World Cup Qatar | From Bilbao to a Doha cruise to place an Athletic ikurriña in front of Harry Kane
minute 9 of England-United States played Friday night at the Khor Al Bayt Stadium. Harry Kane finishes one of the few attacking plays drawn up by the British, but his shot from the edge does not have the expected success. To repent, he jumps out at you, In the background, there is a Euskadi flag, an ikurriña, topped with the coat of arms of the Athletic, fulfilling the unwritten law that, wherever you go, you will always find a fan of the rojiblanco team displaying their colors around the world.
In the minutes after the scene, Mikel Medina’s mobile phone is filled with messages from friends and acquaintances who know that he is in Doha for the World Cup. “They already know me, if I take it everywhere. With Athletic I have traveled 23 times around Europe, I have gone to Moscow, Lviv, Sweden… And we have also brought it to Qatar”He explains the next morning next to the cruise where he is spending the World Cup with another friend.
Mikel is from Arrankudiaga, a small town south of Bilbao. His friend and he are going to spend ten days in Qatar, from Wednesday to next Friday, in which they are going to watch ten games. Three flags have traveled with both of them on the plane: the one that the whole world has already seen and two others, one formed in turn by two ikurriñas, an Athletic flag and another from their town’s team; and the other in homage to a friend he had in a plane crash.
“The other two will not let us put them in the fields because they are too big. The limit is two meters by one and a half meters and both exceed it by a lot. But this, yes. The first day they told us that they could not put shields of soccer teams, but the thing is that everyone does it. In England we got to the stadium very early, but even so there was almost no room. We put her in a hole where she didn’t look too good, but she hey, look…“, narrates.
Echo of Athletic
Athletic itself, on its social networks, gave an account of the moment in which the Bilbao club slipped into the World Cup in Qatar. And Mikel says that it’s not the first time it’s happened to them: “Think that we’ve gone on many trips with the team and only a few of us are on some of them. We’re already a bit ‘in-the-know'”.
Mikel and his friend (who prefers not to appear in the report) have been thinking about the trip to Qatar for years: “We have been saving for four years, a fixed 60 euros per month for this. The idea was to go to 2026 [en México, Canadá y EEUU], but we said, ‘what the hell? If this is the World Cup of the World Cups! Everything is at hand here, you can go to two games in one day’. So we came.”
In February they signed up blindly, with the groups still not drawn and therefore the matches unassigned, in the FIFA ticket raffle. They got ten of the ones they asked for (among them, for Argentina-MexicoSpain-Germany, Portugal-Uruguay and Croatia-Belgium, not bad) and from there they began to prepare the rest of the trip: lodging, hotel and the Hayya, the special visa for the World Cup.
“We looked at accommodations and one of the first that appeared to us was the cruise ship. And we said, ‘come on.’ In the end, It is centrally located, at a good price for what was available and it’s not like we spent a lot of time here. Sleep and the buffet. Well, and in the mornings a while in the pool and jacuzzi. And even gym “, she explains.
190 euro/night
Between the two of them, they pay for a double room, “with views of an interior patio”, 190 euros per night. And that on a “Second A” cruise. “The one next to it is the Champions level, which says that the wives and girlfriends of the England players are housed there, I don’t know. And you find every boat here…”. A quick walk through the Doha cruise terminal, very close to the stadium 974attests that it is so.
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In total, the ten-day stay in Doha will cost them “between 3,000 and 3,500 euros.” They would have spent more, because they tried to buy tickets for more games and thus squeeze their trip“But we went to the ‘ticketing center’ and they told us that all the tickets had been sold. That later in the fields you see empty spaces, but I imagine that they will be reserved for the local public or sponsors, I don’t know…”.
On Friday they will return to Bilbao and begin to think about their next trip. The first was a Juventus-Athletic from champions in 1998. Always with her flag with the ikurriña, clean and prepared to look impeccable on television. Stay tuned, because you may see it more times between now and Friday.