The most important player for José Bordalás, the outfield player who has used the most minutes this season (2,048), spent many weeks last year on the verge of no longer being at Getafe when the coach returned in April, with the team flirting dangerously with the descent. Nemanja Maksimovic (Banja Koviljaca; 29 years old) carries the flag of the Bordalás spirit at the Coliseum, which hosts Real Madrid tonight in the postponed Super Cup match in which the whites seek to regain the lead of the League (9:00 p.m. Movistar ). The Serbian is the third best recoverer in the championship and the fourth who exerts himself the most physically: only Uzuni, Bellingham and Miguel Gutiérrez have accelerated above 21 km/h more times than him. But not long ago, and for quite a few weeks, he lost that indomitable and extreme soul.
The momentary collapse began in the summer of 2022. “After four years, I thought the time had come for a change, but the president [Ángel Torres] I didn’t have the same idea,” he says. “There I started doing things that I don’t have to do. You say to yourself: ‘Okay, I’m going to train a little worse.’ You start to train badly, you don’t do a good preseason, you get injured, and all year you are playing with that, that you want to go out, and you lose the desire a little.” He was somewhat alerted by the prospect of playing in the World Cup with Serbia in November in Qatar. “That saved me. Since I had the World Cup, I said to myself: ‘Okay, I’m going to change.’
Afterwards, he tried once more to come out in the winter market. But neither. “At the end in January I realized that I was going to stay, and that I was playing with fire.” She began to take flight somewhat. Until the final click in the summer, following the return of Bordalás and salvation in extremis: “I have changed this year. I know that this doesn’t last a lifetime, that you never know what can happen, an injury or something that can stop me. That’s why I’m playing every game like the last. “I’m trying to enjoy it to the fullest,” he says. “I have an opportunity that not many people have. When football is over, I don’t want to say: ‘Puff, what a fool I was, because I didn’t give my all.’ “It has taken me a lot to get to this level.”
Much of this rise to the elite has to do with the continuous demand of the Alicante coach, with whom he already coincided in his first stage. He greatly noticed his departure to Valencia in the summer of 2021: “It cost me a little following Bordalás, which demands you every day. Michel [su sucesor en el banquillo] He is a good coach, but he comes in totally different: we are all friends, calm down, we are going to play… And this team had been with Bordalás for many years, who is there every day: ‘Come on, come on, let’s fight for every ball, everything is important…!’. In the end, you relax a little. The team is slowly going down. It seems like you’re playing well, but you’re leaving things behind that you didn’t leave behind before. They are hitting you. You start badly, you get scared… It’s a shame for Míchel, because I think we played very well with him, he’s a good coach, but football has those things.”
The 2021/2022 season was very complicated. Getafe fired Míchel, Quique Sánchez Flores replaced him, but they were on the verge of relegation, following having reached the last 16 of the Europa League two years earlier. “You think you’ve already reached your maximum. You say: ‘Am I going to fight once more? Where am I going to go if I have already arrived here?’ Getafe is a family club. You sign to be in the First Division, we are going to reach 40 points… And in the end you enter a comfort zone and say: ‘Ah, nothing happens, following this game there will be another one.’ And you go down…”
Bordalás shook him once more with the electric shock of his demand. “You know that if you work hard you will have opportunities, but if one day you stop doing what you have to do, you will not play. You can be spectacular for two months, but if you relax for two weeks, you won’t play. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.”
And Maksimovic woke up: “The coach requires you to be at your limit every day, and then you see that what you have done in recent years was not even half of what you might do. Me, at 26 or 27 years old, spending two seasons in one of the best leagues in the world, with opportunities that almost no one has, I think is a shame. That’s why I reacted.”
The Alicante coach has also managed to wake up Borja Mayoral, Madrid’s youth player and top scorer in the League, tied on 14 goals with Bellingham and Dovbyk. The forward records the best figures of his career: 0.75 goals per game. “It is important that Borja and all of us understood that with him you either work or you don’t play. In the end Borja realized in preseason: if I want to stay and play, I have to work and work every day, and win every ball. And you see that Borja is doing a lot for the team this year. Not just goals, but running, keeping the ball, winning the second play, going back… Bordalás changes your mind, it puts the effort in your mind. If you want to accept his ideas you will be a much better player.”
The ideas that brought out the best in Maksimovic also put the team under a heavy shower of criticism at certain times: “We knew that when the team is good, when it wins, when no one wants to play once morest us, it is normal for them to talk. We know that if we do things well, if we run, if we work, it is very difficult to beat us. Before playing, they start saying: ‘They play badly, they don’t play, they waste time…’. If things go wrong, they already have excuses prepared. It’s better for everyone to talk bad regarding you if you win, than for them to say: ‘Cheer up, nothing’s wrong.’ When you’re down there, everyone is nice, but when you’re annoying, when you’re up there, they’re already looking for things to get out of your way.”
For this reason, the locker room celebrated the day that Bordalás rebelled in the press room with that: “This is football, dad.” The phrase, which became a motto, was already circulating privately in the locker room: “Sometimes I said it in the talks before the game, when they criticized us. He liked to say it,” says Maksimovic. “He is trying to take the pressure off, and to talk more regarding him than regarding the team.”
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