Márquez, one step away from the title: “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced”

There are no longer any of the 20,000 tickets that were put on sale at the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, in the city of Fatorda in Goa province. On Sunday at 3:00 p.m. (Spanish time) the playoff final will be played for the title of the Indian league in which two Spaniards will be protagonistsboth with a past in Espanyol and in other clubs in the League. Manolo Marquez is the manager of Hyderabad, the third team with the lowest budget that finished second in the league and has now slipped into the final. Historical. Before him, the Kerala Blasters in which Álvaro Vázquez, with eight goals, is his great star. “Of the 20,000, 16,000 will be theirs,” warns Márquez.

“Ours has been brutally successful. We are like Getafe. I don’t believe we went through to the final against ATK Mohun Bagan, which is like Real Madrid in the competition. We won the first leg 3-1, with three shots on goal; on the return leg our goalkeeper stopped what is not written… I spent the last few minutes looking for a cardiologist”, jokes Márquez, who has gone through hard times, very, very hard: “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced.”

The competition started on September 1 “in a bubble”. All the teams landed in the State of Goa. 11 teams, 11 hotels and 11 soccer fields. Ten days of quarantine locked in the room and then many problems derived from the positives that were emerging. “We only went out to train or play and there have been many cases, so at a minimum we had to be locked up. For two months they practically brought us meals and we had two psychologists at our disposal. We had a Spanish player who couldn’t take it and left,” Márquez said.

The departure of Edu García and the future of the coach

This is Edu García, who already came to India knowing that he was going to be a father. He had a bad time, even more so after being locked up for 12 days due to COVID, so he decided, for his mental health, to return to Spain. Who has endured is the star of Márquez’s rival, Álvaro Vázquez, a former player among others from Espanyol, Getafe, Sabadell, Swansea, Sporting or Zaragoza. The striker is causing a sensation with his technical quality in a league that is the twenty-second in Asia, with Japan, South Korea or Iran as standards.

Márquez has been in India for two years now and, although the experience is hard, the coach has one more year on his contract and is achieving great results with his club, a franchise that only has three years of demands. In the shadow of other sports like badminton, hockey or cricket, Manolo Márquez is being the fashionable coach of a football that is growing in a country that hopes next season to return to normality without COVID.