2023-04-21 14:00:39
GIRONABorja García equaled Àlex Granell last weekend as the footballer with the most matches wearing the Girona shirt in professional categories. The Madrid player, over the course of seven seasons, has participated in 233 games. A record he has reached thanks to his talent, perseverance and football re-education. Because Borja, one of Quique Cárcel’s first big signings in the summer of 2015, didn’t quite fit in at first. Midfielder by definition, he didn’t defend. And he spent some time on the bench until he changed his mind.
“I have been a player who neglected the defensive aspect a lot. I believed that it was not my task and I had never dedicated myself to improving it. With the mature years and you see that it is necessary. It took me a lot to adapt to it , but if I wanted to play I had to make an effort. It’s without a doubt where I’ve changed the most,” he confessed in an interview with ARA in 2017, the club’s first year in Primera. There are only two footballers who have experienced the two promotion of Girona to the elite first-hand. One is Borja García (the other is Juanpe). He will not be able to completely overcome Granell in the visit to Valladolid this Saturday (6.30pm, Movistar LaLiga), because he broke against Elche. In Pucela, the injured David López and Santi Bueno and Taty Castellanos, who are suspended, will not be there either.
That 2015, Borja had problems getting a place in the starting eleven, despite the expectations generated by his inclusion. “He came with the label of goalscorer. We knew he could give us many options between the lines, because he had scored a lot of goals at Rayo, Córdova and the Madrid subsidiary,” Jordi Guerrero, Girona’s second coach in those moments Especially productive was his time at Nuevo Arcángel, where he would score nineteen goals in one season. But his history at Girona already started on a bad foot: after making his debut in a Cup match with Nàstic, he suffered a partial rupture of the semimembranous tendon.
Nothing bothered Machín more than seeing a footballer go to his club. Borja made the difference when the ball passed through his feet, dressed as an indoor or as a second striker, but he did little work. They spent many hours trying to make him understand. That Girona was a sacrificed team and the player with the most offensive imbalance could not skip the rules. “He was only seen in the plan of ‘When I have the ball I know what to do’, but when the others had it he had to fall to the side to cover and he did not handle it well. This caused him not to be much of a starter at first “, reasons the technician from Arbuci.
Borja made his League debut on matchday 7, playing just over a quarter of an hour, in a defeat to Miranda de Ebro. He was not a starter until matchday 10, and until January 2016 his presence in the lineups was scarce: in 23 matches he had only played three full games and enjoyed four starts. In the other nine duels in which he participated, he did not exceed twenty-five minutes. “It was difficult for him to acclimatise, because the system was defensive. When he didn’t have the ball, he suffered. But I remember when we left for the Christmas holidays he told me that when he came back he would see the good Borja. And he really made a change , he started rumbling,” adds Guerrero. The numbers testify to it: he was the starter in almost the entire second round (15 games) and in the play-offs of ascent
Company by Michel Sanchez
Borja was one of the jewels of the Vallecas squad and was called, at the age of eighteen, to make his debut with the first team, then in the Second Division. In the middle of the field of that Rayo, clearly, there was Míchel Sánchez, a coach who accompanied him in his first steps as a player, when he was climbing the final stretch of his career, and who is marking him in the last years, already as a coach.
“He’s a captain,” says Míchel, who signed him for Huesca in the 2020-21 season, the only one who hasn’t been to Girona since 2015. He signed him for the second time a summer later, in the start of his project in Montilivi. “I am lucky to train footballers like Stuani, Bernardo, Juanpe, Borja or Juan Carlos who are very relevant in the dressing room, and also on the pitch. They are footballers who have a sense of belonging to the club. The others just have to watch how they behave. For me, it’s a pleasure to train them”, comments the white-and-red coach, who has been able to check Borja’s tactical evolution on the field of play: over the years he has given up some of the individual imbalance to gain in defensive intelligence.
Physical problems have also weighed him down recently. “I don’t want to be a burden”, shared Borja at the beginning of the year, in the middle of the recovery process after breaking down in Ipurua on the night that Girona qualified for the final of the last play-off with a goal of his own. “It’s when you lose something that you realize what you had. It happened to me: when I left Girona I felt the happiness it gave me.” Seven seasons and 233 games later, at 32 years old, starter and legend of Montilivi, he is no longer lazy to defend.
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