“There was a little magic in the atmosphere,” Pellegrino Matarazzo said. Real Sociedad’s new coach could feel it; he could hear it too, the sound of drums beating on every street of the city he has embraced and into the stadium that has embraced him back already. When he and his players arrived at Anoeta on Sunday evening, they entered through a guard of honour, a band of soldiers and chefs lined up in the rain, hammering out the club anthem and hoping. By the time they departed around midnight, following 35,346 supporters out into San Sebastián, it had actually happened. La Real had beaten Barcelona 2-1. Celebrations, his captain Mikel Oyarzabal said, had come a day early.
This week is tamborrada, the San Sebastián festival where, at midnight on 20 January, the city flag is raised and marching bands parade through its streets in Napoleonic uniforms and cooks’ costumes grasping sticks, batons and giant cutlery, routes mapped out in loving detail and special supplements. Initially it was a popular pastiche of a military procession, a prelude to carnival, practice runs echoing round in the days before. Kids go first, adults next. An expression of civic pride, they sing of “spreading joy,” being “always happy,” and God knows they were happy now. What better way to begin it all than this? What better way to become one of them?
