Off Side by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online Page A

in part to the fact that its pitch was located in a key zone for Barcelona’s future. The club’s directors had resisted the temptation to sell the ground in the period of urban expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, and then later when people began sniffing around for promising real estate in the area around the proposed Olympic Village. The Centellas ground sat on the third or fourth parallel from the sea, almost on the edge of San Adrián, and as such it was fated to be swallowed up by the new Barcelona which was planned to grow outwards from the central nucleus of the Olympic Village, which in turn would become apartment blocks for the new post-Olympic petty bourgeoisie — a marked contrast with the previous population of the neighbourhood: the last remains of the Catalan proletariat, and the archaeological sedimentations of various immigrations.
    ‘All in due course,’ Sánchez Zapico would say when the club’s more impatient directors started pressing the merits of some of the more lucrative offers-to-sell.
    On other occasions he would wax more lyrical: ‘For as long as I live, Centellas will live, and without this ground Centellas would die.
    ‘Centellas depends on its ground,’ he declaimed, at the end of the speech with which he introduced Palacín to the other players and to around two hundred fans spread out on the club’stime-worn terraces, not forgetting three trainee journalists, recently emerged from the Faculty of Information Sciences who were there to cover third-hand news events with fourth-hand tape recorders bought in the flea market in Plaza de las Glorias.
    ‘Our intention in signing Palacín is to improve club attendances. Palacín isn’t just a name. He’s a centre forward to his core. He’s got balls.’
    The journalists noted down the phrase ‘he’s got balls’, but then, when their offerings finally appeared in their respective newspapers, they went no further than to say that, in the opinion of Sánchez Zapico, Palacín was ‘well furnished’. The new signing merited only one photograph, which, in the event, was not published, although a small headline at the bottom of the last page of sports news seemed keen to stir public interest in the reappearance of Alberto Palacín. ‘Centellas is obviously taking next season seriously, as we see from the fact that they have signed Alberto Palacín, the centre forward who was hailed as the new Marcelino in the 1970s, but who then ran into bad times because of injury. He continued his career in American football, and ended up playing for Oaxaca in Mexico. He was a popular player and established himself as one of the highest goal scorers in the Mexican League. At the age of thirty-six, Palacín has committed himself to helping Centellas to promotion to the Third Division. Then, he says, he will retire. On the pitch he looks to be in fine form, although the passing years have clearly left their mark.’ This was written by a twenty-two-year-old journalist, in other words, a journalist of no age at all: this was the thought that ran through Palacín’s mind as he read the article and had a vague recollection of the youngster who for a few minutes had accorded him the role of a star.
    ‘Don’t take any notice of what they say in the papers. I never take any notice of the press,’ the club’s chairman urged him, thinking that the bit about his age had hurt him. ‘A journalist is like a man with a gun. He thinks that just because he’s got a pen in his hand, he’s got more balls than you. I want you to show ballswhen you’re out there. This club needs players with balls.’
    The Centellas manager, Justo Precioso, operated by similar standards. He was an accountant in one of Sánchez Zapico’s factories, and had become the club’s manager-in-residence after an obscure period as a Second Division player, first as a right-wing defender and by the end as a sweeper. He was a thin, miserable little man, bald, with a three-day growth round his