Although the pandemic has brought the team of their dreams close by by surprise, the members of the Bucharest Athletic Club They will have to settle this Tuesday with cheering on the team from their homes, a few kilometers from the stadium that hosts the match of the Champions League before him Chelsea.
“It is torture, more than a gift,” says the president of the peña sarcastically, Jose Leandro Arias, on the choice of this city to be disputed, behind closed doors, the
Atlético de Madrid-Chelsea de round of 16 Champions League.
“It's like being on a diet and going into a cake shop,” jokes this man from Madrid who is established in Bucharest on the fact that the match is played in his city and he cannot go to the stadium due to the pandemic.
A MAGICAL CITY
The president of the Gasca (gang) of Bucuresti, the Romanian name of this club with more than forty members, reached Romania in 2008 and he is already one of the deans of the Spanish community here.
Arias founded the Peña Atlética in 2011, a year before the team of Diego Pablo Simeone conquer his second AND
uropa League by winning 3-0 at Athletic Bilbao, with two goals from Radamel
Falcao, in the same Stadium
National in which the team will be measured today at Chelsea.
“The end of Bucharest was probably the turning point of the Athletics of Cholo, the moment in which this team took off towards what it is today, ”says Arias in a telephone interview with Efe.
BETWEEN TELE AND WHATSAPP
To Arias and the other supporters of Gasca from Bucuresti the pandemic has not only deprived them of attending stadiums. It has also left them without the dinners that, at the president's house or in a pub in the center of the city, they would set up to follow their club's games.
“We have learned to watch football with one eye on TV and one on the WhatsApp”, Says the Madrilenian, who highlights the jokes that occur in the peña group on match days.
“Since the alignments are known, the WhatsApp it's burning, ”he says.
ATHLETIC ROMANS
This way to enjoy football, either through WhatsApp or around a meal, has captivated some Romanians, who have discovered the culture of our country through football and are today as athletic as any veteran of the Calderon.
“Every time he Athletic he was playing an important game we would meet at the vice president's house, Pedro Navarro, and we ate a stew “, he explains Cristian Iulian Capota, Cap, a Romanian dentist who is a fan of Athletics and partner of the rock.
“This feeling of belonging to a peña is very nice, because we met, ate, drank? For me, the matches of Athletics they were a form of cultural connection between people “, says this mattress for whom the rock has been” an ambassador of Spanish culture and customs. ”