Phil Ball: A tale of two Reals

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  • Gareth Bale's winner kept Real Madrid in the La Liga title race.

    It was on 78 minutes. Real Sociedad’s David Zurutuza tackled Lucas Vasquez on the edge of the home area, shimmied past a couple of challenges and set up a home attack, cheered on by the Anoeta faithful. Zinedine Zidane looked down at the turf and chewed on his cud. As the sun peeped out yet again from the clouds on a blustery Basque Saturday afternoon, I turned to my brother-in- law and said the fatal words: ‘The league’s slipping away from them, like grains of sand through their fingers’. Dramatic stuff, but I did actually say that – may the sparrows be my witness. Barcelona had been here a few weeks earlier and gone home empty-handed.

    Anoeta, the big boys’ graveyard, was reaping grimly again. Here, down to the wire, a draw was of no use to Real Madrid. Later in the afternoon and evening, Atlético first and then Barcelona would be playing too. With Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema watching from their sofas in Madrid (and Toni Kroos), something had to happen, and quickly. Twelve minutes remaining, and then their season was over. The depression would follow then into their 2nd leg tie at home to Manchester City on Wednesday.

    Two minutes later, and Lucas Vasquez, hard working all game, knocked in a curling right-footed cross at which Gareth Bale leapt prodigiously like a centre forward of yore, beating Aritz Elustondo to the ball and bullet-heading past Geronimo Rulli, and the complexion of the league changed again. You could tell what the goal meant to Madrid, their substitutes and technical staff bouncing around in a joyous ruck whist Bale ran to celebrate with his pal, the physio Jamie Benito. The gesture may have been significant or not, since Benito’s boss, Jesus Olmo, is presently under fire for the Cristiano Ronaldo injury situation. As for Sociedad, they had only their pride to play for – although Real Madrid are traditionally the enemy – but there were no late surprises, even when Zurutuza connected well in injury time to a header that Keylor Navas saw late but saved with aplomb.

    The entire weekend in San Sebastián had been conditioned by the visit of Madrid. When they come to town, people behave strangely, the wind shifts slightly and dogs howl long into the night. For political reasons well known, Real Madrid are never the flavour of the week in the Basque Country, but in recent years the enmity has died down a little, partly because Barcelona are not as popular as they once were, also because Atlético Madrid are even less popular, and the whole corporate image machine emanating from the Bernabéu has finally managed to capture the attention of Basque youngsters – a generation perhaps not quite so automatically anti-Spanish as previous ones were. This is good, of course, just as long as some of the edge remains. It makes the football more interesting and can turn the aesthetically pleasing but sometimes anodyne stadium into more of a nationalist hothouse.

    Madrid flew in on the Friday night and drove not to the 5-star Maria Cristina Hotel (where they usually stay) but to the NH Hotel in my neighbourhood of El Antiguo. The hotel is about 100 metres from my house, and although a good one, it’s nowhere near as posh as the Maria Cristina. Apparently there wasn’t enough room for the whole squad and so the NH was the alternative, which is interesting because the chain was founded by Joan Gaspart’s father.

    Gaspart junior, one of Barcelona’s more controversial and neurotic presidents, was much better at being a business man than a club president, but it was said, some time ago, that Florentino Pérez preferred his players to stay in a one-star pension behind the bus station rather than check in to one of Gaspart’s chain, for obvious reasons. Times change, or there was no alternative.

    Real Sociedad's Anoeta Stadium.

    Real Sociedad’s Anoeta Stadium.

    I asked my 17 year-old daughter if she wanted to wander down to the hotel on Friday night to do some star-spotting, even though Ronaldo wasn’t there. ‘I don’t like Ronaldo’ she hissed. I asked her who she did like. ‘Bale’s alright’ she replied, with a shrug. I ventured that Bale currently resembled a sort of wannabee hipster, his sideburns and tied-up bun nowhere near as cool as Sergio Ramos’ macho techno-pirate beard. ‘You just don’t understand dad’ she sighed. And so, in my ignorance, I wandered down to the hotel alone. What I do understand, however, is that the trick is not to stand outside when the players get off the bus, earphones buried into auditory canals with faces as long as a wet weekend, but to hang out in the hotel around supper time, and just observe. I have perfected this particular art, and in a hotel where I normally have my morning coffee, nobody will shoo me away. In Spain there’s an unwritten law that keeps journalists away from the players when they’re in hotels, unless you’ve arranged some particular meeting beforehand. Players grow to hate the whole hotel thing, but it’s a major part of their strangely cosseted lives. They just like to wander around and be left alone.

    I don’t even have to go in, because Marcelo, Nacho and some member of the technical staff are out for a walk in the blustery night air. I greet Marcelo with a ‘hey!’ and he returns me a ‘hey!’ in football Esperanto. I must confess to a soft spot for Marcelo. Not only is he one of the top ten players on the planet, he’s also a top chap, always smiling in a slightly goofy but likeable way. You get the feeling he’d laugh his way through an earthquake. The group wander past and disappear into the darkness. In San Sebastián, nobody will hassle them. As Bruce Springsteen remarked a couple of years ago, it’s the only city in the world where he’s taken his family down to the beach and been left alone. It’s currently the Cultural Capital of Europe 2016, but Real Madrid are here for other reasons.

    Marcelo stays on the bench the following day, and Nacho plays, of course. Wednesday’s game has conditioned the line-up, but this is not a game that the visitors can risk too much. The nature of their squad means that they nevertheless start with ten internationals, plus the boyish Borja Mayoral, given his chance up front. Real Sociedad, with five of their best players absent through suspension and/or injury (Carlos Vela, Iñigo Martinez, Jonathas, Imanol Agirretxe and Sergio Canales) start with nine ‘canteranos’, players who have come through the productive youth set-up in Zubieta. Predictably, for the first 20 minutes Madrid are all over the hosts, with Bale looking like a man on a mission. He almost scores twice from headers, and then scuffs a shot with his weaker right foot. It’s hard to remember that Bale actually made his name as a marauding full-back, rarely a position from which a player can show just how good he is in the air, offensively speaking. But Bale is the best header of a ball at the Bernabéu since Fernando Morientes, and is actually probably better at it. He’s also learned how to get out of tight spaces, and how to link up better with his midfielders. In fact he is suddenly looking like the awesomely strong player one always suspected he was, and if Real Madrid do win the league this season, his efforts at Rayo last week and this week’s saviour stuff in Anoeta will continue to endear him to the Real Madrid faithful. They took a while to warm to him, it has to be said.

    Madrid march on, whilst Sociedad will do better next season. It seems to be coming right for the boys in white, after an otherwise dysfunctional campaign. Barcelona look determined to hang onto their advantage in the league, and Atletico will never say die, but Wednesday night looks promising, Ronaldo or no Ronaldo. The Champions League will always compensate for a league campaign, and Atlético would agree. Their unfortunate experience in 1974, robbed of the then European Cup in the 120 th minute and then dispatched cruelly in the replay by Bayern, still festers in the Calderon’s edgy soul. It’s going to be an interesting week in the capital.

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