With half a minute left in the bronze medal match in field hockey, before Spain took its last penalty corner, its last bullet, the Spaniard Xavier Gispert ran to the touchline with no other concern. “What’s going on?” shouted the coach, Max Caldas, who did not understand what he was doing there at such a critical moment. “Oh no, we’re going to score. I dreamed it,” the player replied.
What happened was that that penalty corner also went down the drain, for the tenth time in the match. On this occasion, the most basic summary of the match served to explain almost everything: India was successful in two consecutive penalty corners and Spain had problems on several occasions to execute this action. They had 10 opportunities, four of them in the last minute and a half, when Gispert’s head exploded, and they were left with a clean slate.
“There are two types of players,” explained Caldas, “those who know how to shoot and those who know how to score goals. We still don’t have those who know how to score goals. I mean scoring them in succession. This is a matter of experience and training, there are no secrets. I would be worried if we didn’t have ten. But of the 10, three were badly taken out and one was badly saved,” added the Argentinean about a fate that tilted the afternoon in favor of the Indians (2-1) and left Spain without a medal.
They were a recognizable and energetic Redsticks, nothing like the shaved version of the semifinals against the Netherlands (4-0). “That day we were scared, thick, and today I didn’t see that at all,” said the coach, who appealed to the future. The team, eighth in the league, was not expected to be rankingworld championship, at such an advanced stage of the Olympic tournament, but the bell in the quarterfinals against Belgium opened a window that was only in the minds of the most optimistic. In the group stage, they also beat Germany, the finalist.
The step forward in Paris was aimed at Max Caldas, one of those coaches with a humanistic vision of the bench who quotes Ted Lasso in interviews. The coach of the fictional series who uses very particular and close methods to gain the trust of the players is one of his references, as he said a few months ago in Acewhere he recalled the phrase that Lasso said to one of his pupils in one chapter: “Be a goldfish, which is the happiest animal in the world because it has a life of 10 seconds.”
In real life, Caldas invited the players’ parents to go into the locker room during the pre-Olympic final (the place had already been secured) to attend the last minutes of the locker room liturgy. And on the day he announced the list for the Games, he called the parents of those called up via Teams to inform them of the decision before it was made official. Then, he asked them to turn off the cameras because their children were going to join the video call so that they would not see them.
This is how relationships were built in a team that also had a kind of Minister councilan elite group of six veterans who met every Monday via video call to discuss various team, game and coexistence issues, and then raise them with the coaching staff.
The low average age of Spain at these Games (less than 25) and the fact that only five members of the list had Olympic experience (Álvaro Iglesias, José Basterra, Álex Alonso, Joaquín Menini and Marc Recasens) suggested that perhaps this group’s moment would be better at Los Angeles 2028. But the opportunity suddenly opened up. In the end, penalty corners ruined Spain’s push. Some were not even finished and in others they found Sreejesh Parattu, the goalkeeper who stopped one from Marc Miralles with one minute and 16 seconds left. Then came the (unfulfilled) dream of Xavier Gispert.
India won, fifth in the rankingthe old power (eight Olympic gold medals between 1928 and 1980) that dominated hockey when it was played on natural turf, not artificial turf as it is today. Real hockey, some veterans protest.
You can follow Morning Express Sports onFacebook andXor sign up here to receive theDaily newsletter of the Paris Olympic Games.
