Search: ' Racing Santander'

To suggest that the French midfielder has an attitude problem would be like saying Tewkesbury has been a bit damp of late. James Eastham reports on a career that has gone nowhere, via pretty much everywhere

Stéphane Dalmat scored a glorious goal in the Champions League last season. Playing for Bordeaux, he picked up the ball on the halfway line, breezed past an opponent and lobbed PSV Eindhoven’s goalkeeper, Gomes, from 25 yards. In the Sky TV studio, Jamie Redknapp, Dalmat’s team-mate at Spurs in 2003-04, described the midfielder along the lines of being “one of the most skilful players I’ve ever seen”, but labelled his attitude “shocking”.

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In the new edition of his book Morbo, Phil Ball meets the ever-polite people of Vigo and La Coruña, the north-western cities that have unexpectedly become Spain’s new football powerhouses, challenging Madrid and Barcelona from a weather-beaten land

In August 2002, most of Spain was covered by a wet blanket of stubborn grey cloud instead of enjoying the usual weeks of sunshine. Curiously, Galicia, the north-western region of Spain that normally suffers from an average of 320 days of rain a year, was enjoying its best summer for 50 years, baking under cloudless skies while the rest of the country shivered in the rain. Approaching a young couple on the beach at La Coruña, a reporter for Spain’s national television channel, TVE1, held out a microphone to the bikini-clad girl and asked her how she felt for the rest of Spain. With an indignant flick of her sun-bleached blonde hair, she tersely replied: “Que se jodan.” (“Fuck ’em.”) The rest of Spain was outraged, yet at the same time amused by the confirmation that the Galicians thought of Spain as a land-mass hardly worth considering.

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Racing Santander’s forthright new president-cum-manager has been derided by critics but, says Phil Ball, he might just be on the right track

Dimitri Piterman is no ordinary chap. Shortly after buying a 24 per cent majority shareholding in Ra­cing Santander in January, the new millionaire president of the ailing Spanish top-flight club was stopped outside the entrance to the El Sardinero stadium by a TV journalist and asked if he thought that his stated intention of personally running all aspects of the club – right down to team management – was perhaps a tad over-ambitious, even ar­rogant? Espec­ially when he was not qual­ified to do so? Piterman leaned into the beam of the cameras and eyeballed the journalist with a withering stare: “There’s a dork running the most powerful country in the world without a qualification to his name. And you ask me for a diploma to run a football team? Give me a break.” And so began one of the lengthiest me­dia circuses witnessed in Spain over the past couple of decades, with the result that the 39-year-old Piterman has be­come at least as famous as Jesus Gil.

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In an edited extract from his new book, Morbo, Phil Ball explains how Spain owes its patient style of football to an Englishman, Fred Pentland

Fred Pentland came to manage Athletic Bilbao in 1923, following in the footsteps of another Englishman, a trained masseur by the name of Mr Barnes. The arrival of Pentland, who had played for Blackburn Rovers (among others) in the first decade of the century, coincided with the first clear signs of professionalism in the Spanish game. Pentland had been interned in Germany during the First World War and seems to have spent most of his time training German officers. In 1920 he managed the French football team at the Antwerp Olympics and then spent a year at Racing Santander, whereupon Athletic literally bought him from the Cantabrian club, offering him 1,000 pesetas a month – a decent sum in those days.

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Spanish clubs have started to influence the results of matches by offering certain teams lavish incentives. Alex Simpson reports on this legal method of winning the league

When Hercules Alicante beat Barcelona in the game which all but scuppered the latter’s title hopes, the winning team were reported to have picked up $50,000 a man from rivals Real Madrid. Barcelona reciprocated by offering a $2 million incentive to Atlético Madrid in the title decider derby. Big bucks weren’t on offer in the relegation battle at the other end of the table the following week, but with the new TV deal kicking in, the stakes were equally high.

Pedro Nieto, President of Extremadura, the smallest-ever club to grace Spain´s top flight, hit on a novel way to ensure that the opponents of fellow relegation candidates took to the field equally motivated.

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