Twenty years have passed since the day Nacho Orovio gathered our football team and told us:
–Arrad machines: In the newspaper there is a kid in practices that plays well. We need it, do we recruit it?
And we all set out, as is usually the case, Our great captain He was right.
The football team The avant -garde It languished. The pens aged and felt sharp, and the people of Sports World and Avui It had been reinforced based on good: winning the media league began to be a titanic task.
The kid was Xavier Aldekoa, and obedient as we were doing what Orovio proposed: we raised the kids from the kid to a football court. Before summoning an official party, we summon a Pachanga.
And it was true: Aldakoa played wonderful.
Xavier Aldekoa making one of his reports in a file image
Many years ago, I played Football with Xavier Aldekoa; Now, I admire his work: ‘Round Africa’
Aldekoa played as well as he wrote, so we incorporated him into the team and matching The avant -garde He was recovering part of the lost splendor and the force of the union.
From Aldekoa’s hand, five or six years of good living room happened, and then everything was twisted, because some made parents, others temporarily emigrated to Madrid and Aldekoa went to South Africa.
His march was a misfortune for the team, but a gift for the reader of The avant -gardebecause its reports from the neighboring continent are legend. And his columns, too.
This columns was a thing of Joanjo Pallàs, the head of sports who six or seven years ago had decided to give him a corner as a columnist. Since then I don’t miss any Aldekoa story in sports. Their stories tell us about stadiums as ruinous as passionate, and terroir and goals marked with stones, and children who play barefoot while dream of asymmetric balls.
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They tell us about Emmanuel, the twelve -year -old boy who looked like Morgan Freeman. De Abu, a sub -Saharan in love with Liverpool. Or from Zenab, the teenager of Niger who played football with the Barça shirt despite the public, male in essence.
“When we improve, they will applaud us,” said the girl, perhaps naive, Aldekoa.
As an invisible thread, for years, all those stories that talk about football and much more have kept me connected to Aldakoa, modern Robinsón that today leaves us another gift. Is called Round Africa (Peninsula). It is his room African bookand will be in the bookstores on March 26, and it is a selection of their columns, portraits of that way of traveling that the rest of the humans will never do, legends of those places where the kids sleep hugged to Jirones of clothing made ball made.
#football #joined #Sergio #Heredia
