Cover of the book “The Mythical Oviedo” by Nacho Azparren
In sport, as in life, there is only one thing better than living a story: finding someone who can tell it well over and over again. Each story becomes more beautiful with each repetition and develops into a distillate in which the good, the funny, the exciting and the epic take up all the space. An agreement is then reached with the audience, who accepts what is told as a consensus truth. That's how it happened. And how nice it is to experience it again through the filter of distance. Like people who can make people laugh by recreating a funny scene from a movie, and then when they watch the original version, it seems to them that the recreation is much funnier.
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Something similar happens with the period in Real Oviedo's history, which ranges from 1988 to 2001. During these years the club was in the first league. He won more than once at the Santiago Bernabéu and the Camp Nou. He even took part in the UEFA Cup. He liked players like Carlos, Jokanovic, Prosinecki and Duvobsky. He could sign a footballer from Paris Saint-Germain – Dely Valdés. I had a quarry that included Mata, Cazorla and Michu. At this time there were also disagreements, fights and failed signings, but over the years there was added more than a decade of difficulties between the third and second Division B. And then the past time seemed even better than it already was. it would have appeared by itself. The mythical Oviedo (Hoja de lata) is the book in which the journalist Nacho Azparren summarizes 13 years that gave birth to a generation of Oviedo fans and that grew in the club's collective memory with each new withdrawal from the club. Harrow. Azparren reconstructs and presents this shared memory in black and white, supported by more than 50 interviews with main and supporting actors. The result is an entertaining book that uses several moments from each season to explain not only Oviedo but also Spanish football in the 1990s. A text that has a great advantage over reality: it will be there to return to when something is missing. With a story that is told exactly the way the fan wants it: with the exact words so that the return to the past remains something comforting. Even better than having experienced it.
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