“It’s spectacular. It’s incredible. He deserves it. He deserves it”, he emphasizes Fabrice Olinga (Douala, Cameroon, 1996) when he starts talking about the happy present d’Alex Garcia. “I am very happy for him. A lot”, he says happily. Olinga was the youngest scorer in the history of LaLiga until Lamine Yamal he snatched the record from him in October, with sixteen years and 87 days. He was sixteen years and 98 days old when he made his debut and scored the winning goal of the Málaga in Vigo on August 18, 2012. It was his first and last goal in Primera. He only played ten games in the top flight. The last one, aged seventeen and a half: “Everything ended very quickly, too much.”
Deceived by clubs and representatives, he began a journey that took him to Cyprus, Belgium, Italy, without getting to play with Sampdoria, Romania, Belgium, Portugal and Romania. In the second stage in Belgium, al Mouscron, from 2015 to 2021, coincided with Alex Garcia. The Ulldecona midfielder landed at the club in 2019 on loan after making his debut with the Real Village in 2015 and Manchester City el 2016 and to play with him Girona in the elite in 2017, 2018 and 2019. “It wasn’t easy for him to go to a team like that, even if it was very familiar. It was one of the smallest teams in Belgium in terms of finances, but one of the most ideal to go and play,” he says.
He remembers discovering “a very, very good person, always very humble. Moh it seemed like a left over, never. He never made a bad face, ever, at any time. I never had the feeling of: ‘I’m Aleix García and I come from so-and-so’. He had the tag of coming from the City, but he didn’t use it.” “In the field, there was plenty left over,” he clarifies.
Olinga takes a breath and continues: “I, watching him play, said to him: ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘What are you doing here?’, he said to me. ‘What are we both doing here?’. But it was our reality. You know the level and quality you have, but you are there. Things come when you keep believing and working.” The relationship transcended the limits of the playing field: “We started playing Call of Duty because of him. Everyone played on the team. He was one of the best and I was one of the worst.” There was also in the team Joan CampinsBalearic defender trained at Barça, ex del Lobster i today a footballer from Lleida. “We lived great moments. The only thing that bothered me was when I gave him an assist and he missed or didn’t shoot”, he laughs. Olinga wore the ‘7’ and Aleix, the ’24’.
“After knowing the shit in football, I’m back to eat the world”
At the end of the course, Olinga continued at Mouscron and Aleix signed for Dinamo Bucharest Romanian, already separated from Manchester City: “When you don’t have a team and in the end you get a club that offers you an opportunity and a contract that says it will give you, I don’t know, maybe 30, 40, 50,000 euros a month, even if it’s Romania is better than waiting for a team from Spain that won’t arrive and if they do they will offer you 10,000 gross euros or something like that. Dinamo Bucharest was at a great level and I think their decision was not a bad one, knowing that they were going to a big one from Romania and getting paid well. But things went as they went.”
In fact, this summer Olinga called Aleix because he had an offer from a Romanian club (Botosani), to get back with the ball after a year without a team, and the answer was clear: “I asked him how everything was around here and he was one of the people who told me that Romania was a country a bit strange for the footballer. ‘No, no, don’t go there’. ‘They are some bastards‘. ‘Look, Fabrice, I was there for three months, they didn’t pay me anything and I left’. But every bad thing brings a good thing: after Romania came Girona. Things happen for a reason.” “It’s complicated to play in Romania. Aleix also had a bad time. Here when it’s cold and you don’t play you want to die. It’s like a prison». In the winter of 2021 Aleix would sign for Eibar and in the summer he would return to Girona, to guide Míchel’s team in the return to the elite, to a tenth position in Primera and now to the leadership.
«I’m from Girona because of him», he affirms. He confesses that one day he called him and told him to talk to his agents so they could talk to Girona. “He believes in me a lot. He always tells me that I have a lot of level.” He adds that he likes Girona because it gave Aleix a second chance when he was “coming out of difficult times”: a second chance that, for example, he never had. “He needed an opportunity and time to be able to demonstrate all his talent, a team that believed in him». “He’s a guy who’s very smart with the ball,” he says.
This season Olinga has only seen one Girona match, just the defeat against Madrid (0-3), but he plans to visit Girona, perhaps in February, to watch a match in Montilivi and hug his former teammate and friend again: no they see each other since 2020, still in Belgium, but they talk often. “The next time I speak there I will tell him to prepare because I spoke very badly of him in Diari de Girona”, he laughs. Nothing could be further from the truth: “In football you meet many players and most of them are relationships that last six months, one season at most, and you forget, but some people when you meet them you already know they are good and that they are for always. I know that if I call him one day he will pick up the phone and say: ‘Fabrice, where are you?’ And this is very important. You don’t see much in football these days.”
It will be difficult for Girona to win LaLiga “because in the end the greats always arrive”, but he argues: “The truth is that Girona has already won LaLiga and the Champions and more Everything that comes from now on must be a gift: You can’t put any pressure on them. Just have fun on the field as they are doing so far. If they are put under pressure they will fall. Everything will fall.” Before hanging up, he emphasizes again that Aleix is a very good person. And smiling for the umpteenth time he adds: “He owes me a Girona shirt, the bastard.”
2023-11-22 05:30:42
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