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發表於 2007-10-11 22:49:41
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Levante 'win' the cup!
Phil Ball
After a veritable glut of La Liga action the previous week, this one has seemed a little tame in comparison, despite the Champions League action in which only Valencia let the side down. Having lost out to Chelsea in the Mestalla, they surprisingly lost by the same score in the same stadium on Saturday night, after taking the lead early on, just as they had done against Chelsea.
Spain quakes as it realises that seven of Valencia's players are in Luis Aragonés' squad to play the crucial qualifier in Denmark next weekend, although with David Villa limping off in the first half, it looks like the contingent will be reduced to six. Manager Quique Sánchez Flores quakes as he realises, once again, that a section of the crowd don't want him around. Sánchez has a haunted look about him, like a man who hasn't slept much recently.
Like Rafa Bénitez, who cut his teeth at the Mestalla and made his name, Quique is a rotation man. Ah rotations! Does anybody like them, apart from a small set of high-profile managers? Of course, to some extent they're a product of the modern game, in which the top clubs require a squad in which every position is covered by a half-decent mucker with a few international caps to his name.
You may recall in the old days when football nerds would happily recite whole line-ups as a late-night trivia pub trick. As an official nerd my favourite was always the eleven players who turned out for the Leeds side of the late 1960's and early 1970's, comprising Sprake, Reaney, Cooper, Bremner, Charlton, Hunter& et al, with the list ending in the wonderful phrase 'Sub, Bates'.
This was not Norman but rather Mick Bates, a bit-part player who always seemed to be the Number 12, as it was in those bygone days. Fathers would even give their children eleven or twelve middle names consisting of one of these fixed squads, only to be murdered by their offspring in later life.
Try doing that with the twenty-five man squads of today. They don't exactly roll off the tongue. And in footballing terms, the difference is extraordinary in the whole philosophy of 'the settled team'. That's because once you adopt the rotation system, you cannot do it by halves.
On Saturday night, Quique Sánchez played Angulo and Arizmendi on the wings, instead of Joaquín and Silva. All four are internationals (Arizmendi has one cap) but as the 'Marca' journalist José Luis Hurtado put it most succinctly, this was to 'swap skiing for taekwondo, silk for corduroy, grace for energy'.
It was also to swap two players who started the game against Chelsea for two who didn't, which makes sense in terms of the squad size, but which always proves unpopular when the side loses. More than unpopular, it is usually seen as the reason.
Well, hindsight's a fine thing, but Espanyol's role in the events should not be underestimated.
Once again Barcelona's other side are proving their doubters wrong, with two goals from their own recently called-up internationals, Albert Riera and Luis Garcia, ably abetted by the ever excellent Raúl Tamudo. Luis Aragonés, once again in the eye of the storm for not picking Real Madrid's Raúl for the Danish game, has done well to take Tamudo along, if only in Villa's absence.
Nothing against Espanyol, of course, but their pink away shirts are only marginally less excruciating than those of Sevilla's. Poor Sevilla lost again, however, this time at home in their altogether more acceptable white shirts, and now lie just one point above the relegation zone, albeit with a game fewer played.
Who would have thought at the beginning of the season? It looked as though they might have turned the tide in midweek with their 4-2 win over Sparta Prague, but no such luck.
Down in the table's nether regions, Levante prop up the rest with one point from seven games. They lost 3-0 away to Zaragoza, a side who have looked unconvincing so far this season and who were knocked out of the UEFA Cup surprisingly in midweek.
As a result on Monday Levante's manager Abel Resino became the first Spanish manager to bite the dust this season, a phenomenon known as 'La maldición de Octubre' (The October curse) which tends to strike with merciless regularity.
It's a shame Resino has been sacked, because he will now miss out on the possible celebrations in which the club will be indulging if they are indeed awarded the trophy that they won back in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
Well, not exactly 'awarded'. They have the trophy, but it has never been recognised in La Liga's (the Spanish Federation's) official record books. Official statistics are important in Spain, because they cut through political bias and historical revisionism - the country's twin Achilles Heels.
