OVIEDO, Spain -- Through the smoke is a familiar face doing a familiar thing. Saturday night in Oviedo, the biggest night of the year, and a bus pulls out from the Monumental Naranco hotel, where blue banners hang from the facade and hundreds of football fans wait outside. From the hillside above them, a statue of Jesus looks down, stone arms wide, although He probably can't see anything through the clouds of blue and red, the thick swirl of sulphur. The bus turns at the roundabout and edges up Alejandro Casona Street, steep and narrow now, full of people, flares marking the way.
Thousands of supporters of Real Oviedo are lined up along the route, their hands hammering on the side of the bus as it passes slowly through the parting sea on a short journey to the stadium, which on this night is a little longer and a lot louder. Fireworks go off, the floor shuddering. On board, footballers hammer back. In the front row, the coach Javi Calleja sits. "I've never seen anything like this in my life," he says.
Another Oviedo fan is inside there with them, sitting in the back row, except that he's not sitting and definitely not sitting still; he's kneeling, clambering over the seat to get a good look. He's never experienced this either, not the way he will tonight, and God knows he has waited long enough. Forty years, he's wanted to do this, which is why he's there, even though it still won't be quite the way it was supposed to be. Even though he shouldn't be, not really. From outside, it's hard to see, hard in fact to breathe, smoke everywhere, but there in the back window you can just about make him out, palm against the glass.
Santi Cazorla is laughing his head off.
Santi Cazorla is always laughing his head off.
He was laughing two nights earlier, standing there, arm raised straight above his head, bottle gently tilted, trying to pour cider from a great height -- although above his head, standing at 5-foot-6, is not that great a height -- into a glass held below his waist. It has a special name, escanciar, and it is a skill, one the experts are offering a lesson in now. It is also a tradition in Asturias, that green mountainous land in northern Spain, the principality that they like to say is Spain while the rest is conquered territory.
It is Thursday, exactly 48 hours before the Asturias derby against Sporting Gijón, a game right up among the best in the country, even though these days it is played in the second division. Cazorla, Oviedo's captain, is here because it is a club event and they asked him to be and he is always there when they ask him to be: Santi, staff say, almost a little ashamed, never says no. Sometimes, a lot of the time, they worry that it is too much, that he will tire of it. It is hard to express how much of an icon he is here, how significant, how loved, how much he gives back, and this whole ambassador thing can exhaust, though Cazorla says "it doesn't tire me at all."
So here he is, standing alongside their guests, giving it a go. Most of it ends up on the floor.
They have asked him to be there on Saturday for the derby too, like really there. On the bus, in the dressing room, in the team -- so what if he's injured? Not that they needed to. You just try and keep him away.
Cazorla has a calf issue, a minor tear. He hasn't trained with his teammates this morning and he won't tomorrow morning either. Instead, while they're out on the pitch, he is in the gym at the Requexón training ground, down a narrow, winding, wet country lane that couldn't be more Asturias if it tried, past the brown cows in the fields. He's unavailable, everyone knows, but, Calleja says, they want him close and although no one knows this yet, he will be in the squad, there on the bench.
A secret weapon, maybe his presence will play a part. Something to frighten Sporting, perhaps. To get everyone else excited; him just being there changes things, the last year since he came to the club has shown that. As for him, he's desperate to be at the Estadio Carlos Tartiere, to be part of a game he grew up watching, the match he most aspired to experience and one he played at junior level, but not senior. It is the first time at home. At 40, it may be the last chance too, an opportunity he feared he would never have. "And if I get to warm up ..." he says.
And then he laughs his head off again.
BORN IN FONCIELLO, a tiny place of barely 100 people in the parish of Lugo de Llanera, a 10-minute drive outside the city and into the country, Cazorla grew up an Oviedo fan. He joined the club when he was a kid, 32 years ago. He, Robi Toral and Piero Manso, fellow ballboys and youth teamers, best mates then and now, would go onto the pitch at half-time and kick about. But in almost a decade, Cazorla never made his debut. At 18, just about the age when he might have done, he left the club. Last year, 20 years on, he returned.
He did so in the second division. On the minimum salary. Having waived all image rights. And making only one demand: that 10% of the money made on "Cazorla 8" shirts goes direct to the youth academy. It has to be, he says, "the basis of everything." Kids like him shouldn't have to leave next time.
Departing didn't go badly for him, in truth, even though he hadn't wanted to go: He had played for Recreativo, Villarreal, Málaga, Arsenal and Al Sadd, won two European Championships, part of that Spain generation, and having fought back from an injury that Arsene Wenger said was the worst he had ever seen, and somehow got a Spain callup again.
