Javier Clemente: A tough Basque
CHAPTER 26
The Bruiser from Barakaldo
The year of Cruyff’s dream team’s apotheosis was also the year when Javier Clemente, a very different character than the Dutchman, was appointed as the new manager of the Spanish national team. Clemente was born among the steel mills of Barakaldo, the industrial suburb of Bilbao, the same neighborhood where José Lluis Núñez, the president of FC Barcelona, had once lived. But while the Núñez family abandoned the Basque Country for Catalonia, the Clementes were part of its social, political, and religious fabric. Javier’s father worked as a foreman in the metallurgical conglomerate Altos Hornos de Vizcaya in a region that during the late 1970s was hit by the onset of recession—with factory closures fueling a tense political and social situation provoked by the violence of the Basque terrorist group ETA.
Clemente began playing for Athletic Bilbao at the age of sixteen, when he earned a reputation as a dedicated workhorse whose fighting spirit, passing skills, and vision off the ball defied his small five-foot-six stature. As a player, he came to personify Basque soccer at its best—a mixture of guts and gift, aggression and talent with the ball. He was a member of the Athletic team that won the Copa del Generalissimo in 1969, but his playing career was subsequently cut short at the age of nineteen by a crippling tackle from behind by a Sabadell player called Maranon, which he accepted with seemingly disarming stoicism. “I don’t blame Maranon for anything,” he would tell Alfredo Relaño of El Pais in 1977. “It was a very tough tackle, but there are many like that. It had been a tough match, and we were all a bit picados [stirred up like fighting bulls who have been lanced by the picador]. We were a minute away from the final whistle and I had the ball at my feet; he came in and broke my leg.” His determination to try to recover from his injury turned into a personal odyssey, with his repeated attempts to recover frustrated by a series of botched operations and compulsory military service over an agonizing three-year period before he finally threw in the towel.
He retrained as a coach, despite being scarred physically, and some would argue mentally, for life. He would continue to show interested journalists the four inches of discolored and hacked skin on his leg for many years later, like a veteran showing off his war wound or a bullfighter his worst goring. It fueled the myth of another icon of the Spanish fury—with Clemente, while at Athletic, making much of his distinctive Basque credentials.
In an extensive interview with a Bilbao journalist in 1985, Clemente proudly told the story of how as a schoolboy during the Franco years he had painted a picture of the banned Basque national flag, a gesture for which he was punished by his teacher with a black mark against his exam sheet. Nevertheless, he claimed not to bear an enduring grudge against the nuns and Salesian brothers who ran the school. His enduring loyalty—next to soccer—was to the Catholic faith.
After serving his apprenticeship with Arenas Club de Getxo, CD Baskonia, and Athletic’s youth training academy in Lezama, he was promoted to the first team in 1981, and he set about putting together one of the most successful Athletic teams in the club’s history. For the next five years he took the club into its last golden period, winning two league championships (1982–1983 and 1983–1984) and a Copa del Rey and SuperCopa in 1984. The celebrations of the triumphant two seasons coincided with a particularly nasty period of political violence involving the Basque terrorist separatist group ETA and the Spanish security forces. As has occurred for much of Spanish history, soccer was celebrated by those who genuinely enjoyed the game and those who sought to strengthen their political identity through their team. Add to this tribal loyalties based on family affiliation, and you had a combustible mix where soccer could as easily become a demonstration as a party.
Athletic’s triumphs in the early 1980s were marked by the ringing of church bells, nuns applauding from the windows of their convents, and factory workers and militant students joining in the collective party as the team was transported along Bilbao’s Nervión river on a barge. For a very short time the guns fell silent, at least in Bilbao. It was with Clemente that Athletic won its last league championship of the twentieth century, in 1984. From the balcony of the palace of Bilbao’s mayor’s office, Clemente declared that it was a victory for the people and not just the team. Just who the people were was kept deliberately vague. After all, Athletic fans ranged from old Franco diehards to ETA sympathizers. If there was something that united them, it was the myth of some imagined racial purity that could be found only in the region of Spain. A popular song at the time held up the club’s Basque-only selection process as an example that other clubs were condemned not to follow. “We always fight with our own weapons, because we do not like imports” went its defining verse.
