Di Stéfano saved Gento against the Bernabéu

When Pachín arrived at Real Madrid, at the height of the fifth European Cup, one thing surprised him: “Everyone liked Gento. Even Di Stéfano. He more than anyone. He told him: ‘Let’s see Paco, how these?’ And he beat his heels on the locker room floor, tapping very fast, with both feet, as if sprinting without moving from his spot, and that sounded like a very well tuned engine. And then Alfredo said: ‘Paco is fine, we can go out’ . I was amazed.”

And that Gento was about to puncture in Madrid. He arrived in the summer of 1953, with only half a season in the First Division, ten League games and four Cup games, with Racing de Santander. His speed was electric, but his football was rustic. The fans soon took it up with him. He moved his legs so fast that it was almost comical, a bit in the style of ‘stale celluloid’, those films that, due to archaic recording modes, offered anomalously fast movements on projection. He left the defenders behind, but also the ball. He shot anywhere. It ended up provoking cruel ridicule. He played seventeen games out of thirty in the League, but worse. He didn’t score any goals. In the second round he hardly played. He ran the hoax that he was so gross that the first time he was summoned to Racing to travel in a sleeping car, he showed up at the station with his own mattress. Meanwhile, Espina, also a left winger, who had been loaned by the Bernabéu to Racing as part of the Gento operation, had a more than decent season there, with 23 games and six goals.

Bernabéu’s idea at the end of the season was to undo the operation: recover Espina and return Gento.

But Di Stéfano had seen something in him. Di Stéfano arrived a few weeks after Gento, in time to play matchday three of the league, and had led Madrid to the title, with his amazing game, full of technique, genius and knowledge. And with his goals. He was top scorer, with 27 in 28 games. It was the first League that Madrid won after twenty years.

He told the Bernabéu to trust Gento: “He has speed and hits the ball like a cannon. You don’t learn that, you bring it. We can teach you the rest.” And incidentally, he asked him to sign Héctor Rial, born in Argentina but with a Spanish passport, because he was the son of Galician parents. He had met him in Colombia and by then he was playing for Nacional de Montevideo.

“I need one that when I give him the ball, he returns it to me.”

With that expression, Di Stéfano was projecting Spanish football towards modernity. At that time, they played too much the old-fashioned way here: whoever caught the ball in the midfield would drive it up. It barely blended. Di Stéfano wanted to overcome his rivals in the midfield with walls, triangulations, as they began to say then, not with long individual efforts. That’s how they played in South America, that’s how Hungary played, around the brilliant midfielder Bozsik.

Bernabéu did not want to deny him any of the two things. He was the cornerstone of the team, he had given him the League and his arguments were footballing and reasoned. In addition, he had denied him permission to buy a car, because he did not want his players to be ostentatious. So he kept Gento and signed Héctor Rial, not liking anything about him and knowing nothing about him.

But he was right.

Rial started playing inside right. Joseíto used to occupy the interior of the other side. Madrid was acquiring the game that Di Stéfano was looking for, but Gento was still a loose verse. Until on the eighth day, Rial moved to inside left, after a three-way agreement between Di Stéfano, the coach, Enrique Fernández, and himself. They had found a way to make Gento useful. Rial explained:

—When I have the ball, come to me: I give it to you, you return it to my foot and run away. I’ll put it in the background, in your career. While you and I pass it around, Alfredo shoots up like an arrow, to get to the auction. And if you catch it first, we do it the other way around, but with one more touch: you give it to me, I give it back to you, you give it to me again and then I throw you.

The premiere was in the Alavés field, on October 31, 1954. It worked. Madrid won 2-4. And so they continued, with Rial and Gento winging. Gento reached Rial’s balls and as he learned to cross, his speed was lethal. Sometimes, the pass was more inside and then he released the zambombazo, that if he got the door, which was happening more and more, it was unstoppable. If any defense was able to follow him, he brought out an unexpected feature: the sudden stop. Many defenders complained about that: it was not only how he ran, but how he braked.

The Rial-Gento wing was a gold mine. Madrid won that second League of Di Stéfano and Gento, 54-55, which gave way to the first European Cup. And they won it. And the other and the other, like this five in a row. In the fourth entered Puskas, who also knew how to launch Gento with precision. The dynamic was already created. Gento, indeed, and as Di Stéfano supposed, was learning more and more things, until he became a star. When in the cinema the NO-DO, where the summaries were then seen, showed images of some Madrid-Barça, a rumor was heard when Gento took it and Barça was seen falling behind en bloc, as the only way to guard against its speed.

In 1963 a solemn match was played at Wembley between England and the Rest of the World to celebrate the Centenary of the creation of football. Gento was the left winger of that unique team, which was captained by Di Stéfano.

That rustic boy whom the Madrid fans cruelly repudiated in the beginning left Madrid after eighteen seasons, with 605 games and twelve Leagues, six European Cups and one Intercontinental as the most relevant trophies. In addition, he played 43 games for the National Team, which includes two World Cups.

He has a lot to brag about. But the first time I asked him about Di Stéfano, he told me:

“Without him we wouldn’t have won anything we did.” He was the one who did it all. He didn’t let us rest on the pitch or in training. Not even on trips, when there was an important game. He turned everything around, explained everything. I knew everything.

The first time I asked Di Stéfano about Gento, he told me:

“It was a safe exit for us. The worse we were, the more we used him and he always offered us an escape. I think that throwing on his feet he would have caught the first one.

Alfredo Di Stéfano and Paco Gento, Honorary Presidents of Real Madrid.