Cup: Athletic – Granada: The last year of Aritz Aduriz | Copa del Rey 2019

Before Granada, the striker says goodbye Wednesday of San Mamés in Copa del Rey. “I fantasize about the barge,” he acknowledges.

• Reportage.
  

  Aduriz and the last blows of the 'Zorro'
  

When Iñaki Williams He scored the agonizing goal in the discount against Barça that gave the classification to Athletic for the semifinals of the Cup, almost all his teammates ran like crazy towards one of the corners of the field to hug him. But Aritz Aduriz it did not. The veteran striker submerged himself inside the net he was defending Ter StegenHe grabbed her firmly and opened her arms to radiate her anger and happiness into the stands. Anger because he had been in the infirmary for three months, an ordeal for a competitive animal like him. Happiness because he knows that the opportunities to do something big on a soccer field run out and he has to live each one to the fullest.

Aduriz, after a few seconds, left his goal, but kept his arms outstretched and his mouth open, absorbing the prolongation of that last chance that football had just given him before everything ends at the end of this season. If he accepted this last course, despite the signals that his own body sent him, it was to live nights like that, like today, like the one that, perhaps, will wait for him on April 18 in La Cartuja.

«You see Adu, so motivated, that he has been saying to us all year 'we are going kids, we have to reach the final, which is my last year', and that excites us all. We are going to put all the meat on the grill to make the Grandpa retire happily and calmly with a walk in the Barge, ”said Williams in the Self after the meeting. A feeling shared by a locker room that venerates a 39-year-old soccer player and one day – he fulfilled them yesterday – that rushes his last blows as a professional with the desire to retire with a title.

«I have been fantasizing about this for a long time», recognized the San Sebastián striker himself on Monday, during the awards gala, one received from the magazine Panenka.

«At the beginning it was a fantasy and it may be that it is now closer. Imagine leaving football this season and winning a title. It is anyone's dream. Taking out the Gabarra would be something magical, ”he added before his last Cup match in San Mamés. La Gabarra, after all, an old tow barge, has been an unattainable Dorado for Athletic for three and a half decades. The 2015 Super Cup, won with four goals from Aduriz, did not take it out of its mooring in the Maritime Museum of Bilbao, mainly due to the tightness of the calendar. There was a thorn stuck to 20 rojiblanco, who after 4-0 of the first leg did not hesitate to claim it: «Of course I would like to take out the Barge. For many years, nothing has been celebrated in Bilbao and people of two or three generations deserve to live this ». He had to settle for coining from the balcony of the City Hall, before thousands of fans, his most remembered phrase: «We are like you! A gang!

The streak of injuries

Destiny has given him one last chance for all the personal worries of the last year and a half to be forgotten. Last season, two muscle injuries conditioned his preseason and kept him out of competition the first month of competition. Subsequently, a knee injury left him out of combat from January to April. He returned for the final leg of the season but, still weighed down, he was not able to provide a single goal for the team.

In this last season things have not gone better. After a portentous start, with that Chilean against Barça in the first League game, he played nine shocks, all as a substitute, until the hip told him enough and forced him to be out of action for another three months. «It is not easy when you see that you cannot help in the field. It is not easy to know that you have an injury that will never heal, that I will take it with me after football. I have assumed it, ”he lamented a few days ago at a press conference.

Most likely, this Tuesday will start from the bench, like a silver bullet in the bedroom of Garitano. He has 244 goals as a professional, but has not yet scored the last. He knows it and his rivals know it. The only doubt is when it will arrive and if it will help to buckle up your career by crossing the Nervion estuary, that last and undisputed longing.