Jen had a conference to attend in Seville and as I can work from anywhere that I fancy, we decided to have a couple of weeks in Spain. We started off in Ronda, which is a picturesque town above a valley. On the Saturday morning, we took a walk down the hill with the intention of being able to view the town from below. It didn’t quite work as we ended up on the side of town without the spectacular cliffs, but I suppose it meant that we saw some views that don’t make it on to the postcards.
Something that we did see though was a horse exercising. A bloke had taken it from a stable and walked it to a nearby field. He let it off and it galloped around on the grass by itself whilst he smoked a fag and scrolled through his phone. If the horse ever learns the way to the field by itself then I suspect that the fella may well be out of a job.
Our hike didn’t really work out well as we realised we had taken a path that led only to someone’s front door. On retracing our steps, we learned that we were now on the other side of Ronda, close to the supermarket that we’d called into on arrival. Jen pointed out some floodlights nearby and since we were unlikely to ever reach the cliffs that we’d intended to, we revised our route and headed for what I’d hoped to be a stadium.
As we got close I heard a few shouts and the sound of a whistle. Result. There’s nothing like stumbling across a bonus game. My pleasure dimmed a little when I realised that it was actually the New Sports City stadium which is where we intended to watch a seventh-tier game that evening.
We saw some of the action from the woods outside and realised that it was a youth game. Some digging around online revealed that it was an under fifteen fixture. These are termed Cadete B games in Spain with Cadete A being the next age group up, under sixteen.
One of the Ronda clubs, UD, were taking on Athletic Coin in a regional game. It was three euros to get in, which seemed steep to me for a kids fixture. Most of the crowd were parents and younger kids, who were there for their own games and training sessions, straight after the current match.
Our arrival was at around the hour mark and the score was level at one each at that point. We saw a couple of away goals from Coin as they took the points. It’s always nice to have a sit down for half an hour on a hike and when you can spend that time watching football even better. Stumbling across a bonus game also meant that we’d have no difficulty in finding the stadium when we returned that evening for the senior fixture.
Tags: Cadete football, Ronda
Trail of the Lion King 
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