A tributo to Adolfo Ramirez

It was a truly emotional evening

After nearly 50 years, a group of football teammates from the early 1970s finally met up again to honour their manager, and thank him for the positive influence he’d had on them during their formative years

Text by Stephen Neish

AS I WROTE IN A RECENT article for the Gibraltar Chronicle, Adolfo Ramirez is a man who’s lived and breathed football all his life. From his early days as a player with Catalan Bay-based Shamrock FC and then Gibraltar United to his stint as GFA Manager between 1993 and 1997, during which he gloriously steered Gibraltar to silver medal success at the Gibraltar Sunshine Island Games in 1995. He gave his beloved game his all.

When he finally hung up his boots (not before acquiring a sackful of cups, trophies and medals) he went into management and took over the reins of a fledgling junior team called Rovers United. I

remember the very first match we played under him was against one of the top teams in the division. We were 3-0 down at half time, got what’s today known as the hair dryer treatment during the interval, and ran out 4-3 winners in the end!

Adolfo’s commitment to “los Rovers”, as everyone called us, was absolute. When we had a fixture at one of the Europa Point pitches, he’d somehow pile us all into his tiny Honda Civic – the smaller ones like yours truly in the boot, if memory serves me correctly – and drop each of us at home after the match. I’d swear that car was actually a disguised version of Dr Who’s time machine the TARDIS, which as fans of the cult sciencefiction BBC TV series will know, was much larger on the inside than it seemed from the outside. Eventually the valiant Civic conked out, and he had to buy a new set of wheels!

Mind you, Adolfo demanded a similar level of commitment from his players. We trained three times a week and you’d better turn up if you wanted to play at the weekend. If he smelled alcohol on anyone’s breath (most of us hadn’t reached drinking age yet) he was sent home and dropped for the next game. Discipline - That was one of the many values he helped instill in us. Teamwork and team spirit too - Playing for each other- “Carrying” a player without complaint when he was having a stinker. It’s no exaggeration to say he helped us transition from boys to men.

Adolfo advocated a fast, attacking style of play and demanded a high work rate. He was proud when servicemen living in Chilton Court and Edinburgh House told him they went to see our matches at the Naval Grounds (remember them?) to admire the quality of our football, sometimes against older, taller and physically stronger opposition.

It wasn’t all work, however. He also rewarded us by organizing events like end-of-season parties to which our parents were invited, and dances - to which they weren’t! I have fond memories also of all of us watching a film he’d managed to get hold of (VHS had still to be

invented) of the 1968 European Cup Final in which Manchester United beat Portuguese champions Benfica 4-1 after extra time, the first occasion on which an English team lifted Europe’s top trophy. I’m sure Adolfo must have been heart-broken when “his” Rovers broke up, mainly as a result of so many members of the team going on to further education in the UK.

But, back to that emotionally charged night of Saturday 11th January; it had been months in the making and was the brainchild of “Forty” Azzopardi, he of SDGG and Piazza Grill fame and a tough, uncompromising (to put it mildly) defender in his youth. He asked me if I’d help organize a surprise party for Adolfo and I was more than happy to oblige. We decided to hold it at the Casino Calpe, but how to get him there? Luckily his younger son Colin already knew, although it hadn’t yet been announced officially, that he was to be appointed the new Chief Fire Officer and on that pretext he and his brother Giles said they were inviting their dad to a quiet, discreet celebration. The poor chap didn’t know what hit him. When the three of them climbed the stairs to the first floor, he naturally thought the intonation of “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” by a room full of people was meant for Colin. It took him a few moments to realize it was actually meant for him, and that those doing the singing were his Rovers United protégés. “I’m speechless” he eventually managed to utter, visibly moved. But he recovered as we tucked in to our paella and raciones, and we shared many stories, memories and anecdotes of bygone days.

Nor did he go home emptyhanded. Before cutting a cake decorated as a football pitch, we presented him with a football shirt of his favourite team, Athletic Bilbao, a football signed by the Rovers “Old Boys”, a framed photo of an actual Rovers line-up before a game and an inscribed glass plate. I can think of no better way to end than with a quote from it: “To Adolfo, much more than a manager: a mentor to all of us”.