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La Selección, 1920
Saturday’s Nations League game in Murcia between Spain and Denmark brought back certain memories for me personally, but it was also a signficant fixture in other ways, not least because Denmark are top of the group, Spain were without Rodri, Simón, Carvajal, Nico Williams, Olmo, Le Normand and Uncle Tom Cobley ‘n all….and, if we rewind back to the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, the very first official tournament to which the Spanish selección travelled, the opening game was against – you’ve guessed it – Denmark. The pedants will point out (correctly) that Spain actually played a game in 1913 in Hondarribia against France, on a pitch which lies 22 kms to the east of the keyboard I’m writing this on. The score was 1-1, but due to transport problems and the refusal of various other regions’ federations to cede players to what they considered an ad hoc national committee, the team consisted of nine Basques and two blokes from Galicia. It’s kind of ironic, given subsequent political and cultural events, that this first team called ‘España’ was almost entirely Basque. Here are those chaps from 1913, below.
The rogue federation soon disbanded and WW1 took over daily events, but by the 1920 Olympics Spain fancied sending an official side to the games, actually the fifth Olympics in which football had figured. I wrote about this (below) in my book ‘Morbo’ in the first edition in 2001:
“When the Spanish football squad set out by train for Antwerp in the autumn of 1920 to compete in the Olympics (Spanish football did not turn professional until 1926), they travelled third-class. Few of the players had set foot in a foreign country and the press angle at the time was all about how the involvement of the team in the tournament would simultaneously raise European awareness of Spain and enable the country, isolated down there in the Iberian peninsula, to measure itself against other nations.
It was as if they had no real conception of how good or bad they were likely to be. Before the global village, it was difficult to know what you were going to come up against, a factor that added a sort of picaresque spice to the matches, like Quijote traipsing through the countryside, never quite sure what or whom he was about to encounter. And when all the games were over and Spain went home with the silver medal, the self-delusion began to take shape.
The 1920 Games bear much of the responsibility for the subsequent 80 years of relative failure, and several of the incidents back then were to set the template for the years to come. Like England’s failure to acknowledge the luck that accompanied them in 1966, the Spanish reaction of ‘Well, we’re not as bad as we thought’ contributed to their failure four years later in Paris, where they were knocked out in the first game, 1-0 at the hands of the Italians. The results in 1920 were quite impressive. In the opening game in Brussels they defeated Denmark 1-0, before losing to the hosts 3-1 in the quarter-final (complaining bitterly about the Dutch referee). The tournament was chaotic. Belgium won it by default, Czechoslovakia having walked off in protest in the final, dissatisfied with the (English) referee.”
The guy who scored that first (official) goal for Spain was Patricio Arabolaza and there was an interesting piece on him in the local paper (Saturday), narrated by his grand-daughters from the border town of Irun. Apparently, when the train arrived back with the players from the tournament, Patricio had a quick kip and went back to work, mounting scaffolding. This is worthy of mention because in the same edition of the paper, ‘El Diario Vasco’, there was a scary piece about the 14 players who Real Sociedad released to the four corners of the Earth to play various internationals this week – a record number for the team but one which will have required, when they return for their own kip, a total of 77 flights and 124,000 kms of collective distance – the equivalent of zapping four times around the world. Not very sustainable in any sense, of course, but particularly problematic for those who will be mounting scaffolding when they get back. Actually, it might do them some good, were it to help them remember their forefathers.
Patricio the man – and his shirt from that 1920 Denmark game
Whatever…all the above was a pathetic excuse to tell you that when I went to the Bernabéu in 2004 to help persuade the club to allow a British company to film a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the galáctico Real Madrid (they said no, nicely), Emilio Butragueño – the man who famously destroyed that wonderful Elkjaer-Laudrup-Olsen Denmark side of the mid’ 1980s – was part of the club’s executive, and he came along all boyish and besuited to the meeting. Despite him playing for Real Madrid, I’d kind of loved him as a player, and his performances in the 1986 World Cup were astonishing – I relate the experience of first seeing him play in the next paragraph below. The wonderful thing was, that 18 years after the incident in Peru (below), I was sitting opposite him, and in a cheesy attempt to butter him up to accept the film company’s offer, I politely slid a copy of ‘White Storm’ across the table to him, the book that I’d written two years before for Mainstream about the club’s history, for their centenary year. To my astonishment he said, in perfect English, ‘It’s ok. I’ve already read it. And I’ve read your other book Morbo too’. Completely unprepared for this, I stammered ‘Ah -ok. Well perhaps you could sign it for me then?’ to which he replied, ‘No. I’ll take a new copy. You sign it for me.’
No. You sign it for me.
Was that the coolest moment of my miserable life up to then? Probably. Anyway, here’s the other extract from ‘Morbo‘, just to get you ready for tonight’s game. From the chapter ‘Dark Horses’.
The two first editions mentioned, gathering dust in Emilio’s attic.
