The RCD Mallorca It is on everyone's lips again. After an unexpected and painful descent to Second division last season, everything indicates that, just one year later, the vermilion set will achieve, just a few months later, the desired promotion to the top flight of Spanish football.
The team led by Luis Garcia Plaza second gear in LaLiga SmartBank and is, together with Espanyol, the main candidate to achieve direct promotion to LaLiga Santander and return to the place that, for many, corresponds to him: the First Division.
The golden age of Majorcanism
The presence of the Mallorcan team in the highest category of national football was common during the last five years of the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s.
And it is precisely at this time that the book focuses ‘It’s a feeling:‘ 1997-2013, 16 years of the best Mallorca in history ’, the journalist's first work Miquel Rosselló (Mallorca, 1980).
The book recounts, throughout its more than 300 pages, the golden years of Majorcanism; the brightest era of a team that rubbed shoulders with the best outfits in Europe; who came to be third in the League (98/99 and 00/01) and play the Champions League; to win a Copa del Rey (2003) and play a final of the European Cup Winners' Cup (1999); and to star in victories of great merit against the so-called 'big' teams.
10 matches to remember
In short, with ‘It's a feeling’ we are in front of an entertaining story divided into 10 chapters, each one dedicated to one of the 10 of the most relevant parties of that period in the history of Majorca, narrated as a 'counter-chronicle', captivating the reader based on anecdotes (most of them unknown to the general public and even told by the protagonists themselves) and highly visual descriptions, transferring the reader to those moments of so pleasant I remember for the Mallorquinistas.
And since the author's intention is not to leave a bad taste in the mouth among readers (especially among fans of the Majorca), does not make a chronological account to use, which ended in a painful relegation of the team to Second B, as happened in 2017 after drawing in Anduva before him MirandésInstead, it does a sort of reverse chronology, saving the best for last.
Throughout its pages, the ‘B-sides’ of matches such as the semifinals of the Recopa against him Chelsea, the Champions League debut against Arsenal, the victory with comeback included in the Camp Nou, the 0-3 in Riazor with Hector Cúper that fueled the miracle of permanence or triumph under the downpour that caused the collapse of the Real Madrid of the ‘Los Galacticos’.
Moments of joy and also some not so happy, such as the match in They are Moix in which the Seville snatched the Majorca the ticket for the Champions League while the players, attentive to the outcome on the video scoreboards, collapsed next to a bottle of champagne brought from Kössen that was not uncorked and that precisely shapes the cover of the book.
Rijkaard's Barça and ‘Los Galacticos’ Madrid
And it is that how could it be otherwise, Mallorca is the main protagonist of the book, but Rosselló's work also contributes some 'secondary' of authentic luxury: Real Madrid of the 'Galacticos', the Barça of Rijkaard Y Ronaldinho, the indomitable Samuel Eto’o, the goings-on of Mino Raiola, the stiffness of Louis Van Gaal, the Arsenal of the ‘Invincibles’, the Chelsea prior to the appearance of the millions of Abramovich, …
All of them, and some more, will also be (co) protagonists in “It's a feeling.”
A book that will delight the most soccer fans, whether or not they are from Majorca, and that, surely, will make the vermilion fans shed more than one nostalgic tear and smile more than one, recalling the golden age of a team that, by its own merits, is part of the history of our football.