Mr. LoweSpanish writerAugust 19, 2023 05:53 am8 minutes to read
Santi Cazorla will return to his boyhood club in Spain after recently playing for Al Sadd in Qatar.(Photo by Simon Holmes/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Santi Cazorla was 18 years old when he left Real Oviedo. He didn’t want to go. Born in Fonciello, a small town of just 100 people in the diocese of Lugo de Llanera, Rey played for Carlos Tartiere, the club’s home for more than 70 years, seven miles from his home. But not in the way he dreamed.
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Arriving at Oviedo at the age of nine, he, his soccer and youth teammates Rubi Toral and Piero Manso, the best teammates then and now, jumped onto the pitch at halftime and kicked. They were good, too, people sat down to watch the show, but in his almost decade there, Cazorla had never made his first appearance on the team. He now he won’t go either.
A Serie A team when Cazorla was a footballer, Oviedo escaped from Serie A in 2001 and continued to fall. In 2003, it was relegated to two categories at the same time: on the pitch, it went from the Second Division to the regional Second B, with four divisions and 80 teams; Off the field, they went from Second B to third, with its 17 teams and some 350 teams, it was forcibly relegated due to the financial crisis that threatened to drive them to extinction. The same crisis that forced Cazorla to leave, to close the door when he could have opened it.
With unpaid players denouncing Oviedo and leaving, everything falls apart, local politicians maneuvering to pull the plug and push for a new project in its place; With president Manuel Lafuente desperately trying to keep the club afloat and mobilizing the crowd to be his salvation, Oviedo had to restart with nothing. Team B had effectively become the first team and Cazorla, who had been playing in the under-19 category for three years, better on loan, participated in the first training session. The coach had doubts about his preparation. Worse still, the crisis and the forced relegation had repercussions, ruining the quarry: at each age the B team was eliminated, leaving Cazorla with nowhere to play.
Virtually forced to leave home, he joined Villarreal B, where he played third. (In the midst of the crisis, another homegrown player leaves, three years younger than Cazorla. You may have heard of him: his name is Juan Mata.)
When Oviedo faced Masconia in third in August 2003, the beginning of what they have known as their continued journey through Carretilla – slime – was over. By the end of the season, Cazorla had played twice in the first division for Villarreal. That is double what Oviedo has in the 20 years since then. Soon the whole world knew him: two-time European champion with Spain – only injury prevented him from also being a world champion – absurdly talented and universally popular, that smile is always there even when there are enough reasons to wipe it off his face, he will keep going . to play 687 great games. None of them were with the team backing him. until now.
This week, almost 20 years after the day he left, Cazorla is back. At 38 years old, this will undoubtedly be the last step of a stellar career. The video announcing his return to the team he didn’t actually play for was like something out of JRR Tolkien: wearing a wizard’s hat, riding a horse in a field. A child stops him: The child says: “You’re late.” He replies, “It’s never too late when you have so much to give back.”
In another video, he is sitting on an empty beach when he takes a phone call from Real Oviedo, folding up his lounger and carrying it, leaving him instead in Tartiere’s midfield. The beach is in a place called Paro.
Suddenly, everyone started to go crazy. this is special There is something in the message of the Andorra B coach, Eder Sarabia, that is something likeable that can be applied throughout the country and throughout the division. Next month Santi Cazorla will play at the National Stadium. he is writing. That is a discount. For Oviedo, it’s hard to do justice to how massive this is: excitement, joy, a sense of belonging.
When Oviedo went through another financial crisis in 2012, still in Segunda B and again on the verge of bankruptcy, he was again bailed out by his sponsors, Cazorla was among those who bought the shares. With Mata and Michu, he was vital to the internationalization of their cause – at that point it would not be an exaggeration to say that no academy on the planet could claim a top three Premier League players That summer, Oviedo reached the playoffs, rising from Second B to Second Division. Cazorla went to look and tweeted: “We’ll be back!” They weren’t, unfortunately. Is now.
