Spain play their first match tomorrow. To be honest it would be dead easy to be unaware that the World Cup, Copa Mundial or, more usually, just el Mundial is about to start. There are clues - like lots of adverts on the telly for big screen TVs and dead giveaways like the adverts for Coca Cola reminding you to get your supplies in before kick off. But, if you just were to simply wander around you would hardly be assailed by World Cup offers. None of the petrol companies, for instance, are giving away World Cup medals, youngsters aren't exchanging World Cup stickers and if the bicolour is flying higher than usual I would associate it with something anti Catalan rather than something pro Spanish squad. If there is massive support out there for la Selección Española, the national football team, la Roja, a name which comes from the traditional red kit, I seem to have missed it. Perhaps it will start tomorrow in Sochi at the Fisht Stadium.
If my Spanish nationality exam were to demand a 500 word essay on Spanish football I'd be hard pressed. I am vaguely interested in the World Cup though; as an event. It's just the same when, during the Olympics, I find myself watching, and caring about, the hockey. So, I'm chopping up the cucumber for the salad and on the radio they say that Julen Lopetegui, the national team coach, has got the boot. He's taken on the manager's job left open by Zidane at Real Madrid. My initial thought was that this was sheer madness. Presumably the squad has been training with this bloke, presumably their strategies, the ones they have been practising, were designed by the same man and, after all, it was he who had the final say in choosing the squad. I mean it's not as though it's a scandal taking another job. I presume he was willing to work out his notice. He'd not signed up with another national side and, so far as I know, he's paid his taxes. Why didn't they just let him do his job until the moment when the squad's World Cup was finished?
I was interested enough to have a look online for the printed version. The replacement is a man called Fernando Hierro who was the Sporting Director with the Spanish Football Federation. That presumably means that he's been there, alongside Lopetegui, in the plans so far. That sounded a little better. The article also gave me other pointers. It said that the news of the coach going to Real Madrid had left "players indignant and perplexed, particularly those who do not play for the capital’s team." So now we have it. It's about club football.
There was a strange symmetry to the football news. Whilst the no confidence motion was in progress, against the Partido Popular and its leader Mariano Rajoy, the one that led to a new Spanish Government, Zinedine Zidane the Real Madrid manager, chose to resign. The number of tweets, WhatsApp and Facebook memes that mixed the events was legion. Yesterday the new Culture Minister, Máxim Huerta, who is best known as a morning TV show presenter and author with a very active presence on social media, resigned when it turned out he'd had a bit of a run in with the tax man. He'd routed some of his earnings through a company and, in court, he lost his argument with the Revenue. A bit against the grain in Spanish politics he resigned within 11 hours of the news breaking. So this time the memes were Lopetegui and Huerta rather than Zidane and Rajoy.
The photo by the way is of one of the security guards working at the play-off game between Valladolid and Numancia. He looks a lot like Rajoy. New work for the ex-president?
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