César Luis Menotti, the same who called the double pivot a farce, defined the values to be exercised in front of the defense at the time. “Quality, game knowledge, simplicity.” Teresa Abelleira (Pontevedra, 2000) fits this pattern. In a team that seeks support and is ordered off the ball, it’s always necessary to have players who give it fluidity so that when it wears red it’s in the perfect ecosystem. His importance in the world champion team can be understood with one piece of information: he started in all seven tournaments and touched the ball an average of 102 times per game. And she plays to play, she doesn’t play to play.
“He improves the moves when he receives the ball, he knows how to position himself, always well defined. It’s very difficult to see someone who understands the game like that,” explained Jorge Vilda when considering including her in the national team. But at the EM 2022 he left them out in the last cut. The last-minute loss of Salma Paralluelo encouraged the manager to change his plans. He dismissed the option of a character change and called up Abelleira, who finished the championship in the starting XI, as a central defender in a midfield that Guijarro closed.
The superb Barcelona midfielder was one of the players who stuck by her decision not to attend a FA talk. So Vilda found a solution in Abelleira, who had just come through a difficult season in Madrid, where competition from Claudia Zornoza, Maite Oroz and the Gala Sandie Toletti had robbed her of her prominence. “What we saw at the World Cup is an excellent adaptation exercise that also showed that she gained a lot through sacrifice off the ball and in confrontations,” recalls Manu Sánchez, who was her coach at Deportivo for four seasons, where she as a player acted upstairs as well as inside.
This embryonic deportivo grew largely from the talent of the Galician cadet squad. They were alarmed at the club when they started discussing the ages of the players he had recruited with Manu Sánchez. Belleira was 16 years old. “On a game understanding level, it’s the same as it is now. It’s something innate. “It is very rare for a girl of this age to think of teaming up with a teammate when she receives the ball,” emphasizes the coach. “She was a young woman off the field and a veteran football player on the field. She threw the team on her back without thinking how old she was,” recalls Miriam Ríos, the captain, one of the few who had already accumulated experience on the field. green. After six months at the club, Abelleira and her partner Raquel Béjar became the first two footballers to sign a professional contract with Deportivo in January 2017. “I asked the club to believe in these girls and they did,” Sánchez recalled. The team held up well in three seasons in the Silver category: on its debut in the First Division, it topped the table for several days and finished fourth. Abelleira joined Real Madrid this summer after giving birth.
“Tere is now known all over the world, but in Galicia we have known for a long time that she is the best,” complains Miriam Rios. Behind it hides a formation with several personal nuances that explain the football of Abelleira, daughter of Milo, a coach with 340 games in Second B ahead of teams like Pontevedra, Celta B, Ourense or Cultural. In the sky-blue subsidiary, several generations of players from Borja Oubiña to Denis Suárez benefited from his teaching. “In terms of football culture and values, it certainly helps to have a father like Milo,” says Sánchez, reliving how a discussion in the locker room about a warm-up was resolved by this 16-year-old girl with one sentence: “You taught me that what the technician says belongs in the crowd.” “I was blown away,” recalls Sánchez.
Now comes the management of success, but there those who know her as a former Deportivo captain have no doubts: “She is natural, close and friendly and that is in a footballer who is a reference for so many girls and boys , of paramount importance.” It is so gratifying to see what she and her teammates are achieving! I keep getting goosebumps. All of us who were once football players are and always will be, we will always feel this star as ours too.
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