THE OTHER BARÇAS: RICHARD FITZPATRICKon how soccer is only one of five professional sports played by FC Barcelona, along with basketball, futsal, handball and roller hockey. Basketball is Real Madrid's only other sport. The rivalry is the same
ON THE night before New Year’s Eve last, Real Madrid arrived in the grounds of Barcelona’s Camp Nou to play their “eternal rivals”. It was Jornada 13, or Match Day 13, of the league. Barcelona trailed Real Madrid by a couple of points at the top of the table.
The stadium was humming. There wasn’t room to swirl a gobstopper in your mouth. TV cameras zoomed in on players as they went through their warm-ups, Real Madrid’s players having been roundly jeered and whistled at as they arrived from their dressingroom.
Seated fans from the home team wore replica jerseys of favourite players like Iniesta, the scorer of Spain’s winning goal in last summer’s World Cup soccer final.
A giant Catalan flag of red and yellow stripes, announcing the region’s separatist ideology, took up nearly the whole section of seating behind one end.
Dracs 1991, one of Barcelona’s most vociferous supporters clubs, led the chanting, armed with drums, flags and colourful banners. Barcelona’s club anthem, a screeching, triumphal number which sounds like it was taken from the same songbook as the familiar Champions League anthem, played over the tannoy just before the action started.
Within two minutes, Barcelona stormed into a 5-0 lead. Two minutes? Yes, one of the scores was a three-pointer, one of basketball’s most audacious plays.
Although more renowned for their rivalry in soccer, the two Spanish clubs are also bitter adversaries in basketball.
Basketball is one of five professional sports played by FC Barcelona, along with soccer; futsal, or indoor soccer; handball and roller hockey.
Basketball is the only other sport Real Madrid plays as well as soccer.
There are other multi-sports organisations around Europe, though, including Partizan Belgrade and several outfits from Greece, such as Olympiakos who, incidentally, Real Madrid beat in the Euroleague final in 1995, the last of Madrid’s record eight titles in basketball’s equivalent of the Champions League.
Real, who have won a record 30 Spanish basketball league titles, including a 10-in-a-row, are being eclipsed of late by Barça – who won last year’s European crown in Paris, their second title, following a maiden victory in 2003.
Indeed, Barcelona have a special incentive to retain their European title, as this year’s final will be played in the Catalan capital.
Last Sunday, Barcelona also beat Real 68-60 in Madrid, as it happened, in the final of the Copa del Rey, Spanish basketball’s cup competition.
The quarter-finals, semi-finals and final of the competition were played off over three days. The victory, which was cheered on by 90 travelling fans from Dracs 1991, means they have equalled Real Madrid’s haul of 22 wins in the competition.
Basketball is growing and growing in popularity in Spain, not least because of the prominence of several native sons in the NBA, including the LA Lakers All-Star player Pau Gasol, who returned to his home town with the Californian hoops team for an exhibition match against Barcelona last October.
Gasol is part of a generation of Spanish players who were entranced by sport’s original “Dream Team” – the USA basketball team which swept to victory in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It was the first time the NBA released their stars to play in the Olympics.
With Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan on court together, the team trounced its opponents by an average 43.8 points, which left an indelible impression on Gasol and Marc, his younger brother by five years, also an NBA player with Pau’s former club Memphis Grizzlies. Both players learnt their trade at FC Barcelona.
Juan Carlos Navarro, another player who soldiered alongside Pau Gasol at Barcelona, was drafted into the NBA in 2002, the year Pau Gasol was named NBA “Rookie of the Year”.
Basketball is easily FC Barcelona’s second most popular sport. Futsal, which is the other sport that Dracs 1991 follow, is one of the other most keenly supported of the club’s sports.
In fact, Spain is the number one-ranked futsal team in the world, ahead of Brazil and, curiously, Iran.
Futsal was consolidated as a sport by Fifa in 1989. Before then, it was surely one of sports’ more peculiar offshoots. Having originated in Uruguay in 1930, it quickly became fashionable in neighbouring Brazil, which dominated the sport for decades.
