Super Cup Final. Crickets instead of “oles” in the final of the Super Cup

The rocker Silvio He ruled that Seville did not have to explain that it was the most beautiful city in the world. “Let the second explain it.” The same can be said of the Royal Cavalry Maestranza, main bullring of the bullfighting world because yes, and that the others argue their futile objections. There, a ten-minute drive from the The Cartuja, you never say olé, a flat interjection in the Spanish dialect, “ole”, which also does not sound in the first passes of a batch. “Well,” the stretchers murmur when the right-hander removes the deception in the pair of trial trips; “Ole”, thunders the fans when they are sure that there is work.

They play Athletic and Barcelona a final in Seville without making it less pertinent to tell how the Sevillian spectators would have greeted the breaks of Messi or the snatches of Williams if the game had not been played in a deserted stadium, where the only soundtrack was the cricket songs on the icy night at La Cartuja. Quite an experience, contemplating high-competition sports lulled by the monotonous whistle of these orthopterans, from the stands that trembled to push Niurka montalvo in his duel with Fiona May in the 1999 World Athletics Championships or where Mourinho’s Porto silenced the Caledonian hordes of Celtic – with Rod Stewart leading the choirs from his box – in the 2003 UEFA Cup final, when roaring Portuguese dragons dined on Glasgow steak.

Sixty thousand empty seats in an almost closed room produce a vaulted silence, like that of a cathedral at eight o’clock in the morning on a weekday. Before the pandemic, the acoustics fostered by the genius of the «Antonios» –Cruz & Ortiz, luminaries of Andalusian civil architecture– made the La Cartuja stadium the ideal setting for, with forgiveness, breaking the decibel record on the whistle to Grenadier March –Vulgo, anthem of Spain– traditionally dispensed by the Basque and Catalan fans when they coincide in a final. But there is no music in the run-up, why? Of the Super Cup, so there is no reason to congratulate ourselves for the “closed door”, a disease of our football that, alas, is on the way to becoming endemic.

They could not, that is, sound “oles” in Seville and neither is the political environment to equate this party to an act of the “national holiday”, which is now only bullfighting in the memory of some nostalgic people. And there were no beasts on the sand either, perhaps some “lions” from Bilbao that hardly resemble those of yesteryear in the elegant rojiblanco uniform that they wear. Football has changed a lot, in some cases for the worse, since when to look out over the Athletic area, cement shin guards and tempered legionary courage were needed in the trenches of Sidi Ifni. Your captain, Iker Muniain, jumps into the field with his hair smeared with potingues and his beard outlined with pencils. Anyway.

For missing, he was not in La Cartuja or Luis Rubiales, federative president who invented this four-way Super Cup format to “contribute to improving the situation of women in Saudi Arabia” – you have to have a bronze … – and he had to bring it to Andalusia because the sheiks were very worried about the virus, but only with the one carried by the Spanish footballers and not the one that could infect the two thousand members of the Dakar caravan. Anyway (bis) and let’s leave it here because it is not a plan to fatten up with the same RFEF that invited the press to accredit a sandwich and a chocolate bar.

Go, then, wishes that Rubiales ends his quarantine before April 4, when Athletic returns to La Cartuja for the Cup final last year … two weeks before this year’s one is played. Who says the Federation does weird things? Come on man.

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