Five intimate stories of the River champion: the four sports Gallardo practices and the family spirit that is breathed

River smiles, River celebrates, River begs for the continuity of Marcelo Gallardo from 2022. The flaming champion of Argentine soccer lives hours of happiness but also of uncertainty before the suspense that the technical director left installed about his future. Around the team of Doll stories are woven and woven that are part of the intimacy of the campus. On this note, Infobae recreate some of them to take an imaginary journey into the bowels of champions.

1) Gallardo’s competitive gene is one of the trademarks of this River. Al Doll You don’t like to lose anything, not even when you do one of the four activities you do to clear your mind and stay physically active: football, tennis, golf and paddle tennis. In the privacy of the campus it is an open secret that the coach went home upset more than once because he lost or because he did not have the best day in his individual performance in any of those activities. He usually plays football with the members of the coaching staff and the rest of the technical staff in the days prior to the matches. River partners are usually surprised on those mornings or afternoons in which the Doll disembark at one of the tennis courts of the Monumental to play tennis with Chirola, one of his friends, who lives in the south of the country and occasionally travels to Buenos Aires. On some Fridays, Gallardo usually plays golf with Rodolfo D’Onofrio, Enzo Francescoli and Matías Patanian. And at the River Camp he asked to build a paddle tennis court to outshine the vice accompanied by Francescoli, Patanian and Jorge Brito, candidate for president of River for the ruling party in the elections that will be held on Saturday, December 4. “You could say that he plays all sports well. And you don’t know how well he dances. He is a great dancer. In Madrid, after beating Boca in the 2018 Libertadores final, everything was danced and he broke it, ”says one of the people who knows him best with laughter.

2) At a stop in River’s preseason in Orlando, in the middle of the year, a group of footballers talked about the intensity of the training sessions that Pablo Dolce, Marcelo Tulbovitz and Diego Gamalero, the team’s physical trainers, planned. At one point, José Paradela took the floor and with a forceful phrase summed up the demand with which the Argentine soccer champion squad usually prepares. “In a preseason day here, we run the same as in ten days in Gymnastics”Said with a smile, half jokingly and half seriously, the former midfielder of the La Plata team. Paradela, precisely, is one of the footballers who had the most difficulty adapting to the intensity with which River trains. At the beginning of the year, when he arrived at Núñez’s team, he vomited more than once at the end of training due to the requirement of preparation. It took him several weeks to adjust to the rhythm of the rest of the squad.

3) Mid-November. Agustín Palavecino leaves the River Camp in Ezeiza in his car after training and stops in front of some thirty fans waiting for an autograph or a selfie from the soccer players. Behind the tinted windows you can see the silhouette of a person in the back seat. One fan tells another, while they wait for their turn to have their memory with the midfielder: “Notice that ‘Pala’ is carrying someone behind. Will he be a remisero in his spare time? “. The occurrence awakens the laughter of several of the fans, who are left with doubts about who is the passenger traveling behind. And that person is none other than Felipe Pena, the 20-year-old youth who broke the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in the 5-0 win on the 7th of this month against Patronato, at the Monumental. Having that leg immobilized by a splint, Peña has to leave it stretched out on car trips and that is why his friend Palavecino takes him to his home in the River neighborhood in the back seat of his car, like a remise driver.

4) It may sound naive, but in the privacy of River’s squad there is a phrase that sums up the spirit of the group and the good health of the dressing room: “We are family”. The phrase responds to many factors. The main one is that for the group they are all the same: from Leonardo Ponzio, the captain, to Luis Valla, the person in charge of security, or Marcelo Pudelka, the nutritionist of the squad. There are no differentiated deals between them: Enzo Pérez, a footballer of international rank, embraces with the same force to celebrate the title a friend of his like Javier Pinola, who a Pichi Quiroga, one of the team’s props; or Jorge Bombicino, the main kinesiologist. River’s squad moves as a uniform mass in which the footballers, the coaching staff, the medical staff, the security employees, the props and the rest of the assistants are included. There are no vedetisms. They all recognize each other from what Gallardo instills in them and what the most experienced voices on the team proclaim: Ponzio, Javier Pinola, Jonatan Maidana, Germán Lux, Enzo Pérez, Franco Armani and Enrique Bologna. Many players even share vacations with their families. Two specific examples: after the consecration in the Copa Libertadores 2018 against Boca, in Madrid, Maidana, Pinola, Lucas Martínez Quarta and Camilo Mayada went to rest in the same hotel complex in Punta del Este. Recently, Chilean Paulo Díaz and his family shared a few days off at the Iguazu Falls with Federico Girotti and his girlfriend.

5) Several of the main River leaders did not like what happened last Thursday at the main gate of the stadium Monumental, on Figueroa Alcorta avenue, in the preview of the 4-0 win against Racing. At noon he parked a car from which a man and a woman got out. In the rain, some bags began to drop inside whose interiors you could see the galleys, the streamers, the ties like the one that Ángel Labruna used and the rest of the party favors with which the players celebrated the first League championship obtained during the Gallardo cycle . “You have to do those things without anyone noticing. They should have entered through the door on Udaondo Avenue, away from where the press and the public are. “One of the club’s leaders was heard to say, affectionate to the same low profile that Gallardo cultivates for the squad.

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