All The Latest

By: Paul | October 20th, 2009

The international break is over! Because this latest international break was also during Roanoke College’s fall break, I took some time off from writing, but now I’m back in business.

The first news to report is the result of Athletic’s last game: a 2-1 loss to Sporting Gijon. Once again, I missed this game (I spent Sunday moving back into my room after the break and reorganizing for the second half of the semester). Now, I know I have missed many games so far this year, but this is because of school- luckily I’m almost finished with that.

But, I digress. I am quite unhappy with the result- Sporting is a weaker team than Athletic, the game was played at home, and Athletic tend to do well against Sporting anyway. From all reports, Athletic played a SportingCelebration better game and created more chances, it just seems that the Sporting defense was too much this time. Toquero managed to make himself useful (!) and scored a late goal, but the scoreline says it all- this is another loss. I have three questions coming out of this game: Where is the De Marcos we saw during the pre-season? Why the hell hasn’t de Cerio been given a game yet, even a sub-in? Most importantly, what the hell has happened to the team since the terrific start??

Whatever, the next game is another Europa League game, to be contested against CD Nacional of Portugal this Thursday (another game I’ll likely miss- I have class almost all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays).

sportinglineups

There is some news to report about Athletic’s stadium. Construction on San Mames Barria will begin in April 2010 and the stadium should be ready for the 2014/15 season (check out a translated news article here). For photos of old men in suits standing around a model of the new stadium, check out Athletic’s official site. Oh, and here are some computer-generated photos of what the stadium should look like: sanmamesbarria1 sanmamesbarria2 sanmamesbarria3

As you also may know, I have expanded the services of the Athletic Club Offside itself recently.

If you haven’t already, I would suggest taking a look at the Twitter page I have created for the Athletic Offside. I know firsthand how difficult it can be as a non-Spanish speaker to follow Athletic, so I try to post news articles I find (some translated, others originally in English) to provide fans of the team with Athletic news in English. I also like using Twitter as a means to generate more feedback and to communicate with readers and find other news, so I think the project there is working relatively well.

Speaking of the team being difficult to follow as an English speaker, check out the English section of Athletic’s official website, and please tell me how much of that is actually written in English. Thanks is due to the team for now officially making it more difficult for non-Spanish speakers to follow the team. If it weren’t for my class load, I would just suck it up and learn Spanish myself. However, I do have some exciting news.

Because I am not myself a Spanish-speaker, I posted last week looking for someone who would be willing to write up transcriptions of videos about the team. I received a quick response from a very qualified individual and will be posting his first work on here very soon. A college student like me, it may be a little while before I can post the first translation, but I believe it will be worth the wait; I have always wanted to be able to understand those interviews and press conferences that Athletic posts on their website.

Also, Muniain and Aketxe are away in Nigeria with the Spain U-17 squad. Unfortunately, that means that Muniain, who I believe has provided a huge lift to the team, will be away from duty with the Lions for a while. Still, I wish him well and believe that playing some games in Nigeria could help him further develop. I will post some updates about them once games have been played there.

That’s all the hot news I can come up with now. I will probably post a preview of Thursday’s game tomorrow, and will try to actually watch that game, class schedule permitting.