The message on the flag in the middles of Alaves’ loudest section of supporters behind the goal is clear.
No sitting during the game, no procrastination while eating a bag of nuts or looking at mobile phones. Instead, one must stand and holler support for their team at times.
It has been working, but the noise level has died down and the stand is enveloped by a nervous hush.
Alaves’ biggest game since the 2001 Uefa Cup final when they were defeated 5-4 by Liverpool in Dortmund has reached a nail-biting climax.
Alaves have scored an 81st-minute goal, the first of the tie deep into the second leg of their Copa del Rey semi-final against Celta Vigo.
The goal from Edgar Mendez, a substitute on the pitch three minutes after replacing Gaizka Toquero, has changed everything and those in the ‘grada animacion’ [animated stand] do not quite know what to do. Alaves, a team founded in 1921, have never won a trophy. Yet they are on the verge of a first ever domestic cup final. And that takes a minute or two to sink in.
Tense fans constantly check their watches or, breaking with protocol, their phones.
“Just end now,” mutters one supporter, Alfonso, standing to my right. Another fan, Juan, to the left puts his head in his hands as the minutes tick down. As they do, confidence begins to rise again.
“Come on, let’s go glorious!” the Alaves fans sing. They are all standing, belting out the words: “It’s a strong passion. This fan is crazy, crazy to see you win.”
Celta Vigo do not find an equaliser. One goal – an away goal – will be enough to send them through to a final against Barcelona in Madrid on May 27. But it does not come.
A roar greats the final whistle. Grown men hug each other and weep, with happiness in the home sections and sadness among the 1,200 travelling Celta Vigo supporters.
On the pitch, players fall to their knees. Substitutes run onto the pitch to congratulate them. A fan twirls his umbrella like an extra from the film Mary Poppins.
It started in 2015
The Alaves story, for this writer, started 18 months earlier in the small cathedral city of Huesca on a baking August afternoon in 2015.
Then, the streets of the old town were empty in the high summer sun. It was the first day of the season for promoted local heroes Huesca, but the game would only start at night once the sun’s shadows were no longer being cast over the nearby Pyrenees.
The peace was soon shattered.
“Bravo Albiazul!” the cry came. “The team that resurges powerful again, remembering the glory of that great Deportivo Alaves.”
Fifty or so football supporters clad in blue and white turned the corner and marched up the main street in song. Young and old, male and female, they put on a show with no audience but themselves and the odd cat.
I was in Huesca to meet the former Arsenal footballer Fran Merida with a view to building up sufficient trust to do an interview about his roller-coaster career.
My family came along for the ride, two young daughters stunned and shocked by the approaching noise.
“Vitoria has put their hope in you,” they sang. “That one day you will become champion. Brave. Courage. With enthusiasm you have to fight.”
Mother put a protective arm around daughters. The group approached and quietened. Four hundred of them have travelled three hours skirting Pyrenean mountains from Vitoria (Gasteiz in Basque) and they come in peace.
Blue and white Alaves scarves are given to my daughters as a gift. Later, at the stadium, when they have run out of scarves to swap with Huesca fans, they watch Alaves win 3-2.
It was the first game of an epic season which saw Alaves win Spain’s second division and return to the top flight for the first time in a decade.
They had sunk into Spain’s regional fourth division third tier. As recently as June 2014, Alaves needed a 94th-minute goal in an away game at Real Jaen to stay in the second division and condemn Jaen to the third.
Yet after winning promotion in 2016, Alaves replaced 14 of their players and their manager Jose Bordalas.
It was ruthless, cruel even, but done to give them a better chance of surviving this term.
Manu Garcia, a local boy, was one of the few not let go, alongside a couple of Alaves’ best players.
“Seventy per cent of fans didn’t agree with the changes,” explains Juan Pinna, one of the fans who had been there in Huesca.
“The players who got us up deserved a chance, but many of them were more suited for the second division. It was sad what happened, but ultimately it was necessary.”
Alaves also brought in the Argentine Mauricio Pellegrino as manager, the former Valencia player and coach who had impressed in charge of Independiente in Buenos Aires.
They loaned players which relegated Levante could not afford to keep in the second tier.
They got Marcos Llorente, a 22-year-old midfielder with all the technical ability one would expect from a Spanish Under 21 player, on loan from Real Madrid.
They loaned Theo Hernandez, a 19-year-old left back and France U20 player from Atletico Madrid. They also signed forward Ruben Sobrino on loan from Manchester City.
These bigger clubs were happy to let their youngsters get first team football in the league.
But Alaves also bought well. Basque winger Ibai, 27, came after six seasons with Athletic Bilbao’s first team. He joined veteran former striker Torquero, who was born in Vitoria and started out at Alaves before coming home in 2015 from Bilbao.
