2023-09-09 19:30:07
Barcelona A few days after playing Afrobasket with the women’s team of Angola, Oriol Villa is still trying to get over the experience he had during a few weeks that turned into a rollercoaster of emotions. The Catalan coach was given an urgent assignment to take charge of a young and inexperienced team. The lived experiences have pushed him to reflect on the pace of life we lead in Western society. “The experience has become a brutal life lesson. You realize that we buy a lot of things that we don’t need and that don’t make us happier. Our society is sick and we value our day to day too little. Most of the excesses we do here are unnecessary, we have a wrong way of interpreting life. There is a personal balance sheet, a social one and a sporting one. All three are different. For me it has been a life experience. I had never been to Africa, and that is always a shock, although I am aware that I was in a bubble,” he assures ARA.
“Luanda, the capital of Angola, is chaos. It has 2.5 million inhabitants and doesn’t even have a traffic light. When there is an intersection, the driver of the most determined vehicle is the first to cross. The feeling of poverty on the street is very great. The scoundrel asks you for money and food. An 8- or 10-year-old boy told me he would be a very good player and asked me to take him to Spain. This touches your heart. You see unpaved streets and you get a feeling of brutal inequality”, explains the technician.
The country is full of contrasts. “The president of the third most important club in Angola told me that the first thing they do when the young girls go to train is to ask them if they have eaten anything, but it is true that his club is located in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Luanda. The reality of the most powerful clubs is different and the players get paid. The differences are abysmal,” he points out. The socio-economic reality is very harsh. “The harshness of the lives of some Angolan players disarms you. The national team captain, the team’s main pivot, missed the last few days before the tournament because she had to go to a job interview. He missed four days and when he came back there were a lot of tactical things he hadn’t worked on, but his attitude was exemplary,” he continues.
Villà received advice from Pep Clarós, the Catalan who coaches the Angolan men’s team. “He advised me to be very calm because the pace at which they do things is not ours. Maybe you have to play a game and the day before you still don’t have the kits. I had an anecdote with the visa. I had expired and had been warning for days, but no one was doing anything. When we had to travel to Rwanda they wouldn’t let me get on the plane and then they fixed it with a ten minute phone call. Everything works differently and is very curious. They end up solving everything for you, but at their own pace,” he says.
Villa’s experience was a race against the clock full of obstacles. “I was notified on June 15 and on the 23rd I had to take the plane. I am a teacher and the proposal caught me in the middle of the process of making notes and closing the course. Angola contested the Afrobasket as a guest, as it had not been classified sportingly. Also, we had a lot of casualties. I tried to watch games on video and some live, but when I got to the first practice, there were 17 of the 22 players I had never seen. We had little time to make the final list and prepare the selection to be able to compete. It was a very big time trial. The potential was spectacular, but the technical and tactical level and experience was very low. The sporting reality is complicated”, he sums up.
“The living selection of the past”
Angola won one of the three matches in the tournament. Also, both losses were very close. “If we had qualified for the quarter-finals, it would have been a success, but the situation must be taken into account. We couldn’t even do a full training session with the 12 players,” says Villà, who has documented the whole experience in a daily blog on the internet.
The idea of the Catalan coach, who will take two cadet teams to UE Mataró this season, is to get involved in a medium-term project with the Angolan federation. “I have made them a proposal for the next two years. I would like to be able to change the dynamics of a team that is still living in the past. During the last years, Angola has been losing steam. There are three things that need to be done: train coaches, organize gatherings for them to take their luggage (some of them in Catalonia) and do a more thorough monitoring of the young players”, he opines.
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