So many years later, nobody wants to talk about the Angolazo | Basketball | Sports

The memory of the Angolazo is so painful in Spanish basketball that 32 years later many of its protagonists do not want to relive that Friday morning of July 31, 1992 in Badalona, ​​when the African team defeated the Spanish team (63-83) and eliminated them with a bang from the Barcelona 92 ​​Games. “They are not good memories, I prefer not to stir them up,” one of the Spanish players from that team coached by Antonio Díaz-Miguel told this newspaper. Three decades have passed, but many of the men who were defeated remain silent as if it were still a nightmare. Spain meets Angola again this Wednesday (8:30 p.m., Teledeporte), in the second match of the pre-Olympic tournament in Valencia, and more than one thinks that it is not a good idea to revive old ghosts.

“Diaz Miguel enters the history of Angola,” was the title of Luis Gómez’s article in EL PAÍS. The team was eliminated as the last in Group A after losing to the United States (81-122), Germany (74-83), Croatia (79-88) and Angola, and after only beating Brazil 101-100. It was also the end of Díaz-Miguel’s long period at the head of the national team, a period of 27 years that had reached its peak with the silver medal at Los Angeles 84. It was precisely that success that marked a turning point in the management of the group. The relationship between the coach and the players was consumed while the trainer monopolized the spotlight of the play. The Angolazo ended up advancing a divorce that had already been announced.

“The level of his career is far above that stumble,” says Andrés Jiménez about the coach and about that fall in Barcelona 92; “it was a very tough defeat because we could not have expected it. We were a team that was used to winning. They played with great intensity. And the way we were that day… Goodbye,” adds the former player.

Neither Jiménez nor Jordi Villacampa, with 16 points each, managed to lift the team. After a tied first half (36-37), Spain’s debacle came in the second half: 27-46. Spain took almost 14 minutes to score the first basket in play after returning from the break, a sign that there was not even a conspiracy in the locker room. And they finished the game with zero three-pointers out of 10 attempts and 15 missed free throws. On the Angolan side, Jean Jacques Conceiçao, one of the only three professionals on the team and who years later played for Unicaja, was the national hero with 22 points. “I don’t think I’ll resign. This is not the end of an era,” Díaz-Miguel said bluntly after the game. But his days were numbered. “They’ve given us a beating,” Epi summed up, more realistically.

Curiously, a generational thread links that game with tonight’s. In Spain, Santiago Aldama Alesón (two points in the game against Angola) was preparing to play. He is the father of Santiago Aldama Toledo, today a center for the Memphis Grizzlies and a player in Scariolo’s current team. In addition, a Spanish coach, Josep Clarós, now leads the African team, and one of his assistants, Aníbal Moreira, was in that 1992 group.

Spain and Angola have met four more times since those Barcelona Games, at the 2000 and 2008 Olympic Games and at the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. The Spanish team has always won, although the wound from 1992 is still open.

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