Alaves clicked immediately. They drew with Atletico Madrid away in their first game back, before beating Barcelona away in their second to stun Spanish football.
They followed that up with a 2-0 victory at Villarreal, one of only two teams who have won at El Madrigal this season.
Alaves are mid table, 14 points off the relegation zone they had hoped to avoid, though they have only won two of their 10 home league games.
To reach the final of the Copa del Rey and continue a run that had seen them eliminate Gimnastic Taragona, Deportivo La Coruna and Alcorcon, they had to beat Celta.
Visit to Vitoria
There is six hours to kick-off in Vitoria, an attractive, wealthy city of 230,000, with a 15th-century centre resplendent with grand churches and boulevards.
It lies an hour inland from Spain’s northern Atlantic coast, flanked by usually fertile green hills which, on Wednesday, are capped in snow.
Shops are decorated in the blue and white of Alaves, the cover of the local newspaper, too. Beyond the anticipation and optimism and pictures of special Alaves cakes, the main news is that the local airport plans to have regular passenger flights for the first time since Spain’s economic crash a decade ago and that Ryanair will return to offer flights to Milan and Tenerife.
In a pedestrianised street leading from the city’s train station to its beautiful historic centre, a space has been set up to showcase the proposed stadium development which will lift the capacity of the Mendi from 19,800 to 32,000.
The planned architecture is as impressive as some of the bodegas in the adjacent Rioja region, the idealised images showing a happy future when the stadium is always full, the sun shines and the fans are always happy.
On Wednesday, however, it is raining, cold, dark and the jittery fans cannot enjoy themselves.
“The success of the football team is a big positive for the city,” explains Daniel, a 27-year-old local showing visitors the new stadium plans.
“We hoped to avoid relegation, now we’re mid table and aiming to reach a first ever cup final.”
It is also another reason for people to talk about the Basque Country about something other than ‘the subject’ which dominated for years.
The activities of the Basque separatist organisation ETA were often the only time the region troubled international consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s. The situation is much improved, and peace prevails.
“The tension has gone,” Daniel adds. “Now, people are happy to watch the Spanish national team in all the city’s bars.
“People would never watch Spain in public before. But that’s only one of the changes. Now, people internationally talk of the Basque cuisine, La Rioja, the coastline and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.”
Vitoria is the Basque capital, but it is not as big as Bilbao, nor as glamorous as San Sebastian.
“Vitoria’s a city that works,” Daniel said. “The crime rate is low, it’s green, the bureaucracy works, it’s gregarious and the economic crisis barely touched the city. It doesn’t match the Spanish stereotype.”
Charleen, an American who works in marketing and commutes to Bilbao a 45-minute drive away, agrees.
“Vitoria gives you the best of Spain – a Spain that functions,” she said.
Vitoria also knows its place, with the stadium development being compared to those in Bordeaux and Basel, similar sized cities of quiet wealth where football is popular.
The stadium is planned to be completed by 2021 to coincide with Alaves’ centenary.
Celta Vigo know all about stadium developments, as the roof was blown off part of their Balaidos at home last week, postponing a game against Real Madrid. Alaves did not like that – their rivals would be rested ahead of Wednesday’s game.
As the shops reopen after the siesta, the noise on the streets comes from hundreds of travelling Celta Vigo fans singing A Rianxeira, a traditional Galician folk song.
“It took us eight hours to get here by coach,” says Miguel, a 24-year-old who works in IT. “Our club paid for our travel and the match tickets were €30 [Dh117]. We’ll travel back through the night and arrive at 8am, then I’ll go straight to work.”
Before he sets off on the two-kilometre march to the stadium, Miguel is confident. There will be no problems between the fans, with the hardcore element of both aligning themselves to the left of the political spectrum. Problems would be more likely with the right-leaning rivals of Deportivo La Coruna.
Like Alaves, Celta have never won a trophy either, though they did reach the final in 1948, 1994 and 2001. No team have reached so many finals without being victorious.
Basque country is football country
There is three hours to kick off and the fans from that day in Huesca issued an invitation to join them in Vitoria and on their terrace for the game.
We meet in the Zadorra bar, owned by former Alaves player Jito Silvestre, a 36-year-old Catalan striker who started out at Barcelona with Xavi before a career which took him to 16 clubs around Spain, including four in the Basque Country.
Shirts swapped with former foes adorn the bar, with one from Xavi bearing the message ‘For my brother Jito’.
There are some basketball pictures, too.
“Basketball is big here,” explains Javier Buesa, who played professional basketball for Baskonia, the local basketball team who are among the five biggest in Spain and regulars on the European circuit.