Clemente had a bust of Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, in a place of pride in his Bilbao home. Lest we forget, Arana was a controversial figure in Spanish history, claiming that the only true homeland, or patria, was Vizcaya, the province based around Bilbao, before proclaiming that his patria extended across several northern provinces and even across the French border. Arana claimed that the basic principles of Basque nationalism—as he saw them—were revealed to him on Whitsunday, a key date in the Catholic liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Christ following his resurrection. Arana called his nation Euzkadi, one in which some Basques were clearly more equal than others. Before he died he penned some racist articles against the maketos—an offensive slang term used to identify the immigrants from other parts of Spain to include those in Barakaldo, where Clemente’s dad lived and worked. Arana was not to every freethinking liberal’s taste, but then Clemente was, well, Clemente.
The rest of Spain continued to look at most Basques as terrorists and remained distinctly unimpressed by Athletic, which it was claimed had won more by the mistakes of its betters than any superior skill of its own. But in Bilbao, frustrating the big clubs at that time—the Real Madrid of Martín Vázquez, Sanchis, Santillana, and Juanito, the FC Barcelona of Maradona and Schuster and the then powerful Valencia led by the aging Argentine world champion Mario Kempes—was seen as a noble achievement for a club with only modest resources based on homegrown talent.
During this period, Clemente was courted by the Basque Nationalist Party that Arana had founded, his professed cultural identity (“Us Basques are a race apart,” he declared in a controversial interview with Spanish state television), no-nonsense work ethos, and religious convictions seemingly epitomizing the best traditional values of the Basque nation. In 1985, the then president of the PNV, the former Jesuit Xavier Arzallus, said of Clemente, “For me he is an example. Not because he is a coach of Athletic. Not because he is famous. Simply because he is a whole man, of the kind that Di-agones looked for with a candle in the agora of Athens in daylight. And he is a complete Basque.”
Later a friendly journalist asked Clemente to imagine the team he would most like to have in his life. Clemente volunteered just three “players” he would like to have with him in his version of a quasi-political and spiritual “dream team.” Clemente named as two of his key players the Basque nationalist leader Arzallus and the auxiliary bishop of Bilbao. Only one other person was “selected” by Clemente, and that was Pope John Paul II, in the position of goalkeeper. Why? “Because he can save everything,” said Clemente—such was his religious conviction and his loyalty to one of the most charismatic figures in papal history.
Clemente, the son of poor immigrants who grew up speaking Spanish and not Euskara, the Basque language, was distrusted as a reactionary by the left-wing sympathizers of ETA, the Basque separatist terrorist organization, and became a controversial and divisive figure in Spanish soccer, hated as much as he was loved, generating particular resentment among the Cruyff-inspired stylists of FC Barcelona. During Athletic’s glory period, Clemente would make a habit of ensuring that the San Mames stadium was conditioned to undermine any visitor whose game was predicated on swift passing and rapid movement off the ball. He made famous the manguerazo (the sprinkler), even when it rained—as it often does in that part of Spain. The method involved soaking the field prior to the game to ensure that the turf covered at least half the boot and turned muddy within minutes of the game getting under way.
One of his favorite players was Andoni Goikoetxea, whose devastating tackle on Maradona’s left ankle on September 23, 1983, had an eerie resemblance to the injury suffered by Clemente fourteen years earlier, as if the coach’s tactics had been motivated by some psychological need for revenge. Goikoetxea was banned for eighteen games, later commuted to ten, after which Clemente brought him back into the team for Athletic’s European Cup tie against Joe Fagan’s Liverpool. With Liceranzu and Txema Noriega, the “Butcher of Bilbao” formed part of an uncompromising defense that with a great deal of cynical time wasting held the “reds” star attacking lineup of Dalgish, Souness, Ian Rush, Craig Johnston, and Michael Robinson to a frustrating goalless draw at Anfield. But Athletic lost 0–1 on the return leg at San Mames, thanks to a sixty-sixth-minute header from Rush.
Clemente thus failed to repeat the success of fifteen years earlier when he played on a team that eliminated one of the greatest Liverpool teams ever from the European Fair’s Cup. During the 1968–1969 season, the two teams played each other in the first round of the tournament, a forerunner of the UEFA Cup. Both legs were 2–1 for the home side, which meant that the tie had to be settled by the toss of a coin at Anfield. The toss was successfully gambled by Athletic captain Koldo Aguirre.
