• David Villa announces his retirement the top scorer of the national team

It was, more or less, in the month of May. The exact date is difficult to specify, more than 20 years have passed, but in the memory of Marcelino García Toral , the coach who left Valencia two months ago, the game returns as if it were yesterday. «He left the last half hour. He scored two goals and gave one assist ». Marcelino speaks of David Villa , the top scorer in the history of the Spanish team (59 hits in 98 games), which on Wednesday, from distant Kobe (Japan) announced that in a little more than a month he retires. "I want to leave football before football leaves me," he said. He has achieved it.

Marcelino, disconnected from the world since leaving Valencia, picks up the phone with the condition of speaking only of the Guaje . He, Marcellin, returns to that party. That first afternoon in which he saw what would later become a legend. «It was a match between Sporting and Racing Santander. It was very striking. It had all the qualities that the world later discovered. He was skilled, fast, he had a perfect unmarking timming , he could orient that demarcation towards the two profiles because he solved with both legs equally well, he defined wonderfully ... », explains the technician, who a month later entered the secretariat Sporting technique and, half a year later, I took the subsidiary where Villa played. He could only train him for six months because, at the beginning of the following course, summer of 2001, he already joined the first team with Pepe Acebal . To stay, of course. He had all those qualities and, besides, he was an intelligent footballer.

«Smart because I listened. And he learned fast, then he picked up the concepts you asked for. It was different, there was nothing more to see it, ”continues Marcellin, whose admiration shows in his tone. By the way, a detail. His ability with the left leg, it is known, he acquired when he broke his right leg as a child and, after rehabilitation, he kicked more with the left than with the right for that fear left behind by the injuries.

Instinct for unchecking

«His instinct to be unmarked is something that cannot be worked on, with that you are born or not born, but when people ask if their goal smell is just talent, I say no. It's talent, of course, but I also work. David has always been a hard worker, and that can be seen in how well he has adapted during his career to the different places where he has played. As a point, as a second point and pulled to the left, as sometimes in the selection and sometimes in Barcelona. Definitely, from a young age he was seen: he was different, ”concludes Marcelino, a privileged witness of the start of a race that the protagonist announced goodbye, in deferred, as Fernando Torres, one of the hundreds of soccer players, coaches, managers , etc ... that sent his love through the USSR.

He goes with a pharaonic record (see graphic) and with more than 400 goals as a professional . The man who unblocked a good part of the only World Cup that Spain can boast about (just remember the goals against Chile, Portugal and Paraguay), the man who missed the final of the 2008 Euro Cup due to an injury and all of 2012 for another , the most reliable striker who has known the selection. So much so that his throne has not been occupied by anyone since he left . He did it after the World Cup in Brazil (2014), although he returned ephemerally in September 2017 to play, with Lopetegui, five minutes against Italy. Behind him, there has been no forward able to approach him. And none is intuited on the horizon.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • sports
  • football
  • Spain National Soccer Team

Eurocopa 2020Robert Moreno and the "cognitive prejudice of confirmation"

Eurocup 2020Robert Moreno: "The goal debate will continue"

Eurocup 2020 A bittersweet Spain catches the classification in the discount