A game at the 90’s Bernabéu

There was one thing totally different in soccer of the nineties. Go to Bernabéu so it had nothing to do with the polished, technological and protected expertise we all know right now. That was one thing else, extra gross, extra visceral. For me, with simply fifteen years, coming into that grey mole was like going to the zoo, reminiscent of launching a conflict that was performed within the grass, but in addition within the stands, within the vomitories, in each nook of the stadium.

There have been no digital lathes or cameras in every nook. There have been thrusts, flesh that flew from the gallery to the road for a pal to select them up and will sneak into. There was a southern background taken by Skinheads that entered like a herd, making its strategy to elbows. The Bernabéu was a stadium for 115,000 folks, but it surely all the time appeared that there was extra, that he overflowed by the halls, the steps, that that would fall aside from a lot roar.

The ambiance had its personal colour: grey. Every part was grey. The cement, the previous seats, the sky of Madrid on winter days. And, on the identical time, that grey was wrapped in a smoke mist. On the break, the stadium was crammed with the scent of cigarettes and cigars, a dense smoke that was combined with the aroma of tortilla sandwiches and empanados fillets that took out the companions from their baggage. For those who didn’t put on something, as occurred greater than as soon as, along with your easy pipes, you needed to die of starvation.

It was a tribal, uncooked soccer. I keep in mind how within the information, they confirmed folks sleeping two days earlier than on the ticket workplaces to get an entrance and the way every so often the membership president acquired the primary within the tail. I did it, with 15 years, dishonest my mother and father: I informed them that I used to be going to review at a pal’s home and I went to queue on the Bernabéu in the midst of January, with that chilly that isn’t the one now, it was a extra crude chilly, which fell to you to the bones.

I used to be nearly seventeen hours ready, ice cream, with my fingers in my pockets, however with the intact phantasm that I used to be about to stay one thing epic. A few hours earlier than opening the ticket workplaces that turned a pandemónium with folks squeezing like received in a truck, shifting from the penetrating chilly of January to feeling an more and more overwhelming warmth, a police officer on a couple of meters a couple of meters, lipotimias … I’m satisfied that right now I might not endure it. And I lived it: I acquired my entry into the “hen coop” for that Actual Madrid, 5 – Barcelona, ​​January 7, 1995. An unforgettable battle, a kind of nights that mark you without end.

The Bernabéu was additionally an uncomfortable place, even hostile. The bogs had been a catastrophe, genuine cubiles that many most well-liked to keep away from. I noticed with my very own eyes multiple urinating on the partitions of the vomitories so as to not enter there. However none of that mattered. One went to the stadium with the understanding of being coming into sacred territory. There every little thing was totally different: time stopped, life concentrated in ninety minutes of ardour and nerves.

That stadium of the nineties was rather more than a soccer discipline. It was a spot of initiation, a cathedral that demanded bodily resistance, persistence and braveness. Going to Bernabéu was not a easy Sunday plan, it was a complete expertise, a ceremony of passage, a lifestyle. And I, with my fifteen years, lived it with the innocence and insanity of a kid who felt that every sport was an epic battle during which the entire world performed one thing.

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