December 12 – ETA Stops Play
IT may very well be stating the obvious but terrorists really are the pits aren’t they? Quite apart from the actual terror they cause they have just made the whole world inconvenient. They have added on God knows how long to every plane journey and forced you to take off ever more items of clothing when you go through the security at the airport (first it was just bags, then jackets, then shoes and now belts!), they have also forced us all to walk around with litter in our pockets because you can never find a bin in a public place anymore for fear of terrorists leaving bombs in them.
Today in 2004 they started turning their attention to football when a Real Madrid game had to be called off with only a few minutes remaining because of a bomb scare. The Basque newspaper Gara apparently received a telephone call saying a bomb was due to explode at 2100 local time and more than 70,000 fans had to be evacuated from the Santiago Bernabeu, along with the Madrid team and their opponents Real Sociedad.
The match was evenly poised at 1-1 after Ronaldo had given the hosts the lead just before the break with a left foot shot, and Turkish striker Nihat Kahveci smashed home with an acrobatic finish to equalise mid-way through the second half.
After the whole place had been cleared police searched the ground with sniffer dogs but found no explosive device. “The police have said they have completed their search and have not found anything,” said Real Madrid president Florentino Perez.
“The best thing we can all do now is to put this nightmare behind us. The police said the threat was a credible one and that’s why we decided to evacuate the stadium a quarter of an hour before the deadline. The evacuation plan worked to perfection.”
Madrid midfielder Guti told private Spanish radio station Cadena Ser: “I have never seen this before and sport should be above it all.”
Initial reports suggested the Basque separatist group ETA may be responsible for the bomb threat. The Bernabeu was targeted by ETA on 1 May, 2002, when Madrid were about to play FC Barcelona in a Champions League semi-final. A car bomb exploded in a street outside the stadium and 17 people were injured.
It was all a bit more scary than a bomb scare at Molineux in 1996 when a ‘suspicious package’ turned out to be a sandwich, although quite how it was identifiable as such is difficult to understand after the army carried out a controlled explosion on the poor innocent snack.
The Spanish FA decided that the remaining few minutes of the game should be played and so the teams lined up in the Bernabeu for one of the shortest matches in history on January 5, with just two minutes and 40 seconds plus three minutes extra time on the ref’s watch.
In the time since the first match had ended and the rest of it replayed, Real Madrid had dispensed of their manager Mariano García Remón and replaced him with Brazilian Vanderlei Luxemburgo. Remón must go down in history as one of the only managers to have technically been sacked during a match.
Despite the tight time scale the two teams managed to squeeze a lot into the six minutes of play to entertain the 15,000 fans who had turned up for the shortest match they are ever likely to see. Madrid won a penalty and Zinédine Zidane converted it to give the hosts a 2-1 win. Luxemburgo even found time to throw on a couple of subs to run down the clock.
That’s a wrap for today folks so have a look at which trumpet playing South American was born on this day, and if your Spanish is in need of a top up you can watch the entire six minute match below (clue: “GOL!!!!” translates as ‘goal’).
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