2023-11-24 15:11:29
The Barça starting goalkeeper had not trained all week after returning injured with the national team. He neither played nor trained with Germany. “Iñaki Peña will play against Rayo. He is very prepared and we have 100% confidence in him,” Xavi confirmed hours before the return to the League, the starting point of a tough schedule with seven games for his team in three weeks.
Iñaki Peña came to Barça from Villarreal, after passing through Alicante. He was born there 24 years ago. And he was living in La Masia until he left for Turkey in January 2022. But he did not leave Barcelona for too long. He returned from Istanbul where he had a mid-season loan to Galatasaray. A loan that started well – eight games out of eight as a starter – but ended badly because he stopped playing in the last nine games.
Curiously, his great game, the one that remains in memory, was at the Camp Nou, but defending the shirt of the Turkish team, then coached by Doménec Torrent. It ended in a draw (0-0) thanks to several excellent interventions by Iñaki Peña, who thus earned his return to Barça.
He made two excellent saves against Memphis and another against Busquets, also leaving the mark of his precise footwork. It was his calling card after spending two and a half years as the third (and invisible) goalkeeper of the Barça first team.
A patient race
He is a not excessively tall goalkeeper (he measures 1.84 m), built in the Barça youth academy where he trained for more than 10 long and patient years. Barça signed him from Villarreal (summer 2012) and he has gone through all the club’s lower categories, finally consolidating in the reserve team, but always running into the wall of Ter Stegen, the modern goalkeeper whose excellent and continuous performance frustrates any substitute .
Iñaki Peña, who has been at the Barcelona club for eleven seasons, has been the usual substitute because he has only played five games (only three complete ones) in the last year and a half. Upon returning from Istanbul he has lived almost permanently on the bench, as if he were tied there with an invisible rope.
In the last year and a half, he has only played five games. And only three complete (Viktoria Pilsen, Intercity and Ceuta)
Until now, the goalkeeper, who renewed this summer until 2026 with a clause of 400 million euros, has defended the goal in low-risk situations. With everything decided in the Champions League, the team was already eliminated when it debuted with Viktoria Pilsen (November 2022).
In the initial rounds of the City Cup (Intercity and Ceuta, January 2023) or when it came to protecting Ter Stegen’s Zamora in the inconsequential moments of the League (May and June 2023) playing minutes with the title already decided: 45 in Valladolid (Barça lost 3-1) and 27 in Vigo (defeat with Celta by 2-1).
The club believes in Iñaki Peña. Therefore, he renewed it. The technicians, too. That is why they have not looked in the foreign market for a substitute goalkeeper. They already had it at home. And he, patient as he is (he is 24 years old), is the one who believes in himself the most.
He hasn’t gotten nervous. At least, in public. He has had the necessary calm to wait for his moment. The real moment of him. It is a wait that has lasted a year and a half and it comes because Ter Stegen’s back has caused acute pain that leaves him at home.
A test of character
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Barça is left without its favorite goalkeeper. The one who has been ruling such a strategic place with iron hands and silk feet for almost a decade. In Vallecas, at noon, it is the game that Iñaki Peña had been waiting for all his life. A big game after being inactive for more than three months – not even a minute has been in official competition this season – so not only his talent but, above all, his character will be measured.
Not only good goalkeepers, with powerful hands, survive in that very hostile scenario of being placed between three sticks and being the last man for Barça.
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