Last Friday, a few of us friends were sitting in Praza de A Verdura in Pontevedra when the photographer Amador Lorenzo said with a groan, pointing to the Rúas bar: “I’m not coming back.” My friend, anti-Madrid fan and culé, always in that order, made reference to the terrible week spent there watching football: the penalties against City, the stoppage time victory against Barça. I reminded him that between 2005 and 2010, six eternal years, we saw one season after another how Madrid always lost in the round of 16 of the Champions League. How for six years, between our 27 (symbolic age) and 32 years, practically the footballing flower of our youth, we Real Madrid fans would leave that same bar on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, with an existential emptiness that was only mitigated by praying that the Barça would be eliminated as soon as possible and become a united gang again. How even on a League match between those years, Barcelona scored 1-3 at the Bernabéu and I went home, on the way two others fell and when I arrived, from what I was later able to find out without much effort, they even scored another.
And what were we doing? Return. Return until we couldn’t take it anymore, and we moved like the Targaryens, without kingdom or lands, to Javi’s Cave, a hundred meters above. There we reached the semi-finals against Bayern, and what happened? That the best penalty takers in the world, all in Madrid, missed their shots one after another. Was the problem then the bar? No, the problem was me. They all returned to the Rúas, I went to live outside of Pontevedra, Madrid won the Décima and my friends, the people with whom I crossed the desert, the people of tears, sorrow and heartbreak, have never let me watch a tie again of Champions with her in my city. And then God said: “Madrid will win the Champions League, but you will never be able to celebrate them with your friends from Pontevedra.” Every football fan, if they are truly one, knows that their team’s victories and defeats are not decided by signings, tactics or coaches, but by small and delicate mechanisms that have to do with each person’s habits.
I had to remind Amador this Friday that that bar was the joy of the culés for many years, and it has once again been the joy of the madridistas. I also made him see a curious phenomenon. In the days of Guardiola’s Barcelona, my culé friends called me a lot to watch football, even inconsequential matches that neither came nor went for me, and I only surrounded myself with Real Madrid friends, we were never as close friends as we were at that time; I have been for a few years, however, in which I like to call Barcelona friends to watch football. There was no mocking intention in them then nor is there in me now. I like to think that behind it there is a biological mechanism according to which we flee from self-satisfactory bubbles (few self-satisfactions worse than those of football, all the time saying to each other, when things go wrong, “we are Madrid” that sometimes we just need to go to the unemployment line to shout it while clenching our fists before they break our faces) and debate happily, yes since victory, with clever football arguments. As an old Rúas client said almost twenty years ago (is he still alive?), “I argue about football after winning, I don’t mind saying that the victory was deserved by someone else: whoever deserves it; First give it to me and then tell me who deserves it.” That world, the world of that bar and its clientele, was taken from me. We won five Champions Leagues, yes, but at what cost. Purely literary complaint, to tell the truth.
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