SPORTING MOMENTS: A Mallorcan Stroll

To some citizens of the UK, Mallorca is synonymous with riotous young Brits enjoying their first holiday abroad without Mum and Dad.

In the very antithesis of “style”, they rise at noon before indulging in a full British breakfast and then lounging by the hotel pool or maybe even the beach if they can stagger that far before returning to their hotel room for a quick S,S&S and then heading onto the infamous Shagaluf Strip to weave from discopub to discopub under the eyes of a contemptuous mix of constantly patrolling Policia Local and Guardia Civil.

If there’s a big rumble going on, the weapon-less Policia Local officers are keen to tool up as well. On the sketchily defined border between Palmanova and Magaluf lies a small Guardia station that actually serves as an armoury for the whole of the Calvia district.  

Sue and I’s first holiday together was to Mallorca and, looking back, not dissimilar to the stereotype. The only difference was we were about five km along the coast at a place called Cala Bona, where the gangs of marauding Brits were made up of folks of pensionable age. If people-watching is your thing, don’t bother with Cala Bona. Abramovich, his tovariches and their likes prefer to chill in Club de Mar or Puerto Portals.

Against this unlikely backdrop began a lifelong love affair. Take the couple who had both just turned 40 [us] as read – I am concentrating here on my love for an island that few British people ever [bother to] discover and its football team, Real Club Deportivo Mallorca.

Previously only known for winning the Copa Del Rey in 2003, yesterday saw Mallorca finish a second successive season in La Liga with a 3-0 stroll against Rayo Vallecano to finish a very creditable ninth in a La Liga season which proved they have the capability to do what Norwich City can’t – establish themselves in the elite league. This season even saw Real Madrid put to the sword and there was never a hint of a drubbing from the big boys.

Manager Javier Aguirre and his coaching staff signed up at the weekend for a further year as the popular Mexican aims for a hat-trick of La Liga survival seasons or better.

Mallorca has never been the kind of team to give its supporters an easy ride. Barca or the Athletic Club they are not, having suffered two relegations and promotions since I have been following them but they’re slightly above being dubbed a yo-yo team such as Cadiz or even Malaga, where it looks like the string has well and truly broken as the City by the Sea prepares for life in the regionalised third tier next season.

I first encountered Los Bermellones [in deference to their vivid, vermillion shirts] or Los Piratas [the island has history as a base for pirates] back in the autumn of 2002. This was because a rep from the hotel we were staying at had obtained shedloads of tickets for RCD Mallorca versus Atletico Madrid and was organising an excursion to the Son Moix.

The mark-up was over 200% but neither Sue nor I had been to a Spanish football match so this was far too good an opportunity to turn down.

^{My first match on the island was Mallorca v Athletico on September 22, 2002.}

Fernando Torres played [and scored] for Madrid that evening while the home side featured Cameroonian [and later Chelsea] superstar Samuel Eto’o and one Miguel Angel Nadal, whose colourful life is worthy of a whole box set all by itself.***

Mallorca missed a penalty in a dire 4-0 home defeat toward the end of which we witnessed what is apparently a dying tradition in Spanish football: la lluvia de almohadillas, or “rain of the cushions” as the Mallorquinis expressed their disgust with their team’s performance.

It is probably more apt to describe it as a drizzle rather than a full-on storm but I’m delighted to say I’ve witnessed the phenomenon first-hand!

The next time I went to the Son Moix was to see Los Diablos Rojos [three nicknames down, one to go] beat Valencia 3-0 in the spring of 2008 and a lot had happened in the intervening five years.

_{Me last week in the official kit worn by RCD Mallorca when winning the Copa Del Rey in 2003.}

By this time I had bought some land near Llucmajor, a traditional town in the middle of the island. My neighbour, Carlos, became a great friend and another neighbour, Antonio, built a tiny casita that any member of the Green Party on Norfolk County Council would be proud of.

It had many of the things the Greens would like to see in Norfolk such as no electricity, a soakaway drain, and water collected via guttering and fed into a galvanised well with a bucket on a chain to draw up the precious water as required. All food was cooked outside on a traditional barbecue or consumed cold while solar panels were enough for lighting, a TV and running a small fridge.

It was a glorious way to live. On a finca [rural estate] on Mallorca, not in Norwich.

I had closer to two hectares of land than one and became the proud owner of over 40 trees, which were mainly almonds and carobs and in the old days, my predecessors would have bartered these with neighbours or even sold them commercially.

