“And then suddenly they sacked me.” Julen Lopetegui is running through the reasons to be cheerful – safety secure, 17 shots at the Etihad and the physical stats, an identity emerging, a winter window and a kinder calendar coming – when he uses one of only two English lines in as many hours, delivered as if the final page of a story. The other, not entirely incidentally, is “no comment”, and a smile accompanies both. Five weeks from his sacking at West Ham, the anger and hurt has subsided, on the surface at least. The period of mourning, as he puts it, is over.
“My father died and, although you can’t compare them, personal and professional mourning came together,” Lopetegui says. Offers arrived, but it was too soon. Instead he headed to Mexico, where he is building a hotel with his brother Joxean, a former pelota player, and as he arrives at another hotel, this time in Madrid, it is clear getting away from it all was good for him. Heading in, he bumps into Rafa Benítez and conversation begins, back to football again. “Slowly, you start to feel that enthusiasm,” Lopetegui says. “You step back, see things clearly, get closer to reality.”
