The Spanish football leaders took good note of the flood of criticisms that they received for not suspending the corresponding day of the League Championship in full effects caused by the Dana in its devastating passage through the Valencian Community. While the dead were counted to hundreds, no responsible for the Spanish Federation or the League, with some millionaire salaries, had the courage to paralyze football activity.
Last week we had two good samples of the relative consequence of a game that moves millions of passions, but that cannot be put to much more transcendent issues and in which people’s lives are at stake. The suspension last Monday of the Villarreal-Espanyol Ceramics Stadium. Under the climatological threat of a new rain storm in the Levante area and endangered the safety of blue and white followers on their return trip. Like that of the FC Barcelona-Osasuna clash, for the sudden death of the second doctor of the Blaugrana staff, Carles Miñarro. The two cases are the sample of this sudden change in sensibilities of those who run our football of each day. Because what cannot happen is the unworthy reaction that motivated at the time the death of the controversial Guipuzcoan referee, Emilio Guruceta Muro, of such an infamous memory for the Barcelona by the invented penalty of Rifé on Velázquez three meters outside the area. It was the morning of Wednesday, February 25, 1987, when the BMW car that drove the international collegiate, Pamplona, crashed through the Fraga bridge on the highway. Guruceta himself and the other occupant of the front seat died. The other two of the rear were badly injured, all of them members of the arbitration quartet that that night should whistle the quarterfinal match of the Copa del Rey Osasuna-Real Madrid.
A few hours later, in a stadium of the Sadar full to burst, the whites won 1-2, in a game that would never have had to play under those tragic circumstances. The also International Donato Pes Pérez was urged by the arbitration managers, with a place to the head, to travel urgently from Zaragoza to whistle the game. Pes Pérez himself recognized years later that accepting to direct that party was the worst decision of his long arbitration career.
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