They tried to make up for it today-the fans and the club and the execs in the Bernabeu with a belated act of homage- but neither the President of the Club nor your team mates were with you when, alone on sunday, you gave your final press conference as a departing Real Madrid player prior to your transfer to Porto. “C’est fini”,you said at the end of a press conference which inevitably had you shedding tears before the grateful photographers.
At the age of 34, you have a record as the player who has been involved at club level in most match victories in the Spanish League, conquered five League Championships, two Spanish Cups , and three Champions Leagues finals. Add to that- two European nation cups and one World Cup with the Spanish squad.
You deserved better from the likes of Mourinho who first tried to devalue you when he was manager at Real Madrid , and from Florentino Perez who ultimately decided you were expendable, but then goalkeepers would not be goalkeepers if they hadn’t assumed loneliness as part of their destiny. Like drummers they are an essential part of the team, but others tend to take the glory. You can take some comfort from the great French author Albert Camus who told us he had learnt all he needed to learn about life while playing as a goalie.
And yet even if your final phrase was uttered in French, your final performance at the club you have given the best of your football years to, was quintessentially Spanish in its Quixotic nobility . You told us that what was important was not that you were a good player or a bad one but that people considered you a decent guy. I certainly did, and so did many of your team mates and even rivals- Barca players like Xavi and Pujol and Iniesta included. They admired your sportsmanship as well as your talent playing for your club and for your country.
The Spanish national coach and former Real Madrid coach Del Bosque- another true nobleman- was among those who believed in you as a “great and natural captain’, so much so that he still hung on to you after everyone blamed you for La Roja’s failure to retain the World Cup in Brazil. How fickle can other people ‘s memories be ?
How can anyone forget you from your early days as a brilliant seventeen year old, later maturing so as to lay a claim to the pantheon of earlier great Spanish goalkeepers, with your beauty in flight and resilience under attack flight, honoring earlier legends like El Divino Zamora and El Gato de Maracana Ramallets.
Perhaps it is true about goalies, as Peter Chapman has argued, that they have had war waged against them-from the early days when a striker would bundle a keeper across the goal line and score, to the more contemporary indignities of the back-pass rule-and it’s a universal rule that the best of goalies are those that manage to keep a clean sheet.
But it is also true that Spain’s best goalie of the last two decades –and I am talking here of you, Iker – personifies those high ideals of the Cervantes hero who were supposed to make Spain great, a bastion against the enemy as well as an excuse for failure.
My enduring memory of you off the pitch is that spontaneous ‘live’ clinch you had with his girlfriend and future wife the TV sports presenter Sara Carbonero, the night La Roja became World Champions in South Africa. In its spontaneity and passion your kiss humanised Spain’s victory, made it lovable. Real Madrid will be a colder place without you.
