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Football continues to make constant winks of complicity to Michael Robinson. As if he wanted to keep alive forever the relationship that the two maintained hand in hand, first within a playing field and then from the wide world of communication. It cannot be pure chance that the 2020-21 National League Championship brings a Cádiz-Osasuna in the first match. Your party. The one with your heart departed.
Nor should it have been an absolute coincidence that his last live meeting as a commentator was on March 11 at his soul Anfield. His third team, Liverpool, was at stake there, although the order of factors never altered the product. His vital organ had the capacity to share a perpetual passion for the three clubs in his life.
Maybe it wasn't just a matter of chance that the year Michael Robinson landed in Pamplona, season 1986-87, his Osasuna was saved from the descent in that triangular Machiavellian invented at the last minute by the president of Cádiz, Manuel Irigoyen, and so did the Cadista team itself. Possibly that was the moment when the yellow color mixed with his 'red' blood.
Robin, as he was called in El Sadar, was struck by the survival instinct of that team capable of maintaining the category after being the last in the regular league; the last one in the relegation playoff and to be saved definitively with two simple draws in that final tournament at three with Osasuna and Racing de Santander, which was the one that lost the category.
That is where the poster for Sunday's match leaves it. Michael with the Osasuna shirt and Robinson with the yellow Cadiz scarf. The perfect alibi to remember how these two clubs entered the shoes of an Englishman from Leicester who defended the green jersey of the Republic of Ireland and had been European champion with Liverpool.
Michael landed in Pamplona believing that the city was called Osasuna, like the club, and without knowing more than five words in Spanish. His coach at Queens Park Rangers, Jim Smith, to convince him that he was signing for a good team reminded him that his suitor had eliminated Glasgow Rangers the previous season from the UEFA Cup. He was calmer.
He arrived on January 6, 1987, signed a contract the next day and made his debut three days later against Athletic in San Mamés (4-1). His first goal from rojillo marks him in his second game. At the Bernabéu, the first minute of play. Real Madrid win 2-1. He was 28 years old and Osasuna paid 25 million of those pesetas for him. From his first steps in Pamplona he always remembered a phone call to his father after his debut in 'La Catedral'. “We are penultimate, my suspicions were true. See if we are bad that we pray before the games.” In English, of course.
Osasuna is saved in the carom before told. For that need he had come to him. Play 22 league games and score seven goals. The idyll with the fans and the dressing room is imminent. Enrique Martín Monreal was then one of the leaders of the house, a left-handed winger of the two before. They coincided two years and he admits that he still gets goose bumps when he remembers him.
“The first thing he did as soon as he arrived was to transfer his competitive instincts to us. We were a little comfortable. We were only thinking about saving the category and he told us that he had just won the European Cup. Of course it had been with Liverpool who is nothing like Osasuna. He was demanding. A born winner. In his second season, which was my last, we were fifth in the League. He, although he did not play some games, was one more. He encouraged us to win. As a good Briton he liked to bet and We did it even in the pachangas. Shortly after arriving I asked him where he wanted me to send him the crosses, to the first post or to the second. He told me it was the first time that a teammate had asked him that question. it was the ball, he was already managing to get there, even if it was pushed. “
“In Osasuna he made betting on pachangas fashionable. He was a born winner”
Enrique Martin
Enrique Martín also highlights that Robin had a good break-away mark. “He ran well into the free spaces. The reality is that he ran at everything, it was like with the centers. Although his knee was injured, he was physically strong. He protected the ball from his back well and turned around with some skill, He made himself understood on the pitch. When I listened to him years later on television, he used the same words as when he was with us. Sometimes I think he knew more Spanish than he appeared and that as he had done well with his turns, he didn't I wanted to change”.
Finally, his professionalism stands out. “I know that he enjoyed life, the city, the province, the food, the drink … but the next day was the first to train. The team made the third time they were doing in England fashionable and there He told us about his little battles when he was a kid and cleaned the veterans' boots. “
Michael explained that his signing for Osasuna, “was not a cultural choice, I did it because I wanted to play football.” In his second season, the best of the team, he played 23 games with just two goals. The club invited him to have surgery on his right knee. He was not very convinced. He was afraid that what precisely happened would happen, that the intervention would further weaken the area. In the third year, on January 15, 1989, against Betis, in El Sadar, in a bad gesture, his knee said enough and there he ended his professional career. The balance in Osasuna, 58 games and 12 goals. He scored at San Mamés, at the Bernabéu and at the Camp Nou.
Daniel Ramírez in his book Because we are from Osasuna and that will never die, picks up a conversation with Robinson from when the author was still a journalism student. Asked what Osasuna meant to him, he replied: “Osasuna is soul, soul and more soul. Something clean and decent. It is defending the humble, all those who spend their money to go to El Sadar and who never stop encouraging” . And also questioned about what he felt when playing in El Sadar, he added: “I knew I had to leave the tunnel and not stop running until I died. I wanted to be one of their own. Before going down to Second, they should have killed me on the field. Playing for Osasuna was a tremendous responsibility for me. I felt more relief achieving the permanence in Pamplona than winning the European Cup with Liverpool. Osasuna and Pamplona are on the podium of all my memories “.