“Butragueño was promoted swiftly through the ranks of the youth sides by Amancio and made his debut for Castilla in 1982. He comes in at number 11 in the Top 100 poll, but he scores much higher in my own personal hierarchy – probably in the top five. Of course, men are particularly fond of rankings and will defend their top ten albums and footballers with embarrassing commitment, though at the bottom of our cheesy souls we know that it is all subjective, all too determined by the generation to which we belong. For my generation, the choices are obvious and uncontroversial – Pelé, Maradona, Cruyff, Best and any one from a rump of half a dozen. But there should be room for a more quirky choice, and Butragueño fits my bill perfectly.
I first became aware of him when I was living in Peru, during the 1986 World Cup. There was a tiny ‘bar’ down the road from my flat, a small hut propped up by four poles, with a slab of corrugated iron balanced on the poles. The proprietor slept behind the counter in the day and kept a large dog on a lead to discourage thieves from walking off with his stock of bottled beer. At night, a group of men would meet and sit on the pavement outside talking into the small hours, drinking from the bottles. The bar collapsed in late ’86 when an earth tremor dislodged one of the supporting poles. The dog survived, although the sleeping owner was not so lucky. But during the World Cup in Mexico, the nightbirds would congregate to discuss the games played in the afternoons or early evenings. The Peruvians were perceptive about football. They spoke poetically about it, in their curiously formal, florid Spanish. They liked to see it played with a flourish so that they themselves could talk about it in style. But teams that were all running and commitment – the work ethic? No. That wasn’t half as interesting. Which is precisely why they were stunned by the Danes, a side they had expected to exemplify all the most tedious puritan traits of the severe northern Europeans. The evening after their 6–1 trouncing of Uruguay, an enormously fat and friendly customer was particularly enthralled, and in full gut-wobble mode, kept intoning: ‘De puta madre! De puta madre!’ (Absolutely fucking brilliant!), banging his beer glass onto the counter in rhythm with his own insistence. ‘That Elkjaer! Did you see him. Cut through them like a bull! They were trying to chop him down, hacking at him, but still he keeps going – then bang! Bloody Uruguayans! Good riddance I say!’ And then a phrase that has always stuck in my head, spoken more quietly, as if he had been describing a lost lover to his friends – ‘Que tal futbol . . . que tal futbol!’ (What wonderful football!) as if his otherwise problematic life had been blessed by what he had witnessed.
In the second phase, Denmark drew Spain. The Spaniards had been slowly improving, having looked quite useful in the group stage, losing unluckily to Brazil, scraping past Northern Ireland 2–1 then beating the weaker Algerians more convincingly, to the tune of 3–0. But I sincerely thought that Denmark were going to win the World Cup that year. They were indeed so wonderful in those first three games that it was difficult to see who was going to stop them. I didn’t know much about the Spanish, beyond my general interest in the tournament, but I wasn’t in any way prepared for what was to happen – and I remember the game as one of the most disappointing I have ever experienced, for the simple reason that I wanted to see more of the Danes. I hated the Spanish for what they did to them that day. The northerners had taken the lead but then Jesper Olsen, Manchester United’s winger, played a calamitous back-pass to his keeper, and the Vulture appeared. Butragueño, with his baby-faced assassin’s neutral expression, saw the mistake coming. He seemed to glide onto the ball as if on a cushion of air and stroke it past the onrushing keeper, as calm as you like. And so it continued. Every time the ball broke down in Denmark’s midfield, Spain counter-attacked ruthlessly, and every time they did Butragueño seemed to score. And what I remember is that he looked as if he should have been doing something less strenuous than football, like a latter-day Billy Elliot. He ran with a ballet-dancer’s poise, with a curiously nimble prance. He looked too feminine for the classic striker’s art. His fourth goal was a penalty that he took himself, after turning Olsen in the penalty area in classic Dalglish style – turn the back, move to go one way, but feint in the opposite direction, flicking the ball through his own legs.
El Buitre -picking off the Danes, 1986
Denmark went tumbling out, as suddenly and as spectacularly as they had appeared. Butragueño was the first man to score four goals in a World Cup game since Eusebio had managed it against North Korea in 1966. In the next match, the Belgians played a cannier game, marking the Real Madrid striker so closely that he hardly touched the ball. Spain went out and, curiously, Butragueño never scored in a World Cup game again. He scored four several years later, in a 9–0 trouncing of Albania in Seville in 1990, and played his last game for Spain in 1992, against Ireland. Up until recently, his 26 international goals were a record for his country, first broken, curiously enough, by the defender Hierro but now also by Raúl. [now of course, by David Villa, 59]
Emilio Butragueño appeared on the international scene that summer just as the BBC were getting used to pronouncing the phonetic nightmare ‘Severiano Ballesteros’. Proud as they were for finally getting to grips with the golfer’s name, they had terrible problems with the new star from Real Madrid, insisting on pronouncing his surname ‘Butragwaynyo’. In fact, they never got it right. The notoriously tongue-tied David Coleman was indeed happy to learn that the player’s nickname was the ‘Vulture’ (el Buitre), and used the easier alternative whenever he was assigned to commentate on a game featuring Spain.”
Phil Ball, Oct 2024
