Trail of the Lion King

The first couple of nights on this Spain trip were spent in Vitoria-Gasteiz. It’s just like almost every other Spanish town of a similar size, with a few big churches, a historic centre and any number of narrow cobbled streets and tapas bars. Perfect really.  It’s also the home town of La Liga side Alaves. Unfortunately they didn’t have a home game during our stay and so I had to look a little further afield to Eibar for a game on the Sunday evening.

The 6.30pm kick-off worked well in that it gave us plenty of time to go for a walk along the GR-38. It’s a hiking trail that extends from Oyon to Otxandio and over our four-day stay we managed to cover forty miles through woodland, vineyards and a selection of small villages. It was an ideal way to finally finish off a pair of shoes.

The post-hiking drive to Eibar should have been a straightforward forty-five minutes up the motorway, but for some reason the sat nav took us to Durango instead which, once we’d realised we were in the wrong place, meant a doubling of our journey time. You can see Eibar’s Ipurua municipal stadium from the motorway, but parking nearby was initially hard to find. Fortunately El Corte Ingles had generously opened their underground car park, despite the store itself being closed for Easter Sunday. It meant that even with the detour and the parking difficulties I still found myself outside of the ground with twenty minutes to spare.

I’d initially expected to struggle for a ticket as Eibar’s ground only holds seven thousand, an amazingly small capacity for a top-flight club in one of Europe’s major leagues. However, they seem to have some sort of scheme where season ticket holders can sell their seat back to the club if they can’t attend. My frequent checking of their website paid dividends when I was able to snap up a fifty euro ticket for the central area of the north stand.

My seat was in row nine of eleven, so a pretty good view. Mind you, with the front row being raised up six feet or so, everyone had a decent vantage point. The people around me all greeted each other with hugs. They seemed very doubtful that I was in the right seat and were obviously expecting to see the regular occupant.

Oddly, the ground wasn’t full, with approximately eight hundred seats remaining empty. I’ve no idea why that was as only the odd seat had been on sale. Visitors Real Sociedad did their bit with around a third of the stadium being filled by their fans, most of whom were wearing their blue and white colours. There was little in the way of segregation, but there was no trouble despite pockets of vocal fans finding themselves singing alongside their opposition.

After not seeing the fake Kike, Kike Sola, the day before at Bilbao, I was quite pleased to see the real one, Kike Garcia, up front for Eibar. He looked different to how I remembered him from his time at the Boro. He seemed leaner, maybe a bit fitter and somewhat oddly appeared to have a better head of hair. Perhaps he’s had a transplant or wears a wig. He still went to ground very easily when challenged but, as when he was with us, he rarely drew the foul.

Kike didn’t manage to get on the scoresheet and neither did anyone else as the game petered out into a nil-nil draw.