Joan Manuel Serrat appeared this Monday on the 24 Hours screen singing one of his most beautiful foreign poems, the Barça anthem, and then the director of the program, Xavier Fortes, as culé as he was, asked him about some outstanding details, about the joy or disaster, of the club that this chronicler also loves.
They were exciting moments of an interview that also highlighted the ethical values that the singer who is now beginning his retirement from the stage applies to the life of his countries, the one that is his birthplace and the one to which the other language of his life belongs. and from your heart. Listening to Serrat, not only as a singer but as a citizen, helps to interpret life without being carried away by sectarianism or rudeness to which daily conversation now leans, more in the media and in Parliament than in the street, so that interview was an example of how calm says more than shouting.
In terms of football, both Barça fans introduced a Barça episode that has marked forever (a lot of people, Serrat too) the emotion of being Barça fans as well in adverse times. Remember that Bertolt Brecht explained that “you can also sing in dark times & rdquor ;, but do not forget that there was a particularly dark afternoon in our history. It was when in that Benfica-Barça that was held in the Bern stadium, in the final of the first European Cup that our team played, a series of misfortunes that are also part of football ended with a 3-2 that benefited the team of Bela Gutman -the true emblem of the Portuguese club- and sank the lineup that included Suárez, Czibor and Ladislao Kubala. Serrat told Fortes that it was very painful, and the Galician journalist recalled that he himself inherited, while still a child, the consequences of that enormous sadness.
In my particular case, I was thirteen years old, I was already writing about football in a sports newspaper in Tenerife, and I had become a Barça player (and Juan Azulgrana signed me!) because in my Tenerife neighborhood the Barça broadcasts were heard better than the ones that they came from Madrid… For three days I was without leaving the house, as if I were watching over an insurmountable duel, from which I don’t know how I recovered. But I pulled myself together. It always happens that a nail pulls out another nail, and nail by nail we arrive at the Cruyff era, which was when we began to feel that life could be approximately beautiful or at least passable. Then Rijkard and Guardiola and Luis Enrique came, and we recovered breaths that drowned out the disaster in Bern…
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Now we have had two or three disastrous matches (and, above all, we have lost Pedri!), after having defeated the archrival dressed in white (in black, by the way, that day), and it seems that the universal deluge fell on us, a hailstorm like the one in Barcelona today.
The culé tends to disorganize his memory, to Pretend you’re invincible surely because he is unable to look back to know that Bern and Benfica existed and that suffering is also part of the shield that the great Serrat placed as one of his fine arts.