Spain: World Cup dream comes true

I can’t remember how old I was – 11 or 12, I guess. After a sweaty football game in the sunny streets of my childhood in Barcelona a friend said: "One day you’ll raise the World Cup." I instantly knew that that was a crazy and impossible thing to happen, but for a moment I saw myself wearing the red shirt and putting the golden trophy up in the air. Back then, football was everything for us: we played it all the time, talked about it, collected stickers every season and every World Cup. Some exotic names on those stickers are still stuck in my mind, mostly goalkeepers: Dasayev, Zenga, Taffarel … I do remember spending a whole afternoon at my friend’s house that same summer retracing the beautiful design of the Adidas Etrusco ball for Italy’s World Cup. Now I know, I must have been nine when my friend wrongly predicted my fate. 

Italy 1990 is the first World Cup I really remember. Not for the first time, I heard or read Spanish media labeling us as the favorites, only to meet the most painful defeats a young man has seen. Spain, a young democracy, money was pouring from the European Union to build new roads, schools, airports, stadiums. The Olympics had happened only two years earlier in my own city. The mood was that of fiesta and I could see it in my parents' faces. We were improving as a nation and nothing could go wrong.

The opening game was between Argentina and Cameroon. I remember as if it was yesterday. My father and I on the sofa amazed at the strength and speed of Cameroon’s players. The goal from Omam-Biyik and the face of Maradona. And Milla, Roger Milla, impossible to forget the joyful style of one of the best players of that tournament. Days went by. Spain won the group phase and found Yugoslavia in the round of 16. They beat us. The disappointment was unbearable. 

Years went by, more disappointments came under different names: Baggio, Zidane, that referee against South Korea … I was getting used to losing, but then South Africa came and I realized my friend was partly right in that distant afternoon. Somebody about my age raised the World Cup for Spain. I was in New York when that happened. Iker Casillas put the most beautiful trophy I can imagine up in the air. I called my parents in Barcelona. My mother was crying and said: "Your generation." I was wearing the red shirt and everything made sense.

Pedro Mediavilla Costa is a Barcelona-based journalist and filmmaker.