🇬🇮 nutmeg fc #8
Today: Gibraltar to the World Cup, chapter 2
On Friday 24 March, Miguel decided to travel to the Rock to support the Gibraltar national team in their Euro 2024 qualifier opener against Greece. The idea was to take advantage of the match to spend the weekend there and start to get into the local spirit.
He invited me to join him, but I preferred not to because I wanted to have enough emotional distance to be impartial in my narrations. At the moment, I wasn't succeeding. To the anxiety I was already feeling about the Gibraltar match I added salt and decided not to know the result until I met Miguel. I wanted him to be my only point of connection to this adventure.
At first, I thought I would have to avoid social networks and media to keep myself ignorant of the result, but it turned out that I didn't need to. Not knowing how the Gibraltar national team is doing is easier than taking a fixed penalty at the opening of a World Cup. Unless you're Diana Ross.
So Miguel and I agreed that we wouldn't talk about the game until we were face to face, but at kick-off time he sent me a clickbait message: You won't believe this, let's meet tomorrow. The range of possibilities was as wide as it was unsettling. The unbelievable could be fish flavoured chips, an own goal from the kick-off, or that a prehistoric animal had emerged from the depths of the Mediterranean and carried off a stuffed Garfield doll. With Miguel you never know.
We arranged to meet at 10am at La Placita cafeteria but, as befits a good Argentinian living in Andalusia, by 11:15am Miguel still hadn't turned up. My anxiety and bad mood were mounting and I wasn't the only one.
When I got to the cafeteria, I asked the waiter for a water and told him I would order some breakfast when my friend arrived. He snorted and left, but he never stopped looking at me sidelong with resentment. As the minutes passed, his gaze filled with contempt, the pressure mounted, and finally I gave in and ordered. Since all I could think of at that moment was the Greeks, Gibraltar's rivals, I asked for a yoghurt. In a cold and cruel revenge, the waiter brought it to me without sugar.
After all the anticipation, and my sacrifice of eating a Greek yoghurt without sugar, I have to confess that Miguel's arrival was, to say the least, disappointing.
He approached my table walking without urgency, without emotion. He slumped heavily in his chair, ordered a black coffee and, instead of telling me what it was I wouldn't believe, he decided to go for the long version, which included details such as that he found a peseta in a gutter. Details which I will omit from the summary below.
Miguel drove from Malaga to Gibraltar, but left the car on the Spanish side. The Victoria Stadium is very close to the border and, surely, finding a parking space in the area would be virtually impossible on match days.
As I mentioned earlier, Gibraltar were playing Greece, an opponent we considered winnable. After all, this is a team that rarely qualifies for the World Cup and, when they do, they never perform at a high level. But the Gibraltarians saw the Greeks completely differently. To them they were a team that, in this millennium, had won more Euros than Germany, England and the Netherlands combined.
A win would be epic, historic and a great joy for a people who have not seen their national team win a match since October 2020, when they beat Liechtenstein. In fact, the unpronounceable team is the one that Gibraltar has beaten the most times in its history: twice. And also the one they have drawn the most: two. With Miguel, we wanted to compose a song about the paternity of Liechtenstein, but we were unsuccessful.
If I was disappointed when I saw Miguel arrive, he was even more disappointed when he got to the stadium. He was expecting a mixture of English wildness and Andalusian joy, but he found neither. The stadium was silent, empty, closed.
Miguel thought the worst: that nobody was going to watch the national team's matches. Then he thought the logical thing: that the match had been called off. And in the end, a lady hiding packets of cigarettes in the lining of her skirt clarified the situation: the Victoria Stadium was not authorised by UEFA to play matches in its competitions and, as it was the only stadium in the country, the Gibraltar national team had to play its home games abroad. The most practical option would have been to play in Spain, which was just a stone's throw away, but geopolitical conflicts meant that they had to go and play their home games in Portugal.
With the stadium closed and the players about to take the field, Miguel sent me the now infamous "You won't believe this, let's meet tomorrow" message and ran off in search of a bar to watch the game. It wasn't easy. There weren't many places that would broadcast it and his physical condition didn't allow him to run more than twenty metres without feeling nauseous. But finally, a benevolent old lady allowed him to get on her scooter and, at 5km/h, took him to the Cliffhanger Bar, where the match was being broadcast.
―Do you know what Cliffhanger means. ―he asked me.
―Yes. ―I answered.
―Well, that. ―he said.