The work that I’d been doing in Dubai had reached a lull and so Jen and I took the opportunity to have a couple of weeks in Spain. After a few days in Alicante we moved inland a little to Elche. We were staying on the outskirts and so didn’t see as much of the historic centre as we usually would, but we did manage to get a walk in at a nearby nature reserve where the route took us up past a dam and then alongside the reservoir above.
I’d picked Elche as a place to stay mainly because I knew I’d be able to take in a second division game against Almeria on the Saturday evening. The fixture promised to be a decent contest with visitors Almeria fourth in the table and Elche back in ninth. It was tight though and a win for Elche would have been enough to see them leapfrog their opponents.
The sat nav on my telephone suggested that I park some distance away from the Estadio Manuel Martinez Valero. It was advice that I came to regret when I discovered a couple of enormous free car parks next to the ground.
I joined the short queue at the ticket office and bought myself a twenty euro seat along one of the sides of the ground. I could have had one for ten euros behind the goal, which struck me as great pricing for second tier Spanish football and only about a fifty percent premium on the price of watching games in the Northern League.
After sorting my ticket I did a lap of the perimeter of the stadium. It dates back to a few years before the 1982 World Cup during which it hosted some group stage games including Hungary’s record 10-1 victory over El Salvador.
Once inside I got myself a coke and immediately regretted not taking a spare bottle top, as the original was confiscated in the way that they tend to do at the Riverside. I then had the all too common experience of discovering that my allocated seat didn’t exist, before someone very kindly pointed out that all of the seat numbers were odd on one side of the half-way line and even on the other. It’s something that has confused me ever since I encountered it in my very first Spanish game at Coruna in 2005 and it’s great that someone has finally explained it to me. Whether or not my memory is up to retaining the information remains to be seen.
There was an organised communal singsong before the start, together with fans holding their scarves up above their heads. Similar I suppose to the sort of thing that goes on at the likes of Anfield. I can be a bit cynical about stuff like that, but I suppose it beats that Pigbag nonsense that Mark Page just won’t let go. You just know that he will have it played at his funeral as the coffin is brought into the church. Hopefully, with the altar boys clapping along like seals, it will be the last time that people ever to have to listen to it. Bab-bye now indeed.
I was pleased to see an appropriate lack of respect by the visiting Almeria fans. Despite being tucked away in the upper tier at the end to my right, they made a decent effort at distracting from the Elche anthem by belting out a ditty of their own.
Once the game started it was apparent that the pre-match singing was enough for almost all of the Elche fans. The only active support of their team came from a block of about thirty ‘ultras’ behind the goal to my left.
To be fair, there wasn’t much to sing about with the main talking points in the first half being what I thought were probably some unnecessary bookings.
The game took off after the break when Fidel made some space for himself and put a clever ball through for his full back, Cruz, whose cross was well turned in by Nino to open the scoring for Elche. The applause was muffled, literally, by most of those in the ground wearing gloves on account of the chilly temperature. Maybe club shops would sell gloves suitable for making a clapping noise.
Elche had a good chance to clinch the game when they hit the post and they forced a good save from the Almeria keeper with a few minutes to go. Their failure to add a second proved costly though when they failed to clear a corner and Owona tucked the loose ball into the corner of the net.
At one each both teams pushed for the win and whilst Almeria almost nicked it at the end that’s the way it finished.
Trail of the Lion King 
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