We were handed an unexpected hero and it couldn’t be more perfect. At the end of the game, Ibanez stood at the side of the pitch trying and mostly failing to take it in. For only the second time in history, Osasuna are in the final, one question began. “You’re telling me,” he replied, “being an Osasuna fan who watched that, aged six.” That same year he joined the club. As the stadium emptied, Ibanez approached his cousin in the stands — a cousin who plays at Athletic — and they embraced. Which is when the tears came.
But this is not just ‘Youth Teamer And Fan Makes History,’ not just that he of all people had taken them to the final, scoring the goal that would always be there and always be theirs. It was that he had joined the club at seven, but been forced to leave again, a little less than a decade later. That he had gone to play for tiny AD San Juan and then Union Deportiva Mutilvera, in tercera, Spain‘s fourth tier, if you can even call it that — it was more like the sixth, playing on astroturf pitches in front of a handful of fans. Mutilvera have 300 members.
It is that he was playing there less than two years ago. That he only returned to Osasuna in 2021 — and that was to play for the B team. That he was playing in Segunda RFEF, Spain’s newly constructed 124-team fifth division. That he only joined the Osasuna team this season. And that he is not a regular, starting six times in the league. He has played 90 minutes three times this season — against Fuentes from the Aragon regional league, Segunda RFEF side Arnedo, and Primera RFEF side Nastic in the first, second and third rounds of the cup. Rare opportunities for a footballer.
This was his competition. Well, sort of. It certainly is now. Against Betis, he wasn’t in the squad. Against Sevilla — when Osasuna, in a lovely gesture, invited the entire Fuente team to come and watch them play — he stayed on the bench. In the first leg against Athletic, he got four minutes. Before the second leg, Arrasate held him up as an example to them all: Osasuna to the core, the embodiment of commitment, work, feeling, always positive and patient too. One-hundred minutes into it, Arrasate put him on the pitch.
A quarter of an hour later, Pablo Ibanez had scored his first goal.
He will probably never match it. No one will. With the exception of the equaliser John Aloisi scored in the 2005 final, it may well be that no one in Osasuna’s history ever has. A kid from the same city, a fan of the club, who joined at six and was forced to go away against at 16. “It hurt but what am I going to do? You think the dream is over but you see that you can grow elsewhere,” he said, but he came back again, given another chance at it. Still he didn’t imagine this, until the Pamplonian who had never scored went and did that. With his team suffering at San Mames and just four minutes left in the Copa del Rey semifinal. With a strike that was as brilliant as it was unbelievable. Osasuna were going to their second final ever and the whole city was going wild.
When a radio journalist played those scenes back to Ibanez still at San Mames, but itching to get on the road and join them, it was all he could do to say: ‘wow and pffff and hostia, bloody hell.’ “The hairs are standing up on my arm,” he said. From among the crowd in Pamplona, someone shouted: “Pablo, I’ll marry you!” A couple of hours later, he was there with them, fireworks in hand. The following morning, heads hurting, it still hadn’t sunk in. “I’m in the clouds still,” he would say. He had seen the goal played back by then — many times.
It was some night.
“I’m as happy as a partridge. These are the feelings that football gives you and you’re thankful to be able to live them,” midfielder Lucas Torro insisted.
“A man can’t be happier than I am,” Arrasate said.
Osasuna is a special club; Arrasate knows. He has made it even more so, bringing them from the second division to here. A man who the club backed when things were bad. Universally popular and rightly so, not a shred of pretence about him, he is a former teacher who began down there at the kind of clubs where Osasuna started this journey and has now led them the way to the biggest game of all. “Blessed be the day that I signed for Osasuna,” he said, and everyone else couldn’t agree more.
After a game a couple of weeks ago, Mallorca coach Javier Aguirre, who was the Osasuna boss in 2005, sought him out and embraced him as he was doing a TV interview. “You have to tell me how to get to the final,” the current coach said, smiling. A few weeks before that, Real Madrid boss Carlo Ancelotti joked that they would see each other in the final. Arrasate didn’t dare believe that, but it turned out he was right, that he could match Aguirre 18 years on. And if the way it happened wasn’t in the script, which was wild enough already, it was even better this way.
“I’m glad it was Pablo who went down in history,” Arrasate said.
