When Real Madrid Castilla reached the Copa del Rey final and played in Europe !
https://www.theshedend.com/forum/41-football-other-teams/?do=add
Some story this, had completely forgotten about this happening.
Spain’s domestic cup competition, the Copa del Rey, has provided plenty of weird and wonderful moments over the years and through its various name changes. There was Real Madrid’s violent 11-1 destruction of Barcelona in 1943, a match now considered the catalyst of the two teams’ rivalry. There was Gaizka Mendieta’s wonder goal in the 1999 final, which steered Claudio Ranieri’s Valencia to glory. More recently, there was the incident in last season’s edition when Arda Turan comically threw his boot at a linesman.
Yet none are as wacky as when Real Madrid Castilla, the historic club’s youth team, met their big brother in the 1979/80 season’s showpiece event.
Before 1991, reserve teams were treated almost as separate entities in Spain. Although they were never allowed to compete in the same division as their club’s senior team, they were allowed to enter the Copa del Rey, or the Copa del Generalísimo as it was known during the Franco dictatorship.
Generally, however, the youth teams failed miserably in the cup, rarely making it out of the first round. They were never allowed to be drawn against their senior team, with draws having to be redone if a senior team and its youth team were pulled out of the hat together. The only way a youth team could face its relative was if it reached the final, something that would never, organisers believed, happen. But happen it did. Real Madrid’s 1979/80 Castilla team proved everyone wrong by reaching that season’s cup final in an underdog story that even Leicester City would raise an eyebrow at.
Eighteen youth teams entered that season’s Copa del Rey, but the only one to scribble its name into the history books was the young side from Madrid. They were a talented group of youngsters at the hungry end of their career, full of enthusiasm and desperate to carve out a living in football. The team’s average age at the start of the campaign was 20, with no player over the age of 23 on the roster.
The coach, Juanjo García Santos, was similarly young, just 34-years-old at the season’s beginning. The campaign would prove the most successful of his short managerial career, suggesting that Castilla’s success was down to the players rather than the result of a talented novice coach, à la Barcelona B in 2007/08 when a certain Pep Guardiola was in charge.
At the heart of this group were a number of players who would go on to secure a mighty haul of league appearances for the first team, such as the imposing midfielder Ricardo Gallego (who played for Real Madrid 250 times), punctual striker Francisco Pineda (91 times) and the goalkeeper Agustín Rodríguez (76 times). Captain Javier Castañeda, the kind of defender never to be seen in a clean jersey, may never have reached the Real Madrid first team, but he did go on to play a club record 350 first division matches for Osasuna.
The birth of this great Castilla team coincided with the new air of optimism that had swept through Spain’s capital city following the death of General Franco in 1975, a movement dubbed the Movida Madrileña. After a few tense and unstable months following Franco’s death, in June 1977 Spaniards voted in their first general election since 1936, symbolising the return of power to the people.
At that point, the Movida Madrileña began in earnest and continued well into the 1980s. Musicians, filmmakers and writers regained freedom of artistic expression, while youth across the country no longer felt the shadow of the dictatorship-backed Catholic Church leering over their every move. The hedonistic movement saw the country’s youth finally take control of their own lives; some used that opportunity to stay out late and fill their noses, lungs and veins with recreational drugs, while others opted for a more careerist approach and took the movement as a sign that there were no longer any barriers to the top.
Whether consciously or not, the 1979/80 Castilla team played with that same youthful confidence. In the same way that young Madrid businessmen no longer believed their path to the top jobs would be blocked by bureaucracy and Franco’s famous favouritism, the Castilla team saw no reason to doubt themselves. Why couldn’t they go all the way in the cup?
The team’s star player, Ricardo Gallego, summed up the sentiment, saying: “We were a team full of youngsters that went out to play football and this surprised a lot of teams. When a team passes the ball with the fluency that we did, when a team runs as we did and when a team has the youthfulness that we did, any opponent that wasn’t prepared would be left behind.”
So it proved when first division side Herculés underestimated Castilla in the tournament’s fourth round, believing, in the fashion of a Scooby Doo villain, that their 4-1 advantage from the first leg would be enough to deal with these meddling kids. With the Real Madrid senior team on a bye – they would enter the competition in the next round – 9,000 members of the Madrid public came out on a chilly February evening to see the kids play, not for a minute expecting that they’d be witnessing the same team in the tournament’s final, or even in the next round.
Although two goals from Paco – who would go on to play in the first division with Racing Santander and Real Betis – had given Castilla a 2-0 lead with just half an hour played, the youth teamers struggled to find that extra goal that would level the tie and force extra-time. At the time, away goals did not decide level ties.
With just one minute to go – and with a lot fewer than 9,000 still inside the ground – the team’s midfield metronome Gallego headed the equaliser past the Herculés goalkeeper. It was now 4-4 on aggregate and the match headed in the direction of extra-time, where Valentin Cidón pounced on a loose ball in the 103rd minute to send the first division side out and keep the youngsters marching on.
Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo was shocked, though not because of Castilla’s progress but because of how long it had taken then to grab the lead. “What was surprising, and this is no exaggeration on our part, was that Castilla needed until the 89th minute to score their third goal and force extra time,” the next morning’s paper read. “They settled the tie in extra time, but they deserved it much earlier.”
Herculés were foolish to underestimate Castilla, a team that already comfortably dispatched with three senior sides to reach the fourth round. Extremadura had been blown away 10-2 on aggregate in the first round before Madrid neighbours Alcorcón fared little better in the next round, losing 5-1 over two legs. Racing Santander, a team that had just been relegated from LaLiga after four seasons in the top tier, proved a little trickier, but Castilla edged through thanks to a 3-1 win.
Having swatted aside Herculés, Juanjo’s boys had booked a ticket to the last-16, where Athletic Club thought they had hit the jackpot when their name was paired with Castilla’s. A 0-0 draw in Madrid suggested that the advantage was indeed Athletic’s ahead of the return leg at San Mamés in Bilbao, but Castilla would send the 23-time winners crashing out of the competition in their own back yard.
Their 2-1 win was no fluke either. It may sound close, but Athletic’s goal only arrived in injury time after second half strikes from Pineda and Balín had given Madrid’s youth team a two-goal lead. A solid performance from Castilla’s goalkeeper Agustín certainly helped, but Castilla’s performance overall was labelled, “a true honour to modern football”. This fast, attacking, flair-heavy football of the 1980s was, of course, quite different to what you and I would nowadays deem modern football.
Another trip to the Basque Country followed as Castilla were drawn against LaLiga leaders Real Sociedad in the quarter-finals, the furthest round they had ever previously reached. Having seen what had happened to their neighbours Athletic, the San Sebastián side did not want to give the Madrid youngsters any chance and they put in an excellent performance in the first leg, securing a 2-1 lead. Castilla were fortunate that the deficit was not larger.
It proved significant that the lead was just one goal when Castilla did what their senior side were unable to do in that season – defeat Real Sociedad. The senior team had lost 4-0 in the Basque Country and had drawn 2-2 at home against the blue and whites in their two league meetings, yet their youth team put in a stellar performance to score two first half goals through Paco and Sánchez Lorenzo in the cup match, before holding on to their lead to win 3-2 on aggregate. They may have had to huff and they may have had to puff, but they had dumped the LaLiga leaders out of the competition.
https://www.theshedend.com/forum/41-football-other-teams/?do=add
Some story this, had completely forgotten about this happening.
Spain’s domestic cup competition, the Copa del Rey, has provided plenty of weird and wonderful moments over the years and through its various name changes. There was Real Madrid’s violent 11-1 destruction of Barcelona in 1943, a match now considered the catalyst of the two teams’ rivalry. There was Gaizka Mendieta’s wonder goal in the 1999 final, which steered Claudio Ranieri’s Valencia to glory. More recently, there was the incident in last season’s edition when Arda Turan comically threw his boot at a linesman.
Yet none are as wacky as when Real Madrid Castilla, the historic club’s youth team, met their big brother in the 1979/80 season’s showpiece event.
Before 1991, reserve teams were treated almost as separate entities in Spain. Although they were never allowed to compete in the same division as their club’s senior team, they were allowed to enter the Copa del Rey, or the Copa del Generalísimo as it was known during the Franco dictatorship.
Generally, however, the youth teams failed miserably in the cup, rarely making it out of the first round. They were never allowed to be drawn against their senior team, with draws having to be redone if a senior team and its youth team were pulled out of the hat together. The only way a youth team could face its relative was if it reached the final, something that would never, organisers believed, happen. But happen it did. Real Madrid’s 1979/80 Castilla team proved everyone wrong by reaching that season’s cup final in an underdog story that even Leicester City would raise an eyebrow at.
Eighteen youth teams entered that season’s Copa del Rey, but the only one to scribble its name into the history books was the young side from Madrid. They were a talented group of youngsters at the hungry end of their career, full of enthusiasm and desperate to carve out a living in football. The team’s average age at the start of the campaign was 20, with no player over the age of 23 on the roster.
The coach, Juanjo García Santos, was similarly young, just 34-years-old at the season’s beginning. The campaign would prove the most successful of his short managerial career, suggesting that Castilla’s success was down to the players rather than the result of a talented novice coach, à la Barcelona B in 2007/08 when a certain Pep Guardiola was in charge.
At the heart of this group were a number of players who would go on to secure a mighty haul of league appearances for the first team, such as the imposing midfielder Ricardo Gallego (who played for Real Madrid 250 times), punctual striker Francisco Pineda (91 times) and the goalkeeper Agustín Rodríguez (76 times). Captain Javier Castañeda, the kind of defender never to be seen in a clean jersey, may never have reached the Real Madrid first team, but he did go on to play a club record 350 first division matches for Osasuna.