“Football is king in Spain, but basketball is the second most popular sport and although the football club is separate and not as it is at Barca or Real Madrid, the president is president of both.
“An average of 10,000 people watch every Baskonia match – 15,000 for the biggest games. We’re from a small city but Baskonia have a big name.”
The crowds are significant for a small city. Alaves’ average is 18,000 and they have 16,000 season ticket holders.
In 2001, the Alaves footballers who reached the Uefa Cup final used to socialise with the Baskonia players. They would stay out until 4am on midweek nights and this concerned their manager Mane greatly.
“That’s not something that I would recommend to deal with,” Mane told me. “Professional footballers should not be out at 4am, but how could I complain? They were winners.
“Their social integration helped me because they would make the players from outside feel welcome. I gave up stopping them in the end. What could I say, they were winning every week and beat Inter away in San Siro?”
That team was has developed heroic status among fans since for what they achieved.
“We travelled to Milan for the away game in our own clothes because there were no club suits,” former player Jordi Cruyff recalls.
“The Italian media were waiting for us at the airport, but they didn’t recognise us, so we sent fans to do interviews with them and pretend they were players.”
These are good times for Basque football. The autonomous community of 2.1 million boasts five top-flight football teams: Athletic Bilbao, Real Sociedad, Alaves, Eibar and Osasuna.
The latter is in neighbouring Navarra, but 70 per cent of their match-going fans consider themselves Basque and the distinctive red, green and white Basque flag is everywhere at their games.
Nowhere in Spain has such a density of leading clubs. The Madrid metropolitan area, with six million, boasts only Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Leganes, the latter one of the sides promoted with Alaves last season.
There are a further 20 professional or semi-professional football teams in the Basque Country, with a packed concentration around the River Nervion between Bilbao and the Bay of Biscay.
“We see the other Basque teams as our brothers,” explains Alfonso Exposito, 40. “Except Athletic. They think they’re superior because they’re the biggest club.
“Too many of their fans think that Basque football is only Athletic Club. When we played there they charged us too much for tickets.
“We see ourselves as Alaves first, then Basque, then Spanish. And this season is great. We go to all of the home games and all of the away games within two hours of Vitoria. Two thousand of us can travel.”
“And Seville,” Juan adds. “Oh, yes, we’re going to Betis. That’s 10 hours from here. And we went to Barcelona. That’s six hours. And we’re going to Madrid when we reach the Copa del Rey final!”
The optimism grows. Vitoria may be the capital, but the main power base for industry, sport and commerce is Bilbao. On Wednesday night, though, the spotlight was solely on Alaves.
The big night
The walk to the stadium in the rain, takes supporters past palatial houses.
“Jorge Valdano used to live there,” Juan points out. Alaves was the first stop in Spain for the cerebral Argentine forward who played for and managed Real Madrid. “Let’s be quick, the Celta bus is coming.”
A sleek coach with ‘Celta’ along the side soon appears, flanked by the flashing lights of the Ertzaintza, the Basque police force.
They are respected, the national police which is seen as an extension of the Spanish government less so.
Celta have big name players Iago Aspas, John Guidetti and Giuseppe Rossi. They knocked Real Madrid out in the previous round and defeated Barcelona 4-3 in the league this season.
The players on the coach have reason to be confident. It turns into the stadium surrounded by a sea of people shouting glory to Alaves and holding ‘This is Mendi’ scarves – an abbreviation of their Mendizorrotza stadium.
There is 90 minutes to kick off.
The road outside lights up fluorescent red. Fans are letting off flares in the rain and singing. This new team of free signings and loan stars have created excitement.
Finally, it is time to go into the stadium where Juan and Alfonso pay €250 for their season tickets with the loudest fans by behind the goal.
Fans have painted their own murals underneath the stand. A sticker derides modern fans and Real Madrid fans who only watch games on television.
Juan rubs his arms to show that the hair is standing up on them. He and Alfonso, who have travelled across Spain together for most of their lives to Alaves, cannot wait.
Juan’s wife, Virginia, is also a fan, but the late kick off means that she stays at home with the children. They are allowed to watch on television.
The singing never stops. It is incredible. So many football games drift by without meaning, but this one means everything to the sell-out crowd singing their hearts out. And they win.
The joy flows into the rain soaked streets where strangers embrace. In the bar by the stadium, Juan and Alfonso meet friends.
They plan their trip to the final and whether to go by train or drive. They had already booked apartments, which they planned to cancel if they lost.
David will meet Goliath once again, though Barca will be without the suspended Luis Suarez. And they will meet again before that. It is Alaves against Barcelona in the league on Saturday.
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