_{Sue takes stock of the almond trees – all 23 of them.}

Carlos told me much of the history of the island, which both Sue and I found fascinating as his parents and grandparents had passed various tales on to him that he was only too glad to share. Although he was a Real Madrid fan we went to a couple of matches at the Son Moix together and it was on these journeys that I discovered a lot about what went on behind the scenes in Spanish football, particularly that the dislike for those wielding the off-pitch power seems to be pan-European among the plebs.

A staunch trades unionist, Carlos was a pintura by day and a dibujante by night, which meant that when he’d finished painting out any particular part of the airport at Palma at his day job he would return home, eat his evening meal with his wife Teresa, feed Keira the dog, chickens and seven cats and more often than not head for his studio in one of the several outbuildings on his finca. Amazingly, there was never an incident between the cats and the chickens, not that Carlos would admit to anyway.

Carlos mainly painted for fun, but his lampoons of both beach and city life were very popular with a couple of Balearic magazine commissioners and he had a nice little sideline going on. His work was very good, but he was often trying to make a political point so much of the underlying meaning of it went over my head as my Spanish language skills never managed to nudge very far above poco pocito.

Sometimes circumstances dictated that I went to Llucmajor on my own and I ended up seeing Mallorca play what I would like to think was 10 times but it could just be nine because every time I try to total the games up I end with a different number. As well as Atletico and Valencia I can remember the Athletic Club, Celta Vigo, Racing Santander, Real Sociedad and Osasuna for sure but there are more.

My favourite memory of my time on the island had nothing to do with football whatsoever.

I was in Llucmajor just prior to Christmas [I’m not sure quite why tbh] when Carlos asked me if I would like to go to a service that was part of the Navidad celebrations at the Catedral de Sant Miguel de Llucmajor.

_{The Market Square in Llucmajor where the Bar Sport became a regular haunt for me}.

In the original spirit of I‘ve got nothing better to do so why not? I tagged along as part of a group of around a dozen of us on a fairly long walk in the evening chill to one of the bars just off the marketplace and enjoy the terrific atmosphere. This was nothing like my usual Bar Sport this place, it was really quite upmarket and I’ve never seen so many well-behaved children in a single enclosed area before or since.

I’d walked past the unassuming, dusty old building many a time but the only time I had tried to go inside it was locked, so going through those early 17th-century doors for the first time became really quite something when I saw the beautiful interior. It is what English churches might have looked like before Henry VIII came along, wrecking ball in hand, I suppose.

It turned out to be the children’s service and was very much like what we have relatively recently adopted in the UK as a Christingle, I guess.

I am very much a man without religion but I was swept aside by the magnificence of it all – I’d never seen anything quite like it before and as the old building surged into life I felt a little bit subjugated by the power of it all for a brief moment.

As everybody filed past to take the wafer I didn’t know what to do but Antonio seemed to guess my predicament and said something like, “Take it unless you really don’t want to – it’s up to you”.

So take it I did and was exceptionally quiet both in the bar [reprise] and on the way home.

*** Miguel Angel Nadal is a native of Manacor, which is one of about half a dozen administrative centres on the island. He still lives in the area.

Himself a former Balearic Islands Mens Tennis Champion, he is these days most famous for being the uncle of Four Majors ace Rafa Nadal. Just for good measure Miguel’s older brother and obviously another uncle to Rafa, Toni, is a professional coach who trained Rafa in his earlier years on the professional circuit. Feliz Cumpleanos Rafa! – the tennis ace was 37 on Saturday.

Back to Miguel. He began and ended his career with Es Barralet [the name of the crown on the club badge] of Mallorca, and when I got to see him he would have been 37! His centre-back partner against Atletico that day was the ironically named Nino, who was 38!

In 2007 he was featured at No. 47 in The Times’s 50 Hardest Men in Football list and was christened The Beast of Barcelona for his on-field antics by the UK tabloids following a few run-ins too many with British-based players for their liking.

With the deepest of ironies, Nadal claims that his fellow countrymen count him as a classy, cultured player and that he only deserved the Beast tag on account of his shaggy hairstyle!

Just to underline the fact that the Nadal clan is possessed of no talent whatsoever, Miguel and Toni’s father was a well-known Mallorcan bandleader at the end of the jazz era.

To say the family is hero-worshipped in their hometown is an understatement. I’ve been there a couple of times and it’s very much an industrial environment, with Manacor Pearls [which are synthetic] and, to a slightly lesser extent, leather as the chief exports. There are a few factory outlets for each product along the main road and visits to these together with their parent factories are a regular part of tourist activities.   

*** Walking back to base camp from a boozy Market Day in Llucmajor one time I couldn’t get this totally appropriate song out of my head: