Real Madrid, in the third episode of ‘Illustrated Hooligans’

“Ah, but are you from Real Madrid?” is a question to which the journalist Manuel Jabois He has faced each other since he was a child. Not for answering, but for remembering and claiming he wrote Wild Group on Illustrated Hooligans, the KO Book Collection. “Wild Group is a wonderful film by Sam Peckimpah and, in the title of this collection, a a certain spirit that soaked Mourinho’s MadridWhen in the media there were four of us defending him and badly armed, but with a theatrical sense and humor that we would like now, despite the titles that we did not have then and the old age that we did not miss, “he responds to AS.

Manuel Jabois accompanies Lucía Taboada, director and presenter of podcast Hooligans Ilustrados, in the third installment of this homonymous sound adaptation to the previously mentioned collection. KO Productions, Podium Podcast and AS Audio They are the participants in this co-production in which they have selected eight books from the collection, and one of them has been that of the journalist from Sanxenxo.

In this episode of serial documental sound, Jabois and Taboada go through the Madrid experiences that the Galician author enjoyed and cursed through the Cruceiro neighborhood, through the Plaza de la Verdura, through the bars that allowed him to see countless league victories and painful eliminations in Europe. What he always kept unchanged was the company: “Watching football is a very happy act if you are with your colleagues”.

Before feeling the warmth of his people in the taverns, he reconverted playmobils in illustrious of the white team. He gave meaning to the usefulness of his puppets like Lucas Vázquez to his life in the right lane. Between childhood and posterity, a longing that starts the episode: “I wanted to do with Hugo Sánchez’s goals what I later wanted to do with my life: stop them in time, freeze happiness and keep it packaged in the fridge to take them any day and open them as if they were ice cream “.

The reference continues in conversation with AS: “Hugo’s goals were my childhood, all of them. I have frozen them almost one by one because in this way the child that I was remains frozen inside, attentive to any heat that brings him back to life, and that usually coincides with the initial whistle from a Madrid game. Regarding other moments, there are too many: a goal by Mijatovic, a goal by Zidane and a goal by Ramos, I guess on the podium. Yes OK, as the madness of the final stretch of Capello’s second league I remember few“.

Back in the episode, this icy desire did not always wash over him in pride: “I was embarrassed when my parents opened the room and found me one Tuesday night hitting play and listening to that rapt, trying to feel the same two days later: to hunt down the moment, and, therefore, to return to those few seconds in which I was happy in an extreme and beautiful way “.

Son of La Quinta del Buitre

Manuel leaves no room for doubt in the podcast: “I grew up with La Quinta del Buitre (…) I am a son of La Quinta del Buitre”. If difficulty is assumed, he firmly declares his madridismo: “A feeling is the easiest thing to justify in the world. It is not acquired, it is not bought, it is not studied. It is had or not, it is not necessary to give it more lapses”. Surely Pepe, his uncle, did not recognize this when he dared to put a Blaugrana shirt with the Cruyff stamp on the back. Jabois – pissed off, upset, refusing – dismissed the stake: “I cried when they put a Cruyff shirt on me.”

Picked up by Taboada, “for Manuel Jabois, with football one defends his childhood plot”. Out of rebellion or disappointment, the one from Sanxenxo planted a white wall before the attack of faith culé de Pepe. It had another resistance support: his paternal grandfather, who helped him to be a “madridista in a very natural way”.

As such, he chooses his favorite time: “The Madrid of Zidane, Ramos, Marcelo, Modric, Cristiano, Bale and Benzema is the best Madrid that Madridistas born after 1970 have seen. It has been like the Madrid of Gento and Di Stéfano for our parents and grandparents. A legendary team that, in the toughest club competition in the world that no one had ever won twice in a row, won three. And a previous one in minute 93, who did not even win in that minute, but tied it. Everything has been such a beast that we are not aware, but we will be, unfortunately, when it takes a similar generation to appear“.

Between sailors and customers, letters and dominoes, sawdust and siphon, Madrid’s childhood shared space with the bar’s childhood. Despite the fact that “nothing beats what you hear in a bar during a match”, AS questions Jabois his predilection: “The Bernabéu, which I did not know when I watched the games in that bar of my grandfather, is the most monstrous thing and exciting that I have never lived. The Bernabéu in the Champions League from the last 16 is pure electricity, a show in itself, something you remember all your life“.

The pink press, the fan-animal, the Tenerife leagues

Around the Bernabéu then this rebellious and transgressive fifth, some chosen ones who understood football in their own way, without recognizing themselves with the rudeness of ‘La Furia’. With his game and his recognition appeared the persecution of the paparazzi, the arrival of the pink press to the changing rooms, the disbelief of players like Míchel González, co-star in this episode of Hooligans Ilustrados, which was innocently lent to furtive photographers without understanding said repercussion.

Míchel, with a father and grandfather with mattress roots but a ‘michelista’ feeling, recalls together with Manuel and Lucía how “a hundred thousand people together called me a fag” And what is the magnitude of the turn that life gave him when he went from Villaverde to a status of such magnitude without anyone guiding the process, only by dint of mistakes. Fortunately, the situation in the stadiums is quite different. Jabois celebrates the expulsion of those people who assumed the role of animal, moving away from amateur eagerness: “We no longer see images with swastikas in the stands.”

The jubilation of the journalist from Pontevedra breaks with the very beginning of the book: “It all started one of those Sundays when we went to town to spend the day with my grandparents. Madrid were winning by two goals to zero in Tenerife and my father decided to get in the car and go home“The classic old-fashioned Madridismo, a stew without skimping on ingredients that Jabois himself would have thrown without contemplation at any nearby head and the start of the historic league debacle offer in this episode a few moments that deserve to be listened to.

The anthem of La Décima, in his own handwriting

It also has no loss listen to Manuel Jabois singing the anthem of La Décima. He grew up serving Albariños, dreaming of goals from Hugo Sánchez; he continued his madridismo creating the lyrics for the anthem of La Décima. At the beginning of indies dyes, he followed the recommendations to hit the key and create a testament in the white fans to tattoo in the memory what was achieved after the 93rd minute.

The stamp AS Audio appears in one of the sound works in Spanish that best deals with this sport, the memories that every fan has around a ball and the number of stories that have emerged with football. For follow all the news of this serial and all the podcasts of the sound space of Diario AS, the new profiles on social networks are now available: @AsAudio on Twitter and Facebook, and @DiarioAsAudio on Instagram.

Subscribe and listen to Illustrated Hooligans on the Podium Podcast and Diario AS web pages and apps, and on other audio platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts).