IN HIS FINAL column of the Champions League season, Tommy Martin talks to Gaizka Mendieta about the experience of losing two Champions League finals with Valencia.
When Gay Talese wanted to write The Loser, his classic profile of Floyd Patterson in the aftermath of his 1962 defeat to Sonny Liston, he had to go to “the foot of a mountain in upstate New York, about 60 miles from Manhattan,” where all you could hear at night were “the clanging sounds of garbage cans being toppled by raccoons, skunks and stray cats making their nocturnal raids down from the mountain.
Thankfully, when I want to speak to Gaizka Mendieta about the experience of losing two Champions League finals, I find him in the green room of a Dublin TV studio. The great turn-of-the-century Spanish footballer is as cool and nonchalant now as when he stood once over nerve-shreddingly important penalty kicks; you’d still put your life on him from twelve yards, steel-grey suit, skinny tie and shiny shoes and all. If he is scarred by the loss to Real Madrid in 2000 and the shoot-out defeat to Bayern Munich a year later, by the tantalising proximity to club football’s greatest prize, he doesn’t show it.
Regrets
“If you’d have asked me this question the day after the finals,” Mendieta says, “obviously I wouldn’t be happy; when you play a final you want to win it. But looking back now it was a great achievement and actually Valencia fans remember those Champions League finals as much as when we won the league or any other titles in the history of the club.”
Perspective. Oddly, the Champions League has had a way of balancing out its spirit-crushing disappointments. Of all the other losing finalists since 1992-93, only Valencia, Bayer Leverkusen, Monaco, Arsenal, Borussia Dortmund and Atletico Madrid did not have a recent success in the bank, or have their wounds soothed by a subsequent victory. Notably (Arsenal, being generous, aside), all those clubs could count even making the final as a monumental achievement, making coping with failure, however agonising, easier.
Only Valencia had to endure it twice.
Mindset
“You have no idea how it is in the first round. You’re out there with all those people around you, and those cameras, and the whole world looking in… And do you know what all this does? It blinds you, just blinds you.” – Floyd Patterson
Not that Valencia approached that first final in Paris like doe-eyed innocents. They had just finished third in La Liga, two points and two places ahead of Real, who needed to win to reach the following season’s Champions League. They had beaten Real at the Bernabeu and drawn with them at the Mestalla. They expected to win.
“I think that was a bit of our problem after the game,” says Mendieta, “because we arrived to that game absolutely on fire, fitness-wise, and the team was very confident. Although we never underestimated Madrid, I think the fact that they’d played in those games [Champions League finals] before made a big difference for them. We weren’t ourselves the way we played the game — we weren’t the team we were two weeks earlier in La Liga.”
He uses the word ‘mindset’ a lot. Madrid had it right; Valencia didn’t. Look at the footage now and Real look ravenous, purposeful. Valencia are standoffish, diffident.
“For us, it was something new and massive. We didn’t know how to play against Madrid in a game like that. Madrid had that need to win and then — Bam! Bam! Bam! Straight to the job, score the goals and job done. While we were trying to think about how to play that game, Madrid already knew.”
I think about Alex Ferguson’s account of Manchester United’s losses to Barcelona in 2009 and 2011 in his second autobiography. After magnanimously admitting his own hubris in not Ji-Sung Parking the proverbial bus against the dominant Barca, Ferguson turned his attention toward his players.
“The preparation for that game [the 2011 final] was the best I have seen. You know the problem? Sometimes players play the occasion, not the game. Wayne Rooney, for example, was disappointing. Antonio Valencia froze on the night. He was nervous as hell.
“A contributing factor might have been that we were accustomed to having most of the possession in games. When that advantage transferred itself to the opposition it might have damaged our confidence and concentration. Our players were unsettled by having to play a subservient role.”
Mindset. United played the occasion. Valencia couldn’t get a grip on theirs. The outcome was the same.
Did we deserve to win?
“Oh, I would give up anything to just be able to work with Liston, to box with him somewhere where nobody would see us, and to see if I could get past three minutes with him.” – Floyd Patterson
A year later and Valencia have topped both of their group stages and beaten Arsenal and Leeds in the knockout rounds. Back again. This time, Bayern in Milan.
“Obviously we didn’t expect to get to the final again, but when we got there, we knew what it was about.” Mendieta won and scored a penalty to put Valencia 1-0 up in the third minute.
“When you see both games, you see our team was more focused, more into the game. Obviously it helped getting the penalty so early, but the team was really into the game. We thought that was our game, because the team was playing so well, so disciplined, and as the game goes along your saying — “we’re going to score again”.
Stefan Effenberg equalised for Bayern in the 50th minute – another penalty, after Mehmet Scholl had missed one in first half – and the German side won the shootout 5-4.
“When you lose in that type of game that slipped through our hands, that was our chance to win a trophy like this.”
Did you deserve to win that one?
“Deserve is a word in football that doesn’t really work.”
So many Champions League finals follow this model. Two well-matched teams, two interlocking tactical plans, longueurs of shadowplay and then a breakthrough, a fracture in the stasis. And then a trophy presentation.
And a loser.
Memories
“After Liston hit me in Nevada, I felt, for about four or five seconds, that everybody in the arena was actually in the ring with me, circled around me like a family, and you feel warmth toward all the people in the arena after you’re knocked out. You feel lovable to all the people.”
Is there anything you would have changed?
If we had the same – it’s impossible obviously – experience from the second final, in the first one, it would have been different. Would I change something? I would have won at least one! But the second one was football at its best, we played a fantastic Bayern with a fantastic Valencia, the penalties…we were unlucky not to win. I would change things in the first one but the second one, that was football.”
“When people talk about it, there are not many teams who can play two Champions League finals in a row, apart from the big ones. Wherever I’ve been in the world, Valencia fans still talk about the Champions League finals rather than the league title or anything else. Happy memories, sour and sweet. Happy memories.”
People don’t think of Mendieta as a Champions League loser. In Ireland, they think of his decisive penalty in the 2002 World Cup shootout against Spain. But in general, it’s the brilliance of his attacking play in that Valencia team that’s remembered.
But it could have been more. Sour and sweet.
