“We’re just up on a cloud now,” beamed Jose Juan Figueras, Alcoyano’s goalkeeper, as a long, late Wednesday night crept into Thursday morning.
He slept little, and woke early because his daughter had to be taken to school. “The other parents were all congratulating me,” he said. There were some jokes, too. On his wikipedia page, someone wrote that he was the winner of the 2021 Ballon D’Or and favourite for the 2022 award.
Figueras, or Josino, as his friends know him, is a journeyman footballer with stamina and resilience. He once played 37 minutes, as a substitute, in the top division for his hometown club, Celta Vigo. It did not go too well. He let in two goals, one of them a direct goalkeeping error, and Celta conceded an equaliser deep into stoppage time.
That was in 2003. Figueras never played another Primera Division minute, though he was on the staff, as one of the reserve keepers, of a couple of top-flight clubs. With others, lower down the ladder, he won some promotions.
Three weeks after his 41st birthday, his big night finally arrived. He was heroic in Wednesday’s 2-1 defeat of Real Madrid in the last 16 of the Copa del Rey, an upset of seismic promotions.
Alcoyano are in the Segunda B, the regionalised third level of Spanish football, and Madrid are … well, they are 13-times European champions, and the reigning Spanish champions. There’s more. Alcoyano were down to ten men, following a red card, against Madrid’s 11 when they struck their second goal in extra-time.
And those 11 Madrid players who conceded the match-winner, a goal smartly set up and acrobatically finished by Juanan Casanova, included Eden Hazard, the club’s costliest buy, World Cup winner Toni Kroos, Karim Benzema, Casemiro and Marcelo.
Some of those stars had been brought on to try and fix the alarmingly low ratio of Madrid’s possession-to-goal-threat and to break Alcoyano’s unbending, underdog willpower. None of them could find a way past the 41-year-old superhero in goal.
Jony, the Alcoyano midfielder, said he had seen it coming, this unlikely giant-killing. “I don’t want to sound cocky, but ever since we were drawn against Madrid, I’d been thinking of an ‘Alcoyanazo’,” he said.
The word Alcoyanazo is now coined, alongside the fabled ‘Alcoconazo’, which refers to Real Madrid’s 4-0 defeat in the Copa del Rey to a club called Alcocon, who, like Alcoyano now, were in the third tier when they bundled Europe’s most decorated out of the 2009-10 competition.
You might gather from these episodes that Madrid do not take the domestic Cup so seriously. And yes, Benzema, Kroos and Hazard had started on the bench for Wednesday’s trip.
But there is still a world of difference between a club with an annual budget of €700,000 ($851,000) and a Madrid squad where the lowest-paid senior professional is on €3 million a year.
Madrid had taken a lead into half-time. Alcoyano equalised with ten minutes of the 90 left, capitalising on poor marking at a set-piece.
With extra-time beckoning Isco and Marcelo – who have won 36 trophies between them with Madrid – were caught on camera sharing a joke. The footage has been paraded on Spanish television as a symptom of complacency.
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Gallery: Real lose to Bilbao in Super Cup
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Real manager Zinedine Zidane is taking flack. Isco and Marcelo are among the players who have slipped down his hierarchy. He is criticised for not rotating his preferred XI enough, and when he did change his line-up in certain places for the Cup match, the players brought in looked rusty.
His relative silence on the touchline is cited as evidence of inadequate motivation. Zidane tried to temper the bad headlines. “Words like ‘shame’ and ‘ridicule’ are your words not mine,” he said to reporters afterwards.
“Playing against a third division team, of course we should be winning. I take responsibility, but these things can happen and we are not going to go crazy about it.”
Nor will his president, Florentino Perez, at least not imminently. Zidane guided Madrid to the league title only six months ago, and has three Champions League crowns from the four seasons that he has been manager.
But he also has only one victory from the last five games, and, in the space of a week, Perez has watched Madrid be knocked out of two competitions, the Alcoyanazo coming hot on the heels of last week's defeat in the semi-final of the Spanish Super Cup against Athletic Bilbao. "Madrid have sprung a dangerous leak," commented Thursday's Marca, the sports newspaper, "just like the Titanic".
