Emiliano Sala (30/10/90 – 21/1/19)

The first thing I saw when I switched the television on at five to seven on Tuesday morning was the lead story on BBC Wales news that a private plane carrying two people from Nantes to Cardiff, which left France at 7.30 pm the previous day, had gone missing just north of Alderney in the Channel Islands after radar contact had been lost.

I’m certain I wasn’t the only City fan that immediately thought this must relate to club record signing Emiliano Sala, who had signed from Nantes only three days earlier and had  returned to France to say his goodbyes to his former team mates on Monday.

For a short while, there was some relief for worried City fans when a French journalist tweeted that our new signing was not on the missing plane, but, even then, it was hard not to think that someone (e.g, family members or City staff) involved in the deal was on the plane because the chances of that flight being part of a completely unrelated matter seemed too unlikely to be true to me.

Within an hour or so though, the French Air authorities had confirmed that Emiliano was on the plane and so, for me at least,  the rest of Tuesday was spent constantly checking social media every few minutes in the increasingly forlorn hope of good news.

Now, the news that the search has been called off this afternoon for the player and pilot David Ibbotson means that what has been feared for nearly three days has come to pass and the man who we were all hoping would score the goals to preserve our Premier League status will never get to wear the blue shirt.

Regular contributor to the Feedback Section, Lindsay Davies contacted me with the following words on Tuesday;-

“I have to express my quite extraordinary level of sadness at the probable death of Emiliano Sala (and his pilot)…a young man at a huge turn in his career, so far from home…the distress of his family can only be imagined.

I have very rarely felt so profoundly the meaning of that old message – of an event putting Football into perspective.”

I can only agree with Lindsay, it has come as a something of surprise just how much this event has affected me. I said “I feel useless, helpless and devastated.” in a messageboard post shortly after it was confirmed that Emiliano was on the plane and found myself asking “why should I feel like that when I know so little about the man?” – I still can’t answer that question, I can only confirm that the awful feeling I had on Tuesday has barely abated.

The closest parallel I can find in terms of how I’ve been affected is the Gary Speed one, but its not a good example really because the circumstances were so different and also all Wales football fans over a certain age would have watched Speed grow up with them. However, I felt “useless. helpless and devastated” on that Sunday eight years ago as well and it’s not how I normally react to the death of a “famous” person.

Although it’s low on any list of priorities at a time like this, just a few words on Emiliano the footballer now. Some eight hours before that plane took off, a thread had been started on the messageboard referred to above containing  a link to the Nantes club website showing all of the goals he had scored for them. I watched it on Tuesday morning and it was so poignant to see his goals being celebrated in such a passionate way, but what goals some of them were! In particular, headers powered into the net from ten yards plus out, calm finishes with his feet, evidence of