This story could start with Jonathan Woodgate’s words the day he played his first game for Real Madrid, only the words he used then can’t be used here, in a family publication. Down under the main stand at the Santiago Bernabeu, a little while after that meeting with Athletic Club in September 2005, there were expletives everywhere as the English defender was still trying to work out what on earth had happened, and not without reason.
“What a debut!” he said, which was at least a line that could be published. Which was true, too. Having arrived in August 2004 with an injury that got worse, not better, Woodgate had waited 516 days to actually play for Madrid. Within 25 minutes, he had produced an unintentionally superb diving header to send the ball flying past Iker Casillas and into his own net. On 44, he picked up a yellow card, one mantra going round his mind: “don’t get another yellow, don’t get another yellow, don’t get another yellow.” And on 66, he got another one. Scoring and own goal and getting sent off: it was some a way to start.
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Woodgate only played nine more LaLiga games for Madrid before returning to England. And so the legend that English players can’t cut it in Spain rolled on; recently, with Jude Bellingham’s arrival, it has rolled back in again. It is time to put it right.
It was the English who first brought football to Spain, one teammate from the opening days of Madrid’s existence describing a certain Arthur Johnson as “the only one who knows what he is doing, a man who takes football very seriously; so much so that he got married on a Saturday and came to play the following morning.” Johnson even published instructions on the game in the local press designed, among other things, to speed the game up, having got so exasperated that too much time was spent chatting and smoking. But if the English were the experts then, that’s not the case now.
