The doors have closed on La Liga, just like front doors all over Spain
Sevilla midfielder Óliver Torres was at home making dinner when the match he had looked forward to more than any other was supposed to be kicking off, a “magic moment” that didn’t arrive. Across the city that hosts the biggest, noisiest derby there is, the Real Betis goalkeeper Joel Robles was preparing food and bed for his daughter, who is six months old. For 90 minutes, they like to say, the whole of Seville stops. This time it stopped for much longer, and so did the rest of Spain. How much longer, no one knows.
Torres and Robles were due to face each other on Sunday night, but the Sánchez Pizjuán stood empty and so did the streets, bar the occasional police car passing to ensure no-one was out. The country was on lockdown because of coronavirus. There was effectively a curfew only this one was all hours and so they, like everyone else, were stuck at home. Betis striker Borja Iglesias and Sevilla defender Sergio Reguilón, though, did face each other: from their sofas, online and on Fifa, they played the derby. Broadcast live, Betis won and Borja scored, which was convenient.
Sixty thousand people tuned in to watch it. There was nothing else to do.
“It’s the biggest game of the year, for the city, for all our fans, and it would have started at nine,” Torres said, just after quarter past. He was doing something else instead but his mind drifted, and he can’t have been the only one. “I’m at home, thinking about what might have been,” he admitted. “What I would be feeling, what would have been happening, all those people supporting you. You miss football anyway, so imagine a game like this. This was a magic moment for me: it was going to be the first time I lived the Seville derby at the Pizjuán.”
But the stadium, like all the rest, was empty. Like everywhere, in fact. In Madrid, children had been sent home from class on Wednesday and soon the rest of the country followed. Schools and stadiums: made to be full, noisy and alive, there may be no building on earth that feels more wrong when there’s no one inside, like skeletons. Kids were off school and it was sunny out so to start with they went where they were always going to go. Which meant that the next day, parks were closed too. Another space that shouldn’t be silent, melancholy expressed in police tape around a playground.
There’s probably no greater playground than a football ground. On Wednesday, Valencia had played in an empty stadium against Atalanta – a brilliant game that felt like no game at all – and Atlético’s visit to Liverpool was the last normal game for some time, maybe even this season, although the president of the league, Javier Tebas, says he is convinced they will find a way to complete it.
The initial idea had been for this weekend’s La Liga games to go ahead