Maybe an Irish Messi is just around the corner
But before we felt any sand between our toes or stood in the shadow of the Sagrada Família, the spectacular, unfinished modernist cathedral by Gaudí, the journey almost ended in the damp school hall. Summoned to a meeting on the eve of our planned departure we were told the ferry company had gone on strike.
We either leave in a couple of hours taking a different, circuitous route to our sunny destination or we don’t go at all, lads? Puff! 25 teenage boys squeeze through the swinging double doors and sprint home to grab a gear bag.
Then it was a bus to Rosslare. Ferry to Wales. Another coach to Portsmouth. Boat to France. I won’t suger-coat it, there was a lot of vomit spilled.
We then swung into Paris for breakfast and a leg-stretching stroll before bravely heading south with merely an ‘Oasis: Live at Maine Road’ video, a 50-card deck and inside jokes to keep us occupied.
At dusk some time later, our coach wended its way down the corkscrew roads from the steep hills that hug the north of the city. The more mature amongst us sported a few backpacker’s whiskers, we exchanged road stories like relieved army vets choppering out of Saigon. Weary from interminable days in transit and repeat renditions of Wonderwall, we still knew it was worth it.
Our teacher – a teak-tough hurler with an obvious taste for the dramatic — took a tape from his top pocket and pushed it into the driver’s stereo system. Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé singing the soaring anthem to the 1992 Olympic Games. Barcelona. Yes, it was worth it.
Antonio Mantero, a 31-year-old Dubliner, has been on the road to Barcelona a bit longer. He spent the first nine years of his life living in Portugal.
Growing up as a football-mad kid he was a fervent fan of the famed Sporting Lisbon. When he was sent to boarding in school by his parents back in Ireland, he unpacked a Mediterranean approach to football as well as a new uniform.
Like a lot of us, ‘girls and everything else’ seduced him and the games of ball on a Sunday morning slipped down the list of priorities. But when his young nephew’s underage side was left rudderless after both their manager and coach walked away from the sidelines, he pulled on the studs again and laced a whistle round his neck.
“So I went and got my FAI badges and I met David Berber on the course.
“You’d get to know each other I suppose and we were talking over a coffee about our football philosophies and everything else. Normal chat. But later on we realised one of us knew of a friend of a friend with a connection to Barcelona so that call was made and we went over for a look eventually.”
And in the tradition of exchange programmes, the Nou Camp’s best trainers are to visit their new Irish friends.
Next month, dozens of football coaches from throughout the country will cram into Kildare’s Carton house. There they’ll be treated to a treatise on tika-taka from Catalan footballing evangelists. Some of the FCB’s brains trust will then file out to the hotel’s state-of-the-art pitches and teach Ireland’s volunteer coaches the same drills and exercises the likes of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta all went through. Not a bad, Saturday.
“We’ve had an unbelievable response,” says Mantero. “I’d love to make a real change to the way we train young players in this country. The FAI try their best but it’s the leagues who hold on the power so we have to start from the bottom up.”
Mantero now coaches the little U10s at Lourdes Celtic in the capital. And he’s stubbornly sticking to his belief in neat, sophisticated football despite some resistance.
“To be honest we lost all our first games. When I took over they were a real kick-and-rush side. They had been managed by a guy in his 60s — a good guy — but we have a completely different philosophy.
“The whole underage thing should be about enjoying it. You go to any park or pitch in the country on a Saturday morning and you’ll see coaches and parents like maniacs on the sidelines and very little smiling on the pitch itself; that’s just wrong.
“I go over to the parents before every match and say ‘listen, please don’t coach the kids. Encourage them if you want but trust us’. To be honest if I had my way I’d have all the parents over in the far corner where the kids couldn’t hear them.”
But the parents have a bit more to cheer about now at least. “We won nine on the row after we settled down. But to be honest it’s really not about that. We say to them every week: go out and enjoy yourself. And we mean it.”
Just like Guadi’s unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrida Famillia in the centre of Barcelona, he’s building from the bottom. But it’s a beautiful work in progress, and he thinks it’ll be worth it.