And yet ... and yet, it's hard sometimes not to think that there could have been more, injury denying Cazorla a World Cup, and that the roll call of clubs could have been weightier. That maybe he didn't always choose well. He had been on the verge of playing for Real Madrid, but he stayed at Villarreal. Pep Guardiola said Cazorla would have fit perfectly in Barcelona's midfield, but that never happened either. His talent, and the joy of his football, sometimes feels like it was not paid back in full; maybe even that the game owes him something and instead dealt him a horrific injury.
"I have a clear conscience in that sense," he says. "Wherever I have been have been places that they really, truly wanted me. I was close to going to Madrid but maybe they didn't transmit to me that they really wanted me. At Arsenal, they really loved me, at Villarreal, at Recreativo, at Málaga, in Qatar ... I can't recriminate myself for any decision I made, don't look back with regret. In the end, I have been where I thought they wanted me, where I felt the affection I need to play football."
Besides, at the end of it all, there was this. And there is nowhere quite like this. This is one regret he would have had. Home pulled and nothing, Cazorla insists, means quite what Oviedo does. There's something about this place: it was the third time that an Oviedo academy product, forced by the club's crisis to seek a top-flight career elsewhere, had returned; not to better times but to worse, to help: Esteban Suárez, Michu, now him.
In returning like they did, that affection has become universal, too. At every ground, Cazorla is applauded -- well, except Gijón and, no, he would't expect that either, although it turns out that when Sporting's Guille Rosas was a kid, he waited for Cazorla to sign a Spain shirt for him one day.
"I don't know why there's so much affection; I supposed because I played in the best generation Spain's had," Cazorla says. "And maybe people appreciate that I'm still playing football and in my city, the fact that I went home: not many people do it.
"It was a decision of the heart. I would play for free if I could, but there are rules that have to be respected, and in the end the club has to pay me a minimum salary. It's my home and I came here to contribute, to do my bit. In the end, it's something that I felt ever since I left: that I had to return to my club, and I am not asking for anything in return."
His wife wouldn't have let him, anyway. His son Enzo always told him he wanted to see his dad play in blue.
According to the club's sporting director Agustin Lleida, it was was the easiest deal he ever did, except for the guilt he felt.
"We knew Santi wanted to come home. We had arranged a video call and that weekend I was trying to work out his salary in Qatar, what we could offer him, what options we had," Lleida told La Nueva España. "I was all ready: a salary, a percentage of shirt sales, the takings from a friendly. But I felt bad looking at what he was earning there because of how little we could offer him. I said: 'Look, I have this proposal, but ...' and he said: 'I don't want anything. Wearing the shirt is payment enough.'"
Cazorla says: "It was a dream to play in this shirt: I was wearing it at 9 years old in the academy but circumstance meant I had to leave very young. But coming back was always there in my mind, getting the chance to wear it as a professional."
FOR A LONG time, there might not have been a shirt to wear, a club to come back to. Oviedo were a first-division team when Cazorla was a ballboy but were relegated in 2001 and kept on falling. In 2003 they were relegated two categories at once, all the way down to tercera, which is actually the fourth tier and has seventeen divisions and almost 350 teams, often playing on little better than park pitches. A financial crisis forced Cazorla out the door, just when it might have opened, and almost brought down the shutters forever.
With local politicians pushing for a winding-up order and putting their weight behind an alternative, starting a new city team from scratch, the fans rescued Oviedo from folding then. Another crisis almost put them out of business again in 2012 and, once more, supporters mobilised. A share issue saved them: the club have 45,000 shareholders around the world. Cazorla, a symbol of where they should have been and a figurehead of the campaign along with two other academy products, Juan Mata and Michu, bought many of them.
The club were, though, still in Spain's semi-professional third tier, until 2015. As a measure of how far they had fallen: they played an Asturias derby ... against Sporting's B team. And although the top flight, the eternal aspiration, still resists, the fans always remained, and under the Pachuca Group of Mexico now, Oviedo are a club growing fast: there is stability, security, a future.
"The club's in a very good state," Cazorla says. "Pachuca want to do things the right way, properly, and they've got a lot of experience. They want to keep growing, reach primera and hopefully the sort of heights they're used to. We're taking good steps forward all working together.
"It has felt hard to be a fan watching from a distance at times. There were difficult moments. When I was in the academy, we went down to tercera for administrative reasons. Thank goodness, we were able to get together and save what was left of the club. We're now enjoying better times. Eventually I've been able to wear this shirt, many years on, and I'm really enjoying this time here, being able to help the club after it came close to disappearing altogether."
OH, HE'S HELPING all right. The impact of his return has been immense, in every sense, including on the pitch.
Truth is, no one knew how good Cazorla really was when he came back, including Cazorla himself. That he was an icon, sure. That everyone loved him, certainly. That the symbolism was powerful, no doubt. But the player? What would they do if, well, you know, he couldn't do it?
