Casillas eyes win to unite a nation and repay a debt

by: Sid Lowe from Guardian.co.uk (June 7, 2004)

Iker Casillas bursts out laughing. "Nah, it wasn't a big deal, just a bit stupid; it happens," he says, a grin stretching across his face as he remembers the scene. Not a big deal? Try telling that to his dad. When Iker was "seven or eight", he is not sure, his dad won the quiniela, Spain's version of the football pools. "He got all 14 results right, only missing the bonus match," Casillas recalls. Such wins are typically worth about £1m, but there was a flaw: Iker had forgotten to take the form in, allowing the money to slip through his fingers. Surely Casillas senior clocked him one and forever reminds him of his folly? "Bloody hell no!" laughs Iker. "The money would have been handy, but he doesn't talk about it much any more."

Hard to believe, but then Iker has done his best to make amends. At only 23, he is the first choice for Real Madrid and the Spanish national team and already boasts two European Cups, two league titles and 37 caps. The Spanish claim that with his incredibly fast reflexes he is the world's best goalkeeper.

He is certainly in demand. He dashes down the stairs and strides out from the cool air and polished floors of the Spanish FA headquarters into the hot Madrid sun, pursued all the way. Beating a path through the crowd, he talks with machine-gun Madrileño rapidity as together we escape, scurrying into the quiet shadows behind the building.

Standing, grinning, by a whitewashed wall with its solitary back door, the scene is that of a cheeky schoolboy sneaking off for a crafty cigarette, away from adult eyes. Which is, somehow, appropriate, for Casillas remains resolutely young, stubbornly normal. He talks with a naturalness difficult to square with the determined pack that, nipping at his heels like piranhas, forced us to hide in the shadows.

He agrees that his life has changed, but his mates remain the local gang with whom he went on the botellón - Spain's classic teenage Friday night, spent on the streets with cheap cartons of wine.

Asked if that is still the case, he laughs: "Hombre, the botellón has been banned but we go round to each other's houses and stuff. I live a normal life. My mates have been here this week and we've been out for a drink - well, a drink - a Coca-Cola."

Casillas has come a long way since a Real Madrid official turned up at his school and told the 16-year-old to grab his kit: he was needed for the Champions League (if only to sit on the bench). "Yeah, right," an incredulous Casillas replied back then. "I'm eating my lunch."

"The most important thing," he says now, "is being yourself; never, ever forgetting where you came from."

Where Casillas came from was Madrid's working-class, industrial satellite town of Mostoles - and kickabouts with his not-quite-quiniela-winning dad. "And, no," he insists, smiling, "I'm not a goalkeeper because I was rubbish on the pitch. My dad was a goalie and he gave me his kit, massive gloves and everything. And I turned out to be pretty good."

That is something of an understatement. From there to Real Madrid by train and bus every day since he was 12, Casillas's first-team debut came under the soon-to-be-sacked John Toshack in 1999. But if throwing him in seemed a gamble, it wasn't. He had already won an Under-16 European Championship with Spain and would soon add the Under-20 World Cup. A European Cup winner in his first Madrid season, by then under Vicente Del Bosque, a senior Spain cap followed two months later. A fan of Peter Schmeichel, he was a kid in an old man's position.

And things got even better, luck and talent making 2002 Casillas's beatification. A sub for the final three months, he replaced the injured César Sánchez with 23 minutes remaining of the Uefa Champions League final against Bayer 04 Leverkusen, rescuing Madrid with his heroics and bursting into tears on the whistle; tears that were, he says, "more down to anger and frustration than joy. That time on the bench really, really hurt, but I learnt more that season than ever."

But fate still hadn't stopped smiling, as if trying to repay that £1m. Spain's first choice, Santiago Cañizares, severed a tendon trying to control an aftershave bottle, leaving Casillas as the country's World Cup No1. "Luck?" he echoes. "Maybe. But if you let in three, what's the point? You have to take advantage."

He certainly did that - the penalty-saving hero against Ireland, he was Saint Iker, his hands those of God. One columnist excitedly wrote: "Iker's not human. The day he came to earth, light shone upon his house like at the gate of Bethlehem when Christ was born. He's an angel fallen from the sky, the messiah, the chosen one."

A galactico, on a par with Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos and Figo, his is the only other shirt in the club shop. "I don't see myself as a galactico," he insists pointedly, tired of the title, bored with the marketing. "I'm just a bloke who came from Madrid's youth team, full stop."

Yet this season Casillas has indeed proven galactic. And that speaks depressing volumes about a club disaster that culminated in five successive defeats but had long been brewing, Casillas too often rescuing his side.

"I'm definitely not unemployed out there," he smiles. "But I'd like to be left alone more, to not step into the ring so often. I saw it coming: we were top but that disguised how difficult things were; we won a lot of games luckily. I don't know about Ronaldo and me 'saving' the team but our problems were reflected in the protagonism continuously falling on the striker and the goalkeeper." Small wonder that, when Madrid's season unravelled, Casillas talked of "the chronicle of a death foretold".

It's a death that makes him even more determined now. "After Madrid's season I wasn't happy, but the national team comes as a relief, a change," he says. "And you turn up with that feeling of 'let's see if we can do something big here'."

Casillas insists that Spain aren't favourites - "how can we be when we've never won anything?" - but he refuses to offer a catch-all explanation for international failure, blaming luck as well as limitations. "Spain have this thing of 'quarter-finals and home' but we've been unlucky," he says. "At the last World Cup we were knocked out because of the referee, it's that simple; no matter what we did we couldn't beat South Korea."

That is not the only reason, however, and frustration oozes through his words as he says: "Playing in Portugal, there's no excuse for people not to come and support us." And yet he only half-accepts the suggestion that the selección is undermined by such coldness, by anti-Spanish regional-nationalism and competing identities. "As a Madrileño , maybe I feel more Spanish than people from elsewhere," he concedes. "But that doesn't mean nobody cares; in Castilla everyone really, really wants Spain to go all the way.

"For me, though, it's more than that: I was made as a footballer and a person in the youth team at Madrid and Spain. I've played at every level from Under-15 upwards; it's part of me. And I'm sure that Xavi, a great friend and a Catalan, would say exactly the same. He's desperate to win the European Championships with Spain and he is super-proud to be there, just like I am."

Just like Casillas's dad, too. Bring the European Championship to the family home and Iker's quiniela debt will be forever repaid.