There are unexpected guests who become the kings of the party. Also in football, increasingly stratified by the economic power of his nobility, but also always fond of the stories of Cinderellas who, once they have tried the shoe of success, do not let themselves go barefoot. Girona’s track record is flat. In 2008 he crowned his Second B group as champion, five times he was champion in Third. In 2019, it brought the Catalunya Super Cup to its showcases, a trophy played four times and never heard from once more. The club did not debut in the top category until 2017, following 87 years of apathy. In his fourth season among the greats, he will visit the Santiago Bernabéu next Saturday in a direct duel to defend his chances of being champion. “I think they will endure this fight until the end,” says Paco Liaño, Deportivo goalkeeper who also fought once morest a giant, in that case Barcelona. It is now 30 years.
“The economic difference between rivals is much greater today, although the squad configuration is similar: a Madrid a la carte once morest a Girona with pieces that mix hunger and a good track record, but not at the highest level,” explains Liaño. It seems impossible to reissue that Deportivo epic, culminated, through a missed penalty by Djukic, with a resolution like a movie. But nine years later the Royal Society wrote its own cruel epilogue. Led by Raynald Denoueix, they crossed the halfway point of the League without defeats and with five points ahead of the best galactic version of Real Madrid, the one in which Makelele worked following Figo, Zidane, Raúl and Ronaldo. Nobody expected that constellation would be challenged by a combo in which footballers like Xabi Alonso, Aranburu or Nihat emerged. And only two stumbles in the last three days separated him from glory, never from memory. “The team was not made to fight for the title, but the games went by and we did not lose. The last stretch seemed long and Madrid does not fail on those occasions because it knows how to play them. It was a shame, but also a wonderful season,” recalls Alberto López, a goalkeeper who already had a long career at the club.
Deportivo and Real Sociedad were united by a link, that of the calm that their coaches imparted. “There was a moment when for Barça and its media apparatus we went from riches to rivals. That was when Arsenio transmitted messages that exuded tranquility,” Liaño remembers. Denoueix was along those lines. “There is never a time when a coach already knows everything. What we have to contribute, and what the player asks for, is confidence. And without confusing tranquility with a lack of dynamism,” he explained to journalist Eduardo Rodrigálvarez in an interview published in this newspaper on the eve of the final day. Denoueix maintained that his team was on the edge and that he might fall to one side or the other. “The following year, we played in the Champions League and fought in the League to avoid going down,” Alberto details. They finished fifteenth and the club dispensed with the coach.
There is no coincidence that a modest team fights for a League, but the line that separates good dynamics from negative ones is sometimes very subtle. Qatar Sports Investments announced on the last day of May 2011 the acquisition of 70% of the ownership of PSG and went from investing nine million euros in signings to spending, that summer, just over 107. Pastore, Motta, Gameiro, Matuidi, Maxwell or Lugano came to the team, which also brought in Ancelotti to lead them. The plan was to unseat the champion, Lille, led by a young Hazard. But the League was won by Montpellier, who won 11 games by one to zero in a campaign in which Giroud and Belhanda scored half of the team’s goals. In the previous season, the same protagonists were saved from burning by three points. “We endured the same song for six months: they are going to wither, they are not going to last… We simply did not pay any attention,” deciphered the technician René Girard; “The pressure was our adrenaline. “We were moved to know that perhaps we were not going to have a similar opportunity.” Girard liked to use the expression “dedramatize.” That was one of the words that his colleague Ranieri used most in the feat that led Leicester to win the Premier League in 2016.
“Madrid, Atlético and Barcelona are made to win every day and they will do so. We have to go game by game,” Girona coach Míchel warned last Friday. Speech coined by Simeone to mark Atlético’s path to the 2014 League; wild card now of the covered, although in reality a variant of the tune that accompanied Racing de Avellaneda at the dawn of this century, a great Argentine soccer player that made the Olympic comeback following 35 years of drought.
“The game by game was already experienced in the Deportivo locker room in 1994,” claims Liaño, who still prefers to talk regarding the excitement of winning rather than the pressure of falling, and who kept a clean sheet in the last six games. But Barça won 13 of its last 15 games and tied the other two to take the League by goal average.
Not all fairy tales end in tears. In Portugal, Os Belenenses in 1946 and Boavista in 2001 have placed wedges between the triumphs of the three Portuguese giants. The only Bundesliga won by Wolfsburg came in 2009 following the Brazilian Grafite and the Bosnian Dzeko scored 54 of their 80 goals. In Italy it was Verona that chiseled the only notch in its record with a win in Serie A with the largest roster of stars in memory, in 1985. Maradona, Platini, Zico, Sócrates, Boniek, Rummenigge and Falcao paled before a provincial club reinforced with discards from the greats and two titans who championed the physical style of that team, Briegel and Elkjaer Larsen. In command was Bagnoli, a coach whom Gianni Brera, a master of Italian journalism, compared to the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer for his character between austere, prone to pessimism and intimacy.
Girona is now charting its path, cautious in front of the microphones and daring in its football. They long to become the tenth champion team in the Spanish league. Mirrors have where to look. “I only ask that the team is healthy to last until the end,” claims Míchel. He has serious rivals. But Ranieri, when they pointed out those who were stalking his historic Leicester, replied: “I don’t care. We’re like Forrest Gump. “We can’t stop running.”
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