“We’re back,” declared the mosaic engulfing the stand at Spain’s oldest football ground, down at one end of the San Lorenzo bay where the Piles river meets the sea. They shouldn’t have been. Starting this season in the country’s regionalised, theoretically amateur Second Division B with its four groups, 80 teams and long, torturous road back to the world of professional football once looked more likely than starting it in the First Division. Not starting it at all had seemed frighteningly possible too. Yet here they were: still alive, back in primera and now, somehow, just seconds away from doing it again. Well, their coach did claim: “Sporting Gijón are revolutionary, like Asturias.”
It was heading into the 94th minute and the resistance was almost over, relieved exhaustion ready to take over. Amid the din, the camera panned to the Sporting bench where a kitman hesitated, tempted but not quite daring to prepare a sprint on to the pitch. From behind, someone nudged him: go on. When the whistle went a moment later, he did. A roar went up and players collapsed. Sporting had returned after three years, embarking upon their fourth primera season in 17 years, and they had begun it with a 0-0 draw against Real Madrid – only the second newly-promoted team ever to get anything from them on the opening day. “Epic,” one local paper called it.
“Effort, sacrifice, work rate, humility and solidarity have overcome Madrid’s talent and millions,” said Sporting’s goalkeeper Pichu Cuéllar proudly.
It was the fifth time in nine games under Rafa Benítez that Madrid had failed to score but Cuéllar, a 31-year-old who began his career at Atlético and is now in his eighth season at Sporting, had faced more than 20 shots and had saved his share too. For much of the second half it had been relentless, if chaotic. Cristiano Ronaldo alone had more shots than Sporting. “It was not the Molinón, it was the Alamo,” commented Santi Giménez. But, read the headline in AS, “Laying siege is not winning”; as the Republican prime minister Juan Negrín famously claimed towards the end of the civil war, on the other hand, resisting sometimes is. Sporting had a draw that “tastes like victory,” said their coach Abelardo Fernández. They also had a point he called “unexpected”.
“Unexpected” is the word. Impressive would be another, maybe even miraculous. And not just for this result; not even for this result, perhaps. It is some achievement. None of Sporting’s players commanded a transfer fee, five of them were playing in primera for the first time and at an average age of 23.5 years they have the youngest squad in the first division. They have made just three signings this summer, all on loan, and the team that started on Sunday night included only one player who wasn’t in the second division with them two months ago – the 19-year-old Paraguayan Antonio Sanabria, on loan from Roma, whose header came down off the bar and on to the last millimetre of the line.
But the point is not that this is basically the squad that came up from the second division – the three loanees are Antonio Sanabria, Omar Mascarell and Alen Halilovic – or not only that; it is that this is the squad that should not have come up from the second division, or so they said. Never mind this season, at the start of last season the target was survival. And survival really meant survival. In fact, even survival might not have meant survival: promotion, by uncontemplated contrast, did. In a fascinating interview with Eduardo Castelao in El Mundo on the eve of this new season, Abelardo admitted: “If we hadn’t gone up, I don’t know where the club would be.”
The worrying truth is: it might not have been at all. During one press conference last season, he had declared: “We’re playing for our fucking lives.” As their campaign got under way, the president of the league Javier Tebas had named them as one of the clubs at risk of going out of business. In administration and in more than €30m of debt, with no way to generate real income, they could not sign anyone. Anyone on decent money had to be let go. Abelardo had taken over for the final four weeks of the previous season and was considered inexperienced – 44 years old – and a risk.
A former player at Sporting and at Barcelona, Abelardo had been the B team coach and it was to that team that he looked. Of the current squad, which is the same squad he put together last season, 16 have played in Sporting’s B team, 15 of them during one or both of his two spells in charge. Sporting’s training ground and academy Mareo, in the wet and windy rolling hills outside the city, from where you can hear the cowbells in the fields across the lane, has long been famous but rarely has it been so central to the first team as this. There was little other choice: Sporting were banned from signing. They could effectively only take players from their B team or below.