Even so, in March 1992, before an Osasuna-Atlético de Madrid, in his stage as a commentator, he felt betrayed. Time, apologies, and a subsequent act of redress helped him make peace with his conscience. “One day I returned to El Sadar with Canal Plus and asked the manager if my 7-year-old son could jump onto the field with the Osasuna captain and his red shirt that we had bought for the occasion. When the boy was in the tunnel to leave the hand of Iñaki Ibáñez, the delegate separated them and prevented my son from jumping. I don't know what the hell he had done so badly that they had such a mania for me, to even do that to my son. They can crush me, they can leave me lame, but doing that to a seven-year-old boy … I have not been able to forgive him, “he confessed on a television program.
Years later, on October 30, 2000, Robinson received a tribute from the club. He was handed the badge of gold and diamonds before a match against Valencia, in the season of his return to Primera, and Liam, his son, jumped onto the lawn of El Sadar and received a red shirt from then-center-back José Manuel Mateo and put it on excitedly. The president, Javier Miranda, baptized Robinson at that time as “Osasuna's ambassador.”
When the communicator Robinson began to flirt with the cadista club and with his fans with the images of the fans chasing the lineman along the band, the team was in Second B and he remembered how he saw Cádiz in his first months in Pamplona. “To see him in the classification you had to go around the newspaper, he was always last, but in the end he was saved.”
Without realizing it, he fell in love with Cádiz, Carranza, its people. There is no first day. There are many. As many as winks. Lots of live comments, like when he said he couldn't come to the studio because he was preparing “the carnivals.” Not even his own son, Liam, understood his father's true affection. “It was a spontaneous thing. Love at first sight of both the club and the people. I never understood why they were so fond of him. And he felt the same. When he said he felt from Cadiz he said it totally convinced”
The new century was advancing, 2001, and one good afternoon between Miguel Cuesta and Antonio Muñoz they convinced him to form part of the Cadiz Board of Directors. The emotions were happening. Tears in Las Palmas when the team promoted to Second against Universitario in 2003. Two years later the jump to First in Chapín, against Jerez, which he celebrated as just another player.
Michael took time where he did not have it to “advise”, which is what his position said. He worked in the shade. He even recommended players to the technical secretary Alberto Benito, whom he raised to office. For Michael, Cádiz sign Oli and Oli scores the first goal that opens the doors of Primera. That day he traveled in the team's coach from Cádiz. Due to his charisma, many players agree to play in the Silver Cup. He was more than an advisor and until 2007 he remained as an advisor.
Delivered forever, his words ratified his deeds. “Cádiz has a duende. It is the only western city where capitalism is not the law. Being rich is even a disadvantage. And, although it may sound like a stereotype, while in other cities in Andalusia they try to be funny, as in Seville, in Cádiz they are effortless. “
Proud of his cadista club in Olvera, a magician king on Three Kings Day, self-convinced that he was an Englishman from Cádiz, in 2019 he was appointed adoptive son of the city. Michael was already ill, but at the medal ceremony he was in top form. This is how Hugo Vaca remembers it, a man from Cádiz born in Córdoba, Argentina, five years as a yellow player and nine as a sports director. Both shared a reward and both had been born miles away.
Hugo, central-libero of the class, did not get to face Michael on the pitch, but they nurtured a good friendship based on their similar Cadista temptations. “It was admirable with how encouraged he faced the disease. That night he made us all laugh. I remember that when we had to talk, the mayor gave each awardee five minutes and I said how they thought an Argentine would sum up half a life in that time. Michael told me not to worry that he gave me three minutes of his. “
“The Cádiz City Council named us adoptive children together. He, English; I, Argentine”
Hugo cow
Of the player Michael, Hugo recalls his temperament. “If he didn't come out with his head or a torn shirt, it's as if he hadn't played. He even crashed into the posts. I would have liked to face him because I would never have jumped into the crash. I would have sent Dos Santos to war with Robinson and I would have waited for him a step back to stop her with his chest and go out playing, as I liked. “
On the day of his death, the city declared a day of official mourning and who knows if one day Ramón de Carranza will bear his name for that of historical memory. What is certain is that on Saturday, to open the League wide, their game will be played. Cádiz-Osasuna. Robinson's party.
Three seasons in the red box, three games against the yellow box. One per course, although in the first, at 86-87, the two clubs met five times. In the first two of the regular league, Robinson had not yet signed for Osasuna – he arrived in January. His debut was already in the playoff for relegation, matchday 37, with a victory at El Sadar (3-2). Injured, he did not play in the 42nd, nor in the final three-legged league, both games at Carranza.
In his three years in Pamplona he faced his other soul club on three occasions: a Navarre victory and two draws.
Balance as a player
In the following, 87-88, in his debut at the Cadista stadium, he scored the goal of the tying head (1-1) to a pass from Pizo Gómez and did not play the second leg at home. In its third and final season the same thing happened. He played the Carranza match (1-1) but had already retired when the yellow team visited Pamplona.