Not so long ago, Real Mallorca manager Javier Aguirre called his best striker a “weird, ugly monster,” but the striker didn’t care. “He’s right: I am ugly. I think there’s something wrong with my wife’s eyesight,” Vedat Muriqi replied. “And he’s [Aguirre] not so handsome either.”
And that’s exactly the way they like him.
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A great storyteller, a born leader, exceptionally charismatic, Aguirre has the kind of personality that fills a room, carrying you along with him, and the kind of mouth your parents wash out with soap and water — and he’s so much the better for it.
So, more importantly, is football. Not really because of all the cursing and the cackling — although, quite honestly, because of that too — but because there’s an authenticity, something real about him: a sincerity, a willingness to own his words that breaks from the boredom, the monotone, the monotony and the carefully crafted vacuum, that tells the truth. A truth, anyway — and not just his interests.
In front of him was a monitor. “Can you play it again?” Aguirre asked, so they did. As he watched it, he went through it again. It was like watching it with a mate in a bar. “Look, look, look. Oh my life, son. When he was at Valladolid, that was going in the top corner!”
Truth be told, Larin might not have liked that. From other coaches, everyone else might not have either: there is an indulgence of Aguirre, it is true. But that’s partly because, well, it is true. Just as it was true a few weeks ago when he turned up in a news conference and said: “It’s my fault. I got it wrong. I got everything wrong.”
There’s something to be said for the sincerity. At a time when clubs close doors, when you beg for 90 seconds of nothingness, when fans hear the same pointless set phrases over and over — “We knew it was going to be a difficult game” — when no one dares speak and what we see and hear seems so far removed from the truth, an ersatz reality, it is to be welcomed. Even to be clung onto a little desperately, a crumb for a starving man. Maybe this is overplayed, maybe it’s even a bit meta, but that little glimpse of something genuine this week, that little reminder that there are people out there, was something to embrace.
The best example came when they were discussing the possible penalty for Barcelona in which Lamine Yamal went down, and Aguirre decided that it was not enough just to say it’s hard to be a referee but to demonstrate it and in doing so revealed yet another a basic truth that one no one seems to want to accept, still less say: that often the officials, the easiest of targets and everyone’s get-out clause, are the victims and not some vengeful enemy. That it’s our fault and our responsibility too, all of ours.
Time for everyone to be a bit more like Aguirre; time to tell the truth.