Levante, as their name might suggest, reside on the east coast of Spain, and are in fact Valencia's other team. I hesitate to say 'second team' since they were founded ten years before their now more illustrious neighbours.
Levante's earliest games were played on a pitch near the docks, on a plot of land which was the property of a perfume entrepreneur, but this port-area association gave Levante the sort of working-class cachet that saw them consider Valencia, founded in 1919, as come-lately snobs. The problem is that the snobs have won trophies and Levante haven't - but there's the rub, because they have.
During the second year of the civil war, the clubs who represented communities that had not yet fallen to the Nationalist troops formed a league, partly to keep football going during the hostilities and partly to cement a series of towns and cities together in a show of political solidarity.
It's an extraordinary story, but to keep things brief, the league was named 'La Liga del Mediterráneo' (the official league had been suspended) since most of the Republican forces still standing were from that area, east of Madrid. Real Madrid, incidentally, applied to play but were refused. Don't forget that back then they were a lefty club, presided over by a communist president and the city, of course, had not fallen to Franco.
Eight sides eventually played in the league, and inevitably Barça won it. The idea was that the top four finishers would then compete in a cup competition, subsequently called 'La Copa del España Libre', and not the 'Republican Cup' as some English newspapers reported last week.
They were indeed republicans, but they were more importantly anti-fascist. You don't have to be a republican to be one of those, necessarily. And of course, as we now know, the anti-fascists themselves could never really decide on what the hell to call themselves, and ended up shooting each other anyway - but to the point.
Levante finished 5th in the league but nipped into the cup competition at the last minute when the champs Barça took the wholly decent decision to take off on a tour of Mexico on a fund-raising venture for the Republican cause. But then Levante complicated matters forever by beating Valencia, of all people, 1-0 in the final in the Montjuic Stadium.
Since democracy officially arrived in 1978, joint sets of Valencia and Levante supporters have occasionally lobbied government bodies in an attempt to force the FEF to recognise the cup competition, but in vain.
Obviously, during the 40 years of Franco's rule it was hardly likely that the cup would be recognised but it's now been 30 years since Felipe Gonzales was democratically elected to lead Spain. The problem for Levante has been that there was never a convenient political atmosphere in place for a government to be seen to permit this recognition.
Had Gonzales' government done so in the early years of the fledgling democracy, they would have been accused of going too far, and of upsetting the sort of people who tried to stage a famous coup d'etat in 1981, for example. Spain's democracy was not established by throwing the fascist baby out with the bathwater, but rather by trying to keep it sedated - as far as was politically possible.
And so the socialists managed to keep Levante at bay. When the right-wing Partido Popular took over, there was no chance at all, since any concessions to such republican memories would have been seen as weakness by the supporters of Aznar and friends.
But now, Mr Bean look-alike PM José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is seen as something of a liberal, and is a Barça supporter. Last week a Levante supporter, Xavier Rius, managed to persuade Valencian MP Isaura Navarro to lobby parliament over the issue, to which he agreed.
Navarro is from the political left of Valencian politics, unsurprisingly, but was actually supported by the region's PP member too, rather more surprisingly. So it seems as if seventy years of hurting will finally come to an end and Levante will be written into the books. Of course, Joan Laporta has jumped onto the bandwagon and has announced that if this takes place, then Barça should also be recognised as the League winners for that year.
Fair enough, but I reckon there's a much easier solution to all of this. Laporta should get his chums together and ask the Prime Minister if he'll agree to pressurise the RFEF into wiping the football history of the Franco years clean, since as we know, the fascists came to power through wholly illegitimate means, overthrowing a democratically elected republic through a violent coup d'etat.
That would get rid of a good chunk of Real Madrid's trophies and make it easier for Barça to become the top side of all time in a few years, statistically speaking. Now there's a thought.
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