I heard it from either, maybe Camacho, maybe Arconada, or in what situation. I do know that that cry, that motto that came from the back of the locker room, accompanied me throughout my career and is still with me. I was an intern in the Spanish National Team, one of those who came from the under 21 team and who paid attention to each message, each sentence, each gesture of the most veteran. That one maintained that he arrived in a locker room that was invaded by the screams of the rival fans, it must be one of those “football hells”, it seemed to me a compendium of all philosophies. It was something like (you see, I don’t even have the exact phrase): “Come on guys, the greatest thing that exists is to silence all those throats and enjoy that silence that means that we have won.”

It had never occurred to me to associate victory with silence, they had always seemed antagonistic to me, but I can assure you that when Bakero scored that miraculous goal in Kaiserslautern, that goal that gave us a pass to the next round, the silence from hell in Kaiserslautern thundered, that silence augured our success.

And I understood.

Many years before Kaiserslautern I had to enjoy the magic of Anfield. It was a first leg of the round of 16 of the old European Cup and our Athletic faced the great Liverpool of Dalglish, Souness, Grobbelaar, Rush, the one in which Michael Robinson played, the one who was going to win that European Cup in the Rome final against… Roma. I can still see myself going down the stairs, the narrow and steep stairs that led from the locker room to the pitch, those stairs where the unglamorous but impressive sign said: “This Is Anfield”. And at the bottom of the stairs the Liverpool fans roared with their mythical You’ll never walk alone. I remember standing under the sign, touching it and thinking, for a millisecond, that I better go back to the locker room, that what was going on down there was too much for me, just a millisecond before deciding that since I was there, I better go downstairs. , see what material those dreams were made of and measure if those of a boy from Aretxabaleta were up to the same level.

We finished 0-0, it would be said that I played a good game, but when I discovered that maxim that associates silence with victory in hostile terrain, I realized that Liverpool’s silence would not be in my collection.

Because I imagine that this noise would be deafening, even more deafening, there for the 15th minute of the match between Liverpool and Real Madrid and a 2-0 scoreline, a maelstrom that seems to devour you and doesn’t even let you understand yourself with your teammates. . And that the volume went down with each goal from the madridistas, a little with Vinicius, a little more again with Vinicius (I could write this article only from the silence that both Courtois and Alisson felt in their brains in the second goals conceded), not I say nothing with that goal from Militao, just at that moment when the classics would say that you have to endure and resist the wild and energetic output of the locals, and the volume went down completely with the two goals from Benzema.

Absolute silence that allows you to listen to your loved ones breaking their throats; they did it also in minute 10, but then it was impossible to hear them. That silence that is the soundtrack of a memorable match.

An overwhelming silence and for the legend, a silence to honor a quiet myth called Amancio. Let the earth be level with the sea.

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