Like so many love affairs, it started with a dance. Like rather fewer love affairs, it finished with a mass brawl.
From the spring of 1982, when the England national side visited Athletic Club in Bilbao and were welcomed by a traditional Basque jig called an aurresku, to the spring of ’84, when the Copa del Rey final between Athletic and Barcelona ended in a punch-up that belonged in a western, the people of Bilbao were given a football team they still passionately adore today. This was a team its supporters could believe in, fanatically cheer and ultimately cherish forever; a team that would rise up and take on Spain’s best.
It wouldn’t be easy, it wouldn’t always be pretty and occasionally it even turned violent, but take them on they bloody well did.
INSPIRED BY SIR BOBBY
On March 23, 1982, Ron Greenwood’s Three Lions travelled to Bilbao. His side would soon be playing their opening World Cup games in the Spanish city, and Athletic’s testimonial for long-serving winger Txetxu Rojo offered a useful recce. It was the first time England had faced an overseas club team, and having been accompanied onto the pitch by a brass band and that aurresku dance traditionally used to salute distinguished dignitaries, they played out a fascinating encounter.
England’s presence in Bilbao’s original San Mames Stadium was historically poignant. Formed back in 1898, the football club came with an anglophile lilt. Basque engineering students had returned from English shores excited about the thriving game, and urged on by an influx of British migrant miners and shipyard workers in the city – along with 50 shirts commandeered from Southampton in 1910 – the club, using its English spelling of Atletico, prospered.
Come the end of the 1981-82 campaign, with a new young Basque coach at the helm in Javier Clemente, Athletic