The standardised name for futsal derives from the Portuguese futebol de salão or “hall football”.
Among some of its more idiosyncratic rules, players were originally forbidden to speak during games; fans, too, at one stage. Players weren’t allowed to play the ball while touching the floor with their hand either, until a medical study in Brazil determined that – due to a large number of broken arms and dislocated shoulders – it was the country’s most dangerous sport.
These days the game has become standardised. It is played with a size 4 ball, which has a reduced bounce of 30 per cent compared to its counterpart from Association Football, an innovation which has made headed goals easier to score.
Two referees oversee play and each team is allowed unlimited substitutions over the 20-minute halves.
FC Barcelona’s outfit, which was founded by a group of former professional players in 1978, have a chequered history. Dissolved for four years in the early 1980s, they won their first cup in 22 years at the start of February in Segovia, a small city in central Spain whose prefix Sego means “victory”.
Spain’s most decorated handball player is Iñaki Urgangarín, son-in-law of King Juan Carlos II. Urgangarín grew up in Barcelona.
He joined FC Barcelona’s handball team as an 18-year-old and stayed for his whole career, where he won, among other accolades, five league victories in a row in the late 1990s.
He represented Spain in three Olympics – 1992, 1996 and 2000, when he was captain. During the Atlanta Olympics he met Infanta Cristina, the youngest daughter of Juan Carlos II. The pair married a year later.
Barcelona’s handball team goes back to 1942. The game was initially played on soccer pitches and as an 11-a-side game but went indoors in the 1950s and became a 7-a-side game. Older still on FC Barcelona’s statue books is the game of rugby, which has been played by the club since 1924.
There are 250 players registered with the club, from under-8s to senior. There are six to eight semi-professional players on its books, and a certain Henry Wallace at number seven on the veterans team, is a brother of Lions Richard, Paul and David.
Earlier this season, plans were afoot to get two of the French Top 14 teams to play a league game at the Camp Nou in the spring in a promotional exercise, but instead the Heineken Cup quarter-final between Toulon and Perpignan will be played in Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium on April 9th, the first time a Heineken Cup match will be played in the city.
The Spanish TV presenter Michael Robinson, who won 24 caps with the Republic of Ireland in the early 1980s and won a European Cup medal with Liverpool in 1984, organised a pirate rugby union competition last year in an effort to kick-start a professional Iberian league.
This year, he’s teamed up with the Spanish Rugby Federation to run off a similar tournament later in the season, based along regional divisions.
Barcelona’s rugby team moved to new facilities at Vall d’Hebron, perched high up in the northern part of the city, two years ago. A few coaches from Munster’s academy visited in early February for a youths coaching weekend.
Having slipped into the second division two seasons ago, the club’s senior team are chasing promotion this year. I watched them beat a team from Bilbao a few weeks ago 20-10. The game was played on Astro turf, a surface some of Spain’s rugby teams play on regularly.
Apart from the sod, everything else was familiar enough. The “third half” was conducted in the clubhouse. During the match, there was a lot of self-policing going on at the rucks.
The English command “crouch, hold, pause, engage” is universally accepted.
And when the game’s female referee was inadvertently upended by one of Barcelona’s rampaging secondrows early in the first half, a cry went up that would have been understood by locals as well as the South African, Italian and French players on the pitch: “Agua!”
13 Clubs in One
There are 13 sports played by Futbol Club de Barcelona, whose motto is the Catalan phrase més que un club, more than a club.
Five of these are professional - football, which has 15 teams; basketball, which has 14 teams, both male and female like the club’s football franchise; indoor football; handball; and roller hockey, the club’s most successful outfit, having won 10 European Cups, including eight-in-a-row from 1978 to 1985.
The other sports played by the club include rugby; athletics; baseball; ice hockey; field hockey; figure skating; men’s volleyball; and wheelchair basketball. Women’s volleyball has an “associated” status at present.
