The continuity of many players in the current squad and the commitment to continue in the Guadalentín, the keys to Alhama’s first project in the First Division
Randri García (Alhama, age 42), coach of Alhama CF ElPozo, usually says that there is no men’s and women’s football. What there is is football. To dry. Without last name. He was a football player. of hope One more. One of some. He played four seasons with Alhameño and another four with El Paretón, in Third and Preferential. Soon he hung up his boots. His father also played football and futsal. And his little brother, Javier García, is still active. He is a left back and plays for Alcantarilla. He went through the Bala Azul, the Alhama, the Mazarrón and the Totana Olympic. And they also call him Randri, like his brother and his father.
But back to our main character. Juan Antonio Garcia is mentioned. It is, of course, Randri who has just become the first coach to lead a team from Murcia to the top tier of Spanish women’s football. He failed as a footballer. But everything he lacked as a player, he has as a coach. Because only he knows what it cost him to make history in his city and yesterday afternoon he and his players received a well-deserved tribute at the town hall. He has been a prophet in his country and today he is reaping the rewards of a decade of hard, professional, honest and quiet work. Very quiet. This whole path has been traveled in silence, far from the spotlight that almost never points to women’s football. From First Autonomous Region to First Class in ten unforgettable years. From appearing in the fields with just eight girls and losing in a landslide every Sunday to receiving the course coming to Barça and Real Madrid.
Today everything is congratulated. But it wasn’t always like that. The beginning was complicated. In Alhama, where Alhameño had always been a men’s team moving between Group XIII of the Third Division and the Preferential Territorial, there had never been a women’s football match until 2009. When Randri, together with his father Antonio García Águila, decided to start a women’s club in the city, with a population of 22,000, many neighbors saw it as a joke. Some gave the project no more than a year of life. The quintessentially Spanish slander, compounded in a place where football had never had the slightest impact. In fact, the men’s team disappeared in 2011.
Indeed, the city had reached its moment of sporting glory in 1992 with the historic silver medal won by Antonio Peñalver in the decathlon at the Barcelona Olympics. Born in Alhama in 1968, the Olympic runner-up gives his name to the Guadalentín Complex athletics track, adjacent to the José Kubala football field where the recently promoted Alhama CF ElPozo plays his home games. The younger generations have not experienced the success of Peñalver and that was quickly erased. It has been dispelled in the fog of all the years (30) that have passed at full throttle.
Alhama is 35 kilometers from Murcia and Lorca and 56 kilometers from Cartagena. ElPozo and Primafrio are headquartered in the city, ranked second and fifth respectively in the ranking of Murcian companies with the highest turnover. Driven by the team’s success and the tax and reputational benefits that women’s sports sponsorship brings, the two have been sponsoring the azulón team for several seasons. Despite this, in the Alhameña Directive, they juggle every year to balance the budget.
Alhama is today the capital of Murcian women’s football thanks to the fact that it has been very well done there. It is an exemplary club, working on the grassroots to take an example and refer to the senior women’s team, the same team that made history this Saturday by being promoted to the Iberdrola League. 180 boys and 70 girls train every afternoon on the José Kubala and every match day on average more than 800 spectators cheer on Randri’s team from the stands. The club has 400 subscribers and 15 federation base teams.
Added to all this is the passivity of the two most important clubs in the region, FC Cartagena and Real Murcia, who never chose an important project in their women’s football division and left the way for an adventure as great as Alhama’s . Lorca Mechanical Broccoli’s attempt was also not consolidated due to serious economic problems. Meanwhile, Randri and Tamara García, the club’s coordinator and captain until she retired in 2019, have thrown away success they could not have imagined on their own.
Both know the market perfectly and at the time managed to bring together all the Murcian talent that was scattered in nearby provinces or even the talent that was lost due to the lack of a reference team in the region. This is the case of Helena Torres, Marta Ponce and Judith Caravaca from Murcia, Violeta Quiles from Cartagena and Marina Martí from La Mancha. After promotion to the Reto Iberdrola league, the national second division, they have been able to attract players who have to prove themselves as a thriving Second Division team, such as the experienced Argentine Mariela Coronel, the Galician Andrea Carid or the Valencian Lena Pérez.
The idea of the club is to give continuity to many of the players who have been promoted and to attract half a dozen players with experience in the First Division. In addition, the team will continue to play in Alhama, despite the shortcomings of the José Kubala-field.
Juan Cayuela de Totana and Artés Carrasco de Lorca with alternative venues for José Kubala, in case the Federation forces Alhama CF ElPozo to move to another stadium while preparing its own stadium to host Liga Iberdrola matches. However, in the club they want to place the turbo and make the necessary improvements to the installation this summer to start the next competition on their usual field.
The Azulona entity has one year to replace the artificial grass with natural grass and also has to install new stands on the side and a floor. The budget to be covered will be 1.5 million euros and in Alhama they expect a significant increase this season in the subsidies received by the Autonomous Community (7,000 euros) and the city council (30,000 euros).
Source: La Verdad
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