🇬🇮 Gibraltar to the World Cup, chapter 8.
nutmeg fc #57.
Previously on Gibraltar to the World Cup.
Miguel is an Argentinean living in Malaga, who becomes a supporter of the Gibraltar national team as they dream of reaching their first World Cup.
Despite continuous defeats, Miguel gets excited when Gibraltar almost scores a goal against France from halfway through the pitch. But the results don't go their way and after a heartbreaking 14-0 defeat to the French side, I discover Miguel (a Racing fan by birth) celebrating with the Boca Juniors supporters' club in Malaga.
To err is human.
As is often the case in matters of passion, emotions prevented me from seeing the obvious. What I thought was a betrayal by Miguel was nothing more or less than an elaborate plan to bring the Gibraltar national team closer to qualifying for a World Cup.
Or to winning a match, which at that point had virtually the same emotional value.
Miguel was not abandoning the Gibraltarian ship to jump on a safer one, such as Boca Juniors, but he was putting on his best soprano voice to lure the Xeneizes fans to the Rock with a siren song irresistible to all Argentine fans: the pride of absurd triumphs.
Anyone who knows an Argentine knows that we like to win. No matter what. But since we can't always win, we look for any excuse to proudly hang a medal on ourselves.
Some examples.
Boca fans are proud that Italian Daniele De Rossi has joined the club to fulfil his maradonean dream and win the Copa Libertadores. It matters little to them that he has only played 7 games, including a Copa Argentina elimination against a second division team, and that he has witnessed from the dugout an elimination against River in the Libertadores semi-finals.
River fans celebrate as a great achievement that Lionel Messi apologised after the goal he scored against them in the 2015 Club World Cup final. They are the only team he apologised to, they say. This, along with the fact that his idol is ex-River Pablo Aimar, fuels the popular myth that Messi is a fan of the team with the diagonal stripe. The Inter Miami player has denied it several times, but River fans care little about what he has to say.
In 2014, San Lorenzo took a historic thorn out of their side and managed to lift the Copa Libertadores for the first time. Until that moment, the greatest pride of their youngest fans was not the titles won or the legends who wore their jersey, but that Viggo Mortensen, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, was a fan of the club. What does it have to do with football? Nothing, but for them it's worth a championship.
Miguel, then, decided to exploit this idiosyncratic weakness of being Argentinian, to bring the passion of the southernmost country in the world to the stands of Gibraltar in Portugal. Boca fans could not fail to support Gibraltar. After all, Boca's first professional goal was scored by Gibraltarian Rafael Pratt in a second division match against the now defunct Belgrano Athletic.
Thus, almost a hundred Boca fans living in and around Malaga vowed that they would be there to support the Gibraltar national team at every match, spreading their enthusiasm and attitude. They would overwhelm every opponent from the stands. They would not stop until the Rock's anthem was played at a World Cup. They swore by Román, by Diego, by Rojitas, by RattÃn. They sang, they got excited, they hugged each other.
The first match for the new fans was a friendly in Algarve against Scotland. A British derby.
Only three fans turned up.