Messi prepares to pass Paulino Alcantara 87 year old record On Wednesday night, Lionel Messi scored his 368th goal for FC Barcelona. As he lifted the ball gently over Joe Hart and the Camp Nou erupted, a few hundred yards away, the man he pursues -- just a solitary goal separates them now -- lay in silence. You can see the back of the north stand, the end at which Messi scored against Manchester City, from the cemetery of Les Corts, where row upon row of small square crypts stand. You can hear the stadium from there, too. Most of the crypts are adorned with marble or glass and decorated with photographs and flowers, but No. 4292 is unremarkable and unattended. It is hard to find, at the bottom of a huge row, and in recent years, few seem to have tried. The cement is grey and crumbling and there is a simple line identifying the family whose plot it is. For a long time, Alcantara’s record as Barcelona’s highest-ever goal scorer went largely unrecognised because the Spanish league was not founded until 1929, two years after he retired. The majority of his goals came in the Catalan championship and were not always granted official status, and there were unrecognised goals in friendlies. Messi officially became the club’s all-time top scorer when he overtook Cesar. Now he is close to Alcantara’s total, and while some historians, led by biographer Angel Iturriaga, have already pushed for greater recognition of Alcantara’s record, this has helped to bring him back into focus. He was Barcelona’s first star, winning 10 Catalan championships and five Cups. He did not play for Spain in their famous 1920 Olympic success in Antwerp because the Games coincided with his medical school exams, but he did later become Spain’s national team manager, and on the day he retired in 1927, a plane flew over the stadium and dropped a ball down to the pitch. He retired to become a doctor in the rough streets of Barcelona’s Barri Xino. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he escaped to France before returning to the Nationalist zone via Navarre, where he worked in a military hospital in Zaragoza before enlisting. He fought alongside Mussolini’s Italian troops for the Nationalists and entered Barcelona with Franco’s forces in early 1939. Alcantara’s father was a Spanish military man and his mother was from the Philippines. The family had been forced to return to Spain in 1899 after the loss of the Philippines and the final collapse of the Spanish empire the previous year. Nicknamed “Romperredes,” or the Net Buster, after a goal he scored for Spain against France in Bordeaux in 1922 was struck so hard that it literally broke the net -- and famous for playing with a towel hanging from his waist like an American football quarterback -- he first joined Barcelona at 15. He scored a hat trick in his debut. He had two spells at the club (1912-1916 and 1918-1927). During the second span, he played alongside Pepe Samitier and goalkeeper Ricardo Zamora. Although the manager, Jack Greenwell, originally played him in defence after his return to the club, supporters rebelled, and Alcantara returned to his striker’s role. Messi scores the 368th goal of his Barcelona career. There, he scored goal after goal, including in the Cups finals of 1920, 1922, and 1926. That was Barcelona’s first great team: winners of nine Catalan championships, five Cups and, by then without Alcantara, the first Spanish league title in 1929. Samitier and Zamora are legends of Spanish football history, but after one friendly against Barcelona, the captain of Dundee United called Alcantara “the best player I have ever seen. If he had been playing in England, he would have been a millionaire.” The two-year gap in Alcantara’s Barcelona career is explained by parental pressure. In 1916, he was forced to return to the Philippines but refused to do so until he had helped his team win the Cup, only to ultimately leave without being able to fulfill his promise. Standing in their way were Real Madrid. Barcelona won the first game 2-1, and Madrid won the second 4-1. However, the team that went through was decided by the number of wins, not the number of goals, so there was a replay. After 90 minutes, it was 4-4. The final score was 6-6, and Alcantara had scored three. For Madrid, there was a hat trick from a striker with a now-familiar name: Santiago Bernabeu. Another replay was set up two days later, and again it went to extra time, before Madrid took a 4-2 lead and Barcelona walked off in protest at what they considered the referees’ bias (Madrid would lose the final to Athletic Bilbao). “I put back my return to the Philippines just to play the Spanish championship, which should have been Barcelona’s, but the tricks of the ‘referee’ Berraondo made us lose in Madrid,” Alcantara wrote in his memoir. “That defeat produced in me tremendous sadness . . . It was the first time that I cried like a child, such was the terrible and unexpected humiliation, that atrocious conviction that that tournament legitimately belonged to us.” Alcantara boarded the boat beaten, and the crossing turned out to be an odyssey. The boat hit rocks and the captain demanded that passengers decamp to the cargo hold. When they arrived in the Philippines, Paulinho was asleep on a coffin. Not that it affected him too badly. In the Philippines, he won two league titles with Bohemian sporting club, helped the country to its biggest victory, a 15-2 defeat of Japan, and finished runner-up in the national table tennis championships. In 1918, he received a telegram begging him to return to a Barcelona team that was in crisis. He refused to eat until his parents let him go.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:38:28 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015