They called them the Guajes, kids in Asturian. Kids and cast-offs. Mareo has also successfully picked up players who hadn’t made it elsewhere and helped them restart their careers, at various ages. While the squad is young, eight of Sunday night’s starting XI are 25 or older and only two began at Sporting, but six have played in the B team, developed and given opportunities at Mareo. Alberto Lora began in Madrid’s juvenil youth team; Carlos Carmona was at Barcelona B (and Mallorca, Valladolid, Cartagena and Recreativo); Bernardo began at Sevilla; Isma López at Athletic; Jony started at Real Oviedo before playing for Marino, Getafe and Avilés, as well as Barcelona B.
When Abelardo took over, he set about building a team. He is from the tough Pumarín neighbourhood of Gijón and declares himself left-wing. His grandfather fought on the Republican side in the civil war and was imprisoned. And he talked of a Sporting team that worked, that showed solidarity, that fought. “Sporting Gijón are revolutionary, like Asturias,” he told Castelao. Asturias: land of mining and heavy industry and scene of the October Revolution in 1934. “Without hunger, no one plays,” Abelardo told his players. Close to his players but demanding too, he told them that when he was at Barcelona, Louis van Gaal said he would not play and should look for another club – but he stayed and played more than any other central defender.
Abelardo built a tough, energetic, counter-attacking side that he likened to Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid: “Intense, rob the ball and launch swift transitions, strong on set-plays.” The conditions were not great: the financial and institutional crisis continued, players went unpaid for months at a time, the risk of The End never truly went away. But there was strength in adversity, a collective culture too. They let in just 27 goals in 42 games and lost only twice. And if draws looked set to cost them, a 92nd-minute goal for Lugo against Girona saw them take promotion. Suddenly, the team built to survive was back. “The idea was not to go down: no one expected this at all,” Abelardo admitted.
The team remains the same, so too the objective: survival. It will not be easy. The limitations continued: the minimum salary is €129,000 a year and signings were impossible. Sporting are probably among the favourites to go down and while the draw against Real Madrid tasted like a victory to them, it remains a single point. They may need 40 more. “Need” is no exaggeration. “If we stay up, it will go a long way to assure the viability of the club. I don’t want the lads to have that responsibility, because I want them to enjoy this, but that’s the way it is,” Abelardo admits. When the squad returned from the summer, he had written a message on the board in the dressing room: “Enjoy it. And compete.”
The message for the supporters could have been much the same. Here, they played their part, as they are likely to do all year. If they were happy to be back in primera, primera was happy to have them back. The identification between players and fans, and fans and team (if not club, in crisis and socially fractured), is greater than it has been for years. Mostly, these are players who have been through Mareo, players they feel as their own. Thirteen of them were born in Asturias and the identity imposed by Abelardo reaches them. He has, rightly, become the central figure at the club. “They adore them,” he says. That’s only right too.
Around 4,000 fans gave the team bus a guard of honour on Sunday evening, week one in Spain, as it made its way to the ground, where stands, uneven and steep, are packed tight to the pitch. When Madrid’s bus arrived, the scenes were different and as it parked up, one fan sneaked up: along the back of it is a picture of the trophies Madrid have won; soon, Barcelona stickers adorned them all. The city had filled early with red and white shirts. Inside, El Molinón was sold out. Noisy, too. Every challenge was an appeal, every tackle a roar, every Madrid attack an affront; two passes and there was an ovation, three and palms bled.
It was breathless to begin with and Sporting attacked too, their players talking about having faced Madrid “as equals”. As the second half went on, the turf tilted and the assault began. Sporting, though, resisted. “I’d love to know how many kilometres our players ran,” Cuéllar noted. The short answer on the first day of a new season, on the day when the first division Sporting looked just like the second division Sporting, was: a lot. Down on the touchline, as the clock ticked down, they were waiting for one last run and then the whistle went, drowned in a roar. “I think the fans enjoyed it,” Abelardo said. “How could they not with the 14 tigers who went out there to play?”
Talking points
• Sevilla played the first match of the new season and Sevilla scored the first goal too. Just a pity that it was not the same Sevilla. Sevilla the team drew 0-0 with Málaga on Friday night, just as Deportivo drew 0-0 with Real Sociedad the following afternoon. Spain had to wait until Sevilla, the player, scored a beautiful free-kick for Espanyol against Getafe for the first goal of the season. Salva Sevilla’s goal didn’t exactly open the floodgates, either. After nine games, there were just eight goals on the opening weekend – and three of them were from free-kicks. The first goal scored from open play did not come until Sunday evening, when Luis Suárez volleyed the winner against Athletic Bilbao. Unless there are three goals or more between Granada and Eibar on Monday night, it will be the lowest scoring opening weekend in history. Here’s one for Premier League fans: of the five goals scored from opening play, two came from Roberto Soldado and Iago Aspas.
• They weren’t great games, either. Rayo-Valencia should never have finished 0-0 (Toño made two superb saves) and Málaga should have probably beaten Sevilla, having a goal wrongly disallowed, but as one headline put it Espanyol-Getafe was “a great goal and nothing else”, Atlético’s 1-0 win over Las Palmas had its moments but not that many of them (and Valerón was left on the bench), and Real Sociedad’s trip to Deportivo was pretty bad. So bad in fact that the greatest excitement probably came when the net ripped and had to be attached to the crossbar again. It wasn’t ripped by a Hotshot Hamish of a shot, alas. In fact, check out these words peppered across El País’s brief match report: nothingness, grey, sad, yawn, unbearable, irrelevant, and emotionless.
• Leo Messi really is quite bad at penalties. He missed his 14th of 63 penalties against Athletic, or rather Gorka Iraizoz saved it. That means he has now failed to scored 22% of his career penalties for Barcelona. It probably shouldn’t have been a penalty in the first place and Barcelona struggled to find a way past Athletic, losing Sergio Busquets and Dani Alves too. (Although Sergi Roberto was excellent at right-back). It is hard to avoid the sensation that, despite this weekend’s results, the first half of the season may feel very long indeed for Barça.
• Puxa Asturies! It was not only Sporting who were back. Twelve years later, local rivals Real Oviedo were back in the LFP at last having finally got out of the regionalised, theoretically amateur Second Division B. And Doctor Diego Cervero, as good as his word to never give up until they returned, made an appearance in a 2-2 home draw with Lugo.
• And Marca really outdid themselves with their “beautiful souvenir” (their words): a truly surreal fold-out-and-keep footballing version of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, complete with instructions (no scissors, “use your own hands” it cheers, alongside a useful little no scissors logo) and an even more useful description in case you didn’t get that the heaven of the Spanish league is represented by Messi and Ronaldo, the sinners are the rest of the league, a load of footballers riding pigs and goats and horses and birds and stuff, or some creatures or other anyway, while a referee sprays a white line in the middle of the madness and an owl sits in the European Cup, and then on the right are the teams who have arrived from hell, Sporting, Betis and Las Palmas, plus Vicente Del Bosque turned into some odd creature with his rear end open, and some harps and torture implements and things. Which, let’s face it, you probably didn’t. And which, this column is now handily explaining for you, because actually Marca’s description really didn’t help much, despite this column not actually having a clue what’s really going on. Yes, it’s a masterpiece alright. And all of it is lovingly reproduced in bewilderingly bizarre detail on cheap newspaper.
Results: Málaga 0-0 Sevilla, Deportivo 0-0 Real Sociedad, Espanyol 1-0 Getafe, Atlético 1-0 Las Palmas, Rayo 0-0 Valencia, Athletic 0-1 Barcelona, Sporting 0-0 Real Madrid, Levante 1-2 Celta, Betis 1-1 Villarreal. Monday: Granada-Eibar.
