• ORPHEUS SUAREZ

    @OrfeoSuarez

Updated Tuesday,6June2023-15:16

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Spinach, celery and lime juice, yogurt with chia, seed bread with turkey and avocado, and coffee with soy milk. The sophistication of the breakfasts offered in the coolest places, always in the most appropriate proportion of carbohydrates and proteins, has much in common with those football fields full of arrows, statistics and colored spaces to know the areas of influence of the players. They look like the tablecloths of a 'brunch', where the accumulation of ingredients between meals exceeds the most creative breakfast and can lead to exhaustion in the same way that overinformation leads to absurdity. After several experiences, more than one begs for some toast with oil.

The Sevilla players were among them, after a complex season and cohabitation with Jorge Sampaoli, who must be treated as if he were the disciple of a current, not a simple footballer. If not, you're lost. They were. When that happens, it is best to apply the maxim 'back to basics', back to basics. Curiously, it was coined by the same people who later merged 'breakfast' and 'lunch' to invent the word 'brunch'. It is difficult to imagine in one of them José Luis Mendilibar with the stevia packet in his hand to sweeten the coffee with soy milk, but few know better what it means to go back to basics.

MOU FALLS TO THE ANTI-TOP

The basics are the fundamental, but not the primitive or the rough, a mistake that this football inserted in the 'showbusiness' usually makes: it needs to do many things to spend a lot and teach everything it does and spends. Mendilibar had never belonged to that football, Second Division player and coach who had won titles in Preferente, Third, Second B and Second, but never with a First team. He is not a top coach, in the sense that Mourinho said it years ago, defeated by the Basque in Budapest. The Europa League is, therefore, a cosmic leap at the age at which others retire, 61 years, and that changes the step to Sevilla, which has already renewed it. He called a firefighter to teach how to extinguish the descent to players signed for something else, and now he meets 'Mendilover', whom fans dress with the same lights as who removes the 'sentío' in the Maestranza. It is a Morante without veronicas.

"I have my model and I follow it wherever I go, regardless of place and category. I like quick transitions, defense-attack or attack-defense, and I don't like combining for the sake of combining. I'm amused by the fact that he defends with the ball. And if you only have it 40% of the time, what do you do the other 60%? You'll have to steal it, I say." Long before arriving at Sevilla, Mendilibar explained to me, vehemently, a way of understanding the game that has not changed, although then, still in the great era of possession, his words seemed anathema: "I prefer the pass to 25 meters than the teammate next to him". He did not try to ingratiate himself with the mainstream, despite being at a critical moment after failing on the bench of San Mamés, the Grail of all Basque coaches.

THE DISCOVERER OF DAVID SILVA

Fernando Lamikiz introduced him, in 2005, as the Ferguson of Athletic. He lasted 13 games, after being forced to play the Intertoto Cup against Romanian Cluj, something that conditioned the entire preseason, and questioned in a locker room in which the heavyweights refused to enter pools with ice after training and matches to accelerate muscle recovery. Currently, cryotherapy is common practice, even in sub-zero chambers, for elite athletes.

The man of the quick transitions was, curiously, the one who put in value one of the interpreters of the Spain of possession. Mendilibar recruited a very young David Silva for Eibar, in the Second Division, with whom he was about to achieve the first promotion of the club in its history and left his mark for his play. "When people refer to David, they only talk about technique, but it's much more, because quality is more than touch. He's super competitive, because he puts everything in, the leg, the body, whatever... It is one of the best I have managed, "recalled the coach before finding in Seville the team of more collective quality in his career.

"I WAS A MINGAFRÍA"

Mendilibar himself was in a similar habitat as a footballer, the Sestao directed by Irureta in which he had Valverde and Jon Aspiazu as teammates, but he lacked, as he says, the squeeze: "I was a 'mingafría', as Javi Clemente says". In the band, today, it's the opposite.

Some players under his orders remember Mendilibar as the 'Volatas', because he did somersaults to those who made mistakes in training. Close to them, he is also direct and frontal, as when he told Bono that he would play in Europe but not in La Liga, where he chose Dmitrovic. There were two reasons. The first is that the Moroccan was not in the first training sessions of the Basque to meet his selection; the second, that he knew the Serbian from his second stint at Eibar. The same happened with Bryan Gil or Joan Jordán, with whom he joked as soon as he arrived, telling him that he was slow as an "old donkey". Humor is a symptom of a healthy wardrobe. Dmitrovic gave exceptional numbers in the league. Bono was a hero in Budapest.

Vasco in Seville, did not hesitate to go to Holy Week or the Fair, to the Rakitic booth, although it is not explained how you can resist with a suit and tie at 30 degrees. Mendi prefers polo or tracksuit, although, today, when he arrives at training he seems to be in an airport, as he told Jon Rivas, because of the number of gadgets he finds. Just two goals and a ball. They are the bread and oil of football.

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