He played with Rikeri, Villarreal, Málaga, Arsenal and Al Sadd, 81 games with Spain, but Oviedo did not stop being his team.
during the world Cup In Qatar, I was looking for a live stream to watch the derby against Sporting; by the way, this week Javi Fuego from Sporting responded to his return with an adorable post of the two playing against each other in the youth derby. decades ago – His teammate there, Marc Munessa, said he knew the words to the club’s anthem because Cazorla always sang it. There is a video that has been around the last two days of Cazorla in the Tartiere stands a few years ago, there as a fan. When asked what Oviedo meant to him, he replied: “It’s hard to explain… it’s my home.”
In the end, the announcement happened a little faster than planned, everything suddenly blew up and everyone went crazy, but it was a long time coming. It’s that you can never make yourself believe that it will actually happen; Sometimes Cazorla himself couldn’t. Sometimes it just wasn’t possible, or it might have happened soon. Until this moment, finally free of his contract, there were bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. There were times when a transfer seemed unlikely, when talks stalled and it was feared that the last chance was lost. When it came to the negotiations themselves, well, there weren’t any.
Cazorla always wanted to play for Oviedo before retiring, and he wanted his son Enzo, who is a few years older than his father when he joined Oviedo, to see him in blue. The president of the club, Martín Peláez, announced that this was the largest operation that the Pachuca group had carried out – they run both Oviedo and the Mexican club – but also the easiest.
He will receive the minimum salary of the second division of Spain. He has relinquished all rights to the image. The only request he has made is that 10% of the money earned on jerseys sold with his name and number on them – and there will be a lot – go directly to the youth academy. Children like him shouldn’t have to leave next time. The relief is that he is finally back. “When you are nine years old and you are dreaming, and you have an opportunity, you have to take it,” Cazorla said. The last few days have seen an avalanche of photos on social networks of the young Santi wearing a series of classic Oviedo shirts and even more classic hairstyles. One arrives with a tweet from the club, insisting: “We’ll see that kid smile again.”
Peláez said: “When a player of the stature of Santi leaves everything, it’s easy. He could be somewhere else making a lot of money, he could be on any team, but he wanted to be here. We only give him a salary because we have to.” «
Now comes the hard part: the gameplay. demands and need. Cazorla will turn 39 before the end of the year. He spent the last three years in Qatar. It’s normal to worry that it won’t work; That emotion that I felt now, so overwhelming, will fade away. There may be criticism, or worse. I shouldn’t have worried. There is admiration for everything he has achieved, all the joy he has given, everything he has overcome. He everything he did to come back. The reason he did it, “pure feeling,” as he put it, and how he did it.
The injury he suffered in October 2016 at Arsenal should have come to an end: he had undergone surgery 11 times and the infection had eaten 10 cm of tendon. They have tried everything. They built the Achilles tendon of the knee. A tattoo of his daughter’s name, now half on his arm and half on his ankle, cut out and put there to fix it, is symbolic of everything. In his own words, every time he was stitched up, the wound would open up again, a gaping hole in the heel acting as a window into the horror below.
Spain’s Santi Cazorla celebrates scoring his team’s second goal during the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifier against Malta on November 15, 2019.GT
They thought he might lose his leg. They told him that he would be lucky if he kicked the ball around the park with his son. He spent 668 days without playing. but he is back. Not only that: from 2018-20 years it was Villarreal best playermore than a glimpse of what it was like.
Doing it took its toll and required a tremendous effort, with all the smile, strong and resistant, and so it was. Qatar offered a financial reward on top of the exemption, of course. That first season he was the best player in the League -Xavi described him as the best he has ever coached- and that could have been the end. Three years later, it’s remarkable that he’s still going, sometimes maybe he didn’t want to, but there was something that kept him going: the ending he was looking for.
“Many people may think that I have nothing to gain and a lot to lose, but the opposite is true,” he insisted this week. “When you have a dream to come true, that comes first.” When he spoke with Oviedo, Cazorla did not demand anything of him, he did not lack anything: it was enough money to put the shirt back on. It was everything he wanted, everything he wanted. That’s what the fans wanted too. For them but also for him: almost everything that happens now doesn’t matter. If he’s playing well, great. If he didn’t, he played. If it’s a minute of a game, it’s worth it. It’s been a long wait.
Santi Cazorla was nine years old when he arrived and dreamed of playing for Real Oviedo. After thirty years, he would finally have the chance.
2023-08-19 05:59:42
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