Even in defeat Clemente, who in his best playing days was compared by his faithful admirers to “the blond Englishman” Bobby Charlton, showed little remorse, sticking obsessively with a style of play he claimed to have learned from his other English heroes, Bobby Robson (when at Ipswich) and Ronnie Allen, his coach at Athletic. He never apologized for his side’s brutal treatment of Maradona in the King’s Cup final against Barca on May 5, 1984. In 2010 he told journalist and author Orfeo Suarez, “We fought like dogs in that final of 1984, because with Maradona and Schuster we had to do some dirty work so they couldn’t play against us. If we allowed them to play, we wouldn’t have had a chance. As a result neither of them could get a touch on the ball, and we scored a goal and won.”
The philosophy of the ends justifying the means evidently brought Clemente the results his fans wanted—but once Athletic’s performance began to decline in La Liga and failed to deliver any major international trophy, the coach’s arrogance and authoritarianism began to be viewed as a liability. In January 1986 Clemente squandered the collective good faith generated by Athletic’s championship victories by relegating to the subs’bench one of the team’s most successful and best-loved players, striker Manu Sarabia. The move was justified by Clemente on the questionable grounds that it was best to keep even the better players for the decisive minutes of the game. It proved hugely divisive among the fans and became widely criticized in the local media. Clemente was fired and became coach at Espanyol.
His move to a club that had traditionally been viewed as Barcelona’s non-Catalan club, with many of its members drawn from the central government’s civil service, may have seemed somewhat at odds with his Basque credentials, but they did no harm to Clemente’s career, however controversial it remained. After getting Espanyol qualified for the UEFA Cup, the team beat Milan and Internazionale before losing to Bayer Leverkusen in a second-leg final penalty shoot-out. The defeat followed another of Clemente’s cantankerous and unthinkable decisions—this time leaving out two of the team’s best players, John Lauridsen and Ernesto Valverde.
Yet Clemente’s reputation was such that he lived to fight another day. After a further successful spell at Atletico de Madrid and a brief return to Espanyol in the 1990–1991 season, Clemente was appointed coach of Spain’s national team in a move celebrated by his diehard loyalists in the working-class districts of Bilbao, Barcelona, and Madrid but greeted with trepidation by a new generation of wise soccer commentators—among them Johan Cruyff and the then coach of Real Madrid, Argentine philosopher of soccer Jorge Valdano. They wanted the beautiful game of flowing, attacking soccer with the emphasis on quick passing and interchangeable positions to take dominance over Spanish soccer and feared the unpredictable consequences of his impulsive character on the development of a winning team.
Clemente’s trademark was to pick players for his squad best known for their toughness and “efficiency” in defense. He had great faith, for example, in the Real Madrid powerhouse Fernando Hierro, a player who was equally at ease as a central defender or defensive midfielder with a talent focused on his range of passing skills and use of his height to score goals. At the same time, Clemente wasted little time in excluding from his squad all five components of the legendary Vulture Squad, a move that soured his relations with large swaths of Real Madrid fans. It was almost as if he saw star players as a challenge to his authority.
Clemente initially defied the pessimists by taking Spain on a relatively smooth run—eight wins and one loss in twelve matches—into the 1994 World Cup in the United States before losing to Italy in the quarterfinal when Roberto Baggio scored a late goal. In England in the Euro championships two years later, Spain fell at a similar stage.
In the World Cup in France in 1998, Clemente’s strategy of remaining loyal to a select group of trusted players regardless if their form proved costly, with the aging Zubizarreta no longer able to protect the Spanish goal with the brilliance of his earlier years. Clemente did bring into the squad the twenty-year-old Raúl, a rising star in La Liga, but his inclusion failed to lift the team’s spirits. Clemente was widely criticized as having lost his own killer instinct, as Spain failed to even reach the second round. He was eventually fired during the qualification for the 2000 European Championship in Belgium and Switzerland. In its time of need, the Spanish Federation recalled former Real Madrid player José Antonio Camacho as his replacement, but he too was destined to fail.
