Phil Ball: A pilgrimage to Bilbao's new 'Cathedral'

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  • Photos via Phil Ball on matchday.

    When the Sunday Times writer Rob James said of a game at Manchester United in the 1960s that it was not a football match but a ‘major event’, the less media-frenzied context of the era meant that this was an unusual observation. Nowadays, around most of Europe’s big clubs, it seems rather obvious. You might argue that George Best, Bobby Charlton, Denis Law et al lent the club a certain glamour, but the journalist Rob James meant that Manchester United back then generated their own uniqueness, their own special event.

    Despite being enemy territory for a resident of San Sebastian, I’ve always thought the same about Bilbao. Sunday night’s home season-opener against Barcelona was always going to be an event, but if you’d turned up to a game against Granada on a Monday night it would have felt pretty much the same. The whole city seems to revolve around an Athletic fixture. The traffic snarls up (not that anyone seems to care), the buses halt and spew impossible numbers of red and white passengers, and the faithful flock stride along the pavements and roads towards the ‘catedral’ of the new San Mames, with a strangely concentrated energy that suggests religious fervour. It’s as if they are about to attend a life-changing sermon from some charismatic preacher.

    None of this is media-generated. Bilbao goes about its business in its own way and the rest of the world can come along to see, if it so chooses. Nobody cares what anyone thinks – this is Bilbao, one of the most oddly self-contained urban centres in Europe, with its flash new post-modern stadium squatting above the banks of the river Nervion thirty metres back from where the old stadium stood, dominating the sightlines of the landscape like a cathedral of old. This is where you want to be, the enormous structure of the stadium seems to announce, and the faithful respond en masse to its call.

    The old San Mames was wonderful in the way it seemed to be an extension of the urban morphology, a sort of extra limb tagged onto the old flats and houses of the zone. The new plan has created a small gap between the end of the flats and the light grey exterior of the ground, but the pre-match atmosphere remains the same. Basque giant figures (‘buruhandiak’) dance on stilts, announcing the end of Bilbao’s annual fiestas, people slosh drinks and consume ‘bokatas’ (sandwich rolls) with a frenzy that suggests they have not eaten for weeks, and the decibel level of the gathering is ear-splitting. It’s mayhem and no place for claustrophobes. Everyone wears red and white, from grannies to babies. My blue rain-jacket stands out like a cultural gaffe, as if I’ve stumbled upon the scene in total innocence.

    The new stadium holds 53,000, and won the 2015 Sports Building of the Year in the World Architecture Festival in Singapore. Once inside you can see why. My seats are left of centre, close to the old Herri Norte end where the old Bilbao ‘ultras’ used to gather. The immediate sensation is one of hyper-reality, with the sharp-white interior lighting dominating the fading dusk in the circle of sky that the inner bowl sketches above you. The grass is impossibly green and the track-suited players look like marionettes, dwarfed by the immense vertical walls behind them. It is simply breath-taking, if you’ll excuse the outworn adjective. I‘ve decided to avoid the press-area and use the membership card of my friend Maria from Bilbao, who has committed the considerable sin of taking her holidays in Menorca when Athletic are playing at home.

    Her loss is my gain as I take my seat next to a grumpy-looking pensioner, wearing a cliched Basque ‘txapela’ (beret) and resting his chin on a walking-stick. He seems discomfited by my presence (perhaps expecting Maria) and as he grunts something inaudible it seems to me that something is wrong – that it’s all a bit too smooth for Athletic, a bit too beautiful. The old San Mames was equally intimidating and vertical, but its crumbling facade, broken-down toilets and stubbornly analogue press-area made it a museum-piece, a throw-back to sepia times. The Athletic fans were ‘nuthin’ fancy’, to quote Lynyrd Skynyrd, and rarely minced words – unconditionally devoted to their players and completely uninterested in the opposition, be it Barcelona or Benidorm FC. And of course, they are still there. Looking around at the ill-fitting replica shirts, bokatas, berets and the large Basque males (with whom you wouldn’t mess) something doesn’t quite work, as if the DJ has put on Justin Bieber at a Hell’s Angels’ wedding.

