Our final stop of this Spanish trip was a couple of nights in Olvera. It’s one of those picturesque towns full of white buildings and topped with a castle on a hill. It’s only around an hour and a half from Seville and so we had some time to fill between the respective check-out and check-in times.
There was a fifth-tier game in Utrera, which is around twenty kilometres outside of Seville, that fitted our timetable perfectly.
We arrived early to discover that Utrera is a town full of storks. There was a nest on the chimney behind the olive oil factory and then two or three more on top of the bell tower of the nearby church. As we approached the Estadio Municipal San Juan Bosco, we spotted another nest in what looked like some kind of stadium communication mast.
Jen rarely pays much attention to the action at these games, but when there are storks going backwards and forwards to their nest every few minutes, it’s understandable.
Outside of the stadium was a statue of former Utrera resident, Jose Antonio Reyes. You might remember him playing for Arsenal and Real Madrid. He died in a car crash a few years ago driving between Utrera and Seville, which had been another of his clubs.
We paid our ten euros admission and called at the food hut behind the main stand. We had a coffee each, from a proper espresso machine, and a baguette each with some sobrasada on it. That’s a kind of chorizo paste. With a bottle of coke to take to our seats, it came to eight euros altogether. It’s a far cry from the poor-quality options at the Riverside, where a similar quantity of food and drink would be well over twenty quid. They even gave us a real knife each to spread the paste.
There were presentations before kick-off for where one player got a trophy that looked a bit like the World Cup whilst another was presented with a shirt with 200 on the back. I think the former was Utrera’s player of the season and the other was being celebrated for either having played two hundred games for the club or alternatively, having reached that age.
There was a good atmosphere with fans enjoying the sunshine and a season that had gone well. Victory today would likely clinch a play-off spot for the home side. I’m not sure if there were any away fans, but they probably wouldn’t have felt so happy as they had already been relegated from their fifth-tier Tercera division.
There were lots of kids watching, although most of them were sporting shirts from bigger clubs. Mbappe and Ronaldo were sat just in front of me, with Haaland a couple of places further along. Messi must have been off sick. One young lad had brought a loudhailer which he chanted into whilst encouraging the folks in the stand to clap along.
Tensions rose in the crowd when Espeleno took an early lead. It stayed that way until Utrera equalised bang on half-time. Two more second-half goals started the play-off party and Utrera even brought the old bloke on for a run out.
Tags: More storks, Olive Oil factory, Storks
Trail of the Lion King 
Leave a comment