“Football was very unfair to us”

“A deep sadness.” That is the feeling of all the classes that make up Dinamo de San Juan. Players, coaching staff and managers are totally devastated after a cruel elimination in the Copa del Rey against Autol, which leaves them on the brink of facing a First Division team. A dream that is already broken. Their tone is bitter, they even speak through tears and feel “a lot of anger”, since they do not feel like fair losers and consider themselves seriously harmed by the referee’s decisions. They have fallen from a cloud into a deep well in a matter of hours. “Football was very unfair to us,” they say.

Nearly 700 people traveled en masse to the town of Autol in Rioja, where it was a tremendous party for the people of Santurtziarra. All Biscayan football was pending and eager for Dinamo to achieve the feat. They brushed her The purple squad was far superior to its rival in many sections of the game and it seemed that everything was going smoothly. They were ahead on the scoreboard with little time to spare. They already tasted victory. However, four minutes before the final whistle of extra time, the hosts scored the equalizer. “That made their morale go up and ours went down on penalties”, considers the coach, Raúl Quintana.

Even so, it took the Riojans a world to knock down Dinamo. They did it after nine penalties taken. “You cannot describe how you feel at that moment, it is a total collapse,” says Álex Díaz, president of the club. “It’s a shame that all the kids’ work goes to waste because of a penalty and they can’t have the joy of playing against a First Division, they don’t deserve this,” he adds. The coach agrees that “it’s a tough stick because we had high hopes for this game and the work of many people suddenly fell apart.” The faces of the players, some of them broken down on the ground, testified to the pain that the defeat caused them.

His fans responded. He entered the field to comfort his team and also to congratulate the rival fans, in a gesture of great sportsmanship. “It was a consolation, but we feel very sorry for them,” says Raúl Quintana. Meanwhile, the president reports that he was “sunken” when he saw many of the children who accompanied the team to Autol cry, arriving at two or three in the morning at their homes, having to go to school the next day. The coach reveals that in the locker room “some were better and others worse, some were broken and others trying to pull more of the car.”

The desolation of all the footballers was evident on the return bus. “No one spoke, each one was thinking about their things inside,” says the coach. The bus arrived in San Juan at around three in the morning and some of its members gathered in the field, “to talk a little about everything and try to comfort each other,” the president expands. Apart from sadness, they were also filled with rage. “If a team passes you over, well, that’s what it is, but falling in that very unfair way,” says Álex Díaz. Football knows no justice and it was demonstrated again on the green of La Manzanera, where a controversial refereeing action also came into play.

As for the decisions of the referee, Raúl Quintana exclaims that “what happened does not make sense.” He goes back. Autol lost the final due to promotion to the Third Division in a match in which the main referee was replaced at halftime by another who happened to be in the stands and the team from La Rioja challenged said match. In this regard, Raúl Quintana believes that “they owed Autol one and it is impossible not to think badly.” “We have clearly been harmed, but there is nothing we can do, there is no turning back and I prefer not to think about it,” he adds. The Dinamo manager agrees that “the penalty is very clear and he didn’t want to call it because he was well placed and I also think his goal was a foul.” Two decisive actions of the clash.

“Pride”

However, despite the fact that they now see everything black, there is also a word that they repeat a lot from the purple combination: “pride”. “We are proud of having been there and having taken the name of Dinamo to another dimension,” emphasizes the coach. After all, they attach great importance to the fact that, from their modesty, having been in a Copa del Rey hype, the party that the fans organized in Autol and all the repercussion that this meeting has generated. “It is incredible to see all the people who move Dinamo and all the signs of support that we have received from many people, as time goes by, we will give it much more value,” highlights the president, who calls the fighting character of the club : «we have fallen many times and we have always got up, this time will be no different, as our slogan says: ‘Dynamo never gives up’».