The birth of this great Castilla team coincided with the new air of optimism that had swept through Spain’s capital city following the death of General Franco in 1975, a movement dubbed the Movida Madrileña. After a few tense and unstable months following Franco’s death, in June 1977 Spaniards voted in their first general election since 1936, symbolising the return of power to the people.
At that point, the Movida Madrileña began in earnest and continued well into the 1980s. Musicians, filmmakers and writers regained freedom of artistic expression, while youth across the country no longer felt the shadow of the dictatorship-backed Catholic Church leering over their every move. The hedonistic movement saw the country’s youth finally take control of their own lives; some used that opportunity to stay out late and fill their noses, lungs and veins with recreational drugs, while others opted for a more careerist approach and took the movement as a sign that there were no longer any barriers to the top.
Whether consciously or not, the 1979/80 Castilla team played with that same youthful confidence. In the same way that young Madrid businessmen no longer believed their path to the top jobs would be blocked by bureaucracy and Franco’s famous favouritism, the Castilla team saw no reason to doubt themselves. Why couldn’t they go all the way in the cup?
The team’s star player, Ricardo Gallego, summed up the sentiment, saying: “We were a team full of youngsters that went out to play football and this surprised a lot of teams. When a team passes the ball with the fluency that we did, when a team runs as we did and when a team has the youthfulness that we did, any opponent that wasn’t prepared would be left behind.”
So it proved when first division side Herculés underestimated Castilla in the tournament’s fourth round, believing, in the fashion of a Scooby Doo villain, that their 4-1 advantage from the first leg would be enough to deal with these meddling kids. With the Real Madrid senior team on a bye – they would enter the competition in the next round – 9,000 members of the Madrid public came out on a chilly February evening to see the kids play, not for a minute expecting that they’d be witnessing the same team in the tournament’s final, or even in the next round.
Although two goals from Paco – who would go on to play in the first division with Racing Santander and Real Betis – had given Castilla a 2-0 lead with just half an hour played, the youth teamers struggled to find that extra goal that would level the tie and force extra-time. At the time, away goals did not decide level ties.
With just one minute to go – and with a lot fewer than 9,000 still inside the ground – the team’s midfield metronome Gallego headed the equaliser past the Herculés goalkeeper. It was now 4-4 on aggregate and the match headed in the direction of extra-time, where Valentin Cidón pounced on a loose ball in the 103rd minute to send the first division side out and keep the youngsters marching on.
Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo was shocked, though not because of Castilla’s progress but because of how long it had taken then to grab the lead. “What was surprising, and this is no exaggeration on our part, was that Castilla needed until the 89th minute to score their third goal and force extra time,” the next morning’s paper read. “They settled the tie in extra time, but they deserved it much earlier.”
Herculés were foolish to underestimate Castilla, a team that already comfortably dispatched with three senior sides to reach the fourth round. Extremadura had been blown away 10-2 on aggregate in the first round before Madrid neighbours Alcorcón fared little better in the next round, losing 5-1 over two legs. Racing Santander, a team that had just been relegated from LaLiga after four seasons in the top tier, proved a little trickier, but Castilla edged through thanks to a 3-1 win.
Having swatted aside Herculés, Juanjo’s boys had booked a ticket to the last-16, where Athletic Club thought they had hit the jackpot when their name was paired with Castilla’s. A 0-0 draw in Madrid suggested that the advantage was indeed Athletic’s ahead of the return leg at San Mamés in Bilbao, but Castilla would send the 23-time winners crashing out of the competition in their own back yard.
Their 2-1 win was no fluke either. It may sound close, but Athletic’s goal only arrived in injury time after second half strikes from Pineda and Balín had given Madrid’s youth team a two-goal lead. A solid performance from Castilla’s goalkeeper Agustín certainly helped, but Castilla’s performance overall was labelled, “a true honour to modern football”. This fast, attacking, flair-heavy football of the 1980s was, of course, quite different to what you and I would nowadays deem modern football.
Another trip to the Basque Country followed as Castilla were drawn against LaLiga leaders Real Sociedad in the quarter-finals, the furthest round they had ever previously reached. Having seen what had happened to their neighbours Athletic, the San Sebastián side did not want to give the Madrid youngsters any chance and they put in an excellent performance in the first leg, securing a 2-1 lead. Castilla were fortunate that the deficit was not larger.
It proved significant that the lead was just one goal when Castilla did what their senior side were unable to do in that season – defeat Real Sociedad. The senior team had lost 4-0 in the Basque Country and had drawn 2-2 at home against the blue and whites in their two league meetings, yet their youth team put in a stellar performance to score two first half goals through Paco and Sánchez Lorenzo in the cup match, before holding on to their lead to win 3-2 on aggregate. They may have had to huff and they may have had to puff, but they had dumped the LaLiga leaders out of the competition.