    Phil's view from inside the stadium.

    Phil’s view from inside the stadium.

    Barcelona trot on to a chorus of cat-calls. Despite the Basque-Catalan political solidarity, the cules are unpopular in Bilbao, viewed as arrogant and a bit too up themselves. This is Bilbao, get it? Barca sport their pretty new away kit, vaguely scarlet-blue with lilac fringes. According to my pitch-level sightline, Athletic’s gory red and white stripes merge with the massed ranks of their fans’ own shirts as the game gets under way. Mateu Lahoz is the ref, one who leaves no-one indifferent. It should be an interesting night.

    Athletic huff and puff, Inaki Wiliams causes Jordi Alba some problems, but whenever Barcelona break the crowd hushes, embarrassed by its own terror. After 20 minutes in which Denis Suarez is by far the game’s best player, Arda Turan pops over a perfect cross and Ivan Rakitic rises in an exact line from my seat and thumps a header of yore into the net. The goal is too perfect, like the hyper-real stadium. You can’t quite believe it has happened. The visiting players form a happy ruck as the men in front of me complain that the Athletic defence is ‘blanda’ (soft), but Turan’s casual centre was deadly accurate, and the Turk seems more involved, more a part of the team’s chemistry than last season. He then misses an easy chance, grazing the post when he maybe should have squared to Luis Suarez. The Uruguayan  grimaces and shouts some imprecation at his team-mate, who pretends not to notice.

    La Liga top-four

    • 1. Las Palmas - P2 W2 D0 L0 GD +6 Pts 6
    • 2. Barcelona - P2 W2 D0 L0 GD +5 Pts 6
    • 3. Real Madrid - P2 W2 D0 L0 GD +4 Pts 6
    • 4. Sevilla - P2 W1 D1 L0 GD +2 Pts 4

    Leo Messi’s new blond hair-dye seems to weigh him down slightly, and he overdoes things, passing when he should dribble and dribbling when he should pass. He seems slightly out of sorts, but every time he gets the ball, the crowd repeats its horrified hush. Most clubs in Spain accept a defeat at home to Barcelona, but in Bilbao such thoughts are anathema. Since they simply cannot bear the thought of defeat, players like Messi, of whom they have vaguely heard, pose a terrible threat to their very existence. Messi, however, is not the main problem, and as the game progresses it is the full-back Sergi Roberto, the antonym to Dani Alves’ anarchic patterns, who masterfully controls the game, along with keeper Marc-Andre Ter Stegen, liberated of Claudio Bravo and showing that he possesses similar ball-playing skills. Barca refuse to hoof the ball up the pitch, and Ter Stegen indulges in tiki-taka moves with his defenders to an almost obsessive extent, tiring out the Athletic chasers. The Barca ‘keeper ends the game with 62 passes, a record for La Liga. Are you watching Joe Hart? Nevertheless, one of the 62 went straight to Athletic’s Benat in the first-half, and almost handed the opposition a goal. Despite that wobble, the German seems weirdly tranquil on the ball. He’s pretty good at the rest too.

    Athletic improve when Raul Garcia comes on in the second-half, and have a decent flurry, but Barcelona still miss two sitters, and the game ends with Athletic still pointless and Barcelona second only to the splendid Las Palmas. Just before the end, Rakitic pulls down Iker Muniain by the shirt and it is a blatant penalty, but it goes unseen by the referee because the Croatian cleverly sees that Muniain’s body shields the shirt-pulling action. The Monday press dismiss the incident, but it actually was a penalty. My pensioner friend thought so too, but we had a good view. Mateu Lahoz, though close, did not.

    In short, an excellent evening, despite the drizzle. And never mind the Gugggenheim, get to the new San Mames. You won’t forget the experience in a hurry.

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