There is a question that opens the door to a universe of illusions. Do you want to play with us? It can be heard in a city square, in a school yard, or in a meadow on a summer afternoon. They are four words that travel through the atmosphere loaded with empathy and – towards the person who is not playing – and audacity on the part of those who pronounce them – they never know what they are going to find, no matter how much a first visual exploration can provide clues. —. The response usually goes the other way, supported by gratitude. By the time all the protagonists want to realize it, the ball is rolling and acting as a common language. That same question is sometimes heard at another level. When a club has been following an athlete for some time and decides to take the step of making a proposal, the same words then arrive accompanied by a kind of heavenly music that, in the soundtrack of a life, would sound like the achievement of a dream.
To Manu Sarabia, historic Athletic Bilbao player, the question was asked by another legend, Piru Gainza. That phrase is today the title of a book —Kid, do you want to come to Athletic? (Al Poste)—in which Sarabia and his wife Begoña Armesto put their words to a career marked by an innate talent for football, the passions he aroused in the stands… and by the more than complicated relationship he had with the man who was then his coach, Javier Clemente. Most of the book is dedicated to affair—sic— between footballer and coach. A conflict situation that moved to the San Mamés stands and that occupied pages and pages in the newspapers of the time. Even today it continues to be a source of conversation among Bilbao fans. Now, for the first time, Sarabia openly exposes his version of what happened in those 80s, posing an interesting exercise in memory and newspaper archive through which the escalation of tension between the two is perceived. In January 1986, Athletic dismissed the coach after he declared that Sarabia would no longer play for the club. Almost 40 years later, the wound remains open.
