Let’s see how many technicians are capable of making a resume in which they are cited next to Tito Vilanova, Jordi Roura, Tata Martino, Luís Enrique, Ernesto Valverde, Quique Setién, Ronald Koeman and Xavi Hernandez. No one. Nobody except José Ramón De la Fuente, Dela for friends, the Barça goalkeeping coach who has been at the club since July 2012 when Tito called Juan Carlos Mandià to let him leave Hercules for the Camp Nou. Dela has trained neither more nor less than eleven Barça goalkeepers, and maybe some will leave me: since Victor Valdes and Jordi Masip until Arnau Tenas and Neto, going by Oier, by Pinto, Bravo, Ortolà, Cilessen, Iñaki Peña and of course, Marc-Andre ter Stegen, who demanded from Setién the presence of De la Fuente almost as a personal trainer, while Jon Easter, of the ‘staff’ of the Cantabrian, was dedicated to the substitutes.
What happens with De la Fuente is exceptional, and I am happy for him, because they tell me that, in addition to being an excellent coach, he is a beautiful person, who fought throughout his career as a goalkeeper from humility and awareness of his origins, in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, away from the pageantry and paraphernalia that many of us are accustomed to. It is very likely that everything you know about men’s morals and obligations is due to football, as you wrote Albert Camus, the one who was Nobel Prize in Literature and titular goalkeeper of the youth of the Racing Universitaire d’Alger. The writer also said that he loved the sport “not only for the joy of victory when it was combined with the fatigue that follows exertion, but also for the stupid desire to cry at night, after a loss”. It reminds me of De la Fuente that I know he suffered the same and that he played for Toledo and Córdoba and in many Catalan teams, after his time at Barça B and his very brief stage in the first team, in which he debuted in a friendly in the 1991-92 season.
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The secret of De la Fuente’s longevity as a coach is not only in his technical skills or the rigor of his notebook, or in the warrior ardor that the occasional expulsion in combat has led to him. It is based on what is not written. A kind of brotherhood between goalkeepers (the rarest of any squad, whatever you look at) that he has been able to establish, promote and take care of over ten seasons, a figure that only comes close Juan Carlos Unzué. Something indefinite and ethereal, yet consistent and enduring. At a time when each coach arrives with his own ‘staff’, with his own philosophy and his friends, Dela, unflappable, is the guarantor of a Barça way of being, meticulous and without fuss. A kind of guardian of essences. Xavi, who shared a dressing room with him, knows it. And its discreet legend further magnifies.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com