Sporting Parallels?

It’s only an ad for sportswear, but it’s also a story of Spain. The bearded basketball player Pau Gasol sits soliloquising in what appears to be a bedroom, until finally the tagline appears: “Being Spanish isn’t an excuse anymore. It’s a responsibility.”

Those two banal sentences – spoken, crucially, by a Catalan – go to the heart of what sport is doing to Spain. The country’s improbable run of sporting triumphs has revealed a new Spanish nationalism. And hubristic as this may sound, sport itself is changing Spain.

So begins an article by Simon Kuper, the author of the brilliant book, "Football against the Enemy", in Saturday’s Financial Times.

Spain is on the crest of a sporting wave and the sportsmen and supporters of these various successes are coming from all parts of the Spanish nation:

Spaniards have been watching TV in bafflement since June 2005, when a Mallorcan kid won the French Open tennis title and then reached into the crowd with his sweaty hands to grab King Juan Carlos. That set the tone: like many of Spain’s new sporting heroes, Rafael Nadal speaks Catalan, but identifies unashamedly with the unitary state.

The “Roja” team featured several Catalans, plus the odd Basque and naturalised Brazilian, who all got on fine with their Madrilene teammates. Of course they did: like the entire basketball team, the whole football team was born after Franco’s death.

Of course, it’s not only in football and tennis that united Spanish teams and individuals are performing so well, but also in basketball, hockey, motor-racing (car and bike), cycling etc etc.

Those of us who live in in the UK (and particularly Northern Ireland and Scotland) will not be at all surprised that this kind of fence-crushing success is really getting under the collective skin of the petty regional nationalists:

A minority in the regions remains unhappy. The Catalan nationalist politician Joan Puig demanded to know what Gasol was paid to advertise Spain, and grumbled that Nadal doesn’t speak Catalan at press conferences. And in Barcelona and Basque cities, town halls refused to install big screens showing the football final. But even in these towns, polls show, large majorities supported La Roja.

How inconvenient when the little people don't always follow the script.

And finishing on that optimistic note well-done to England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (it was a point won not lost after Saturday's performance) and also, despite the result, Wales on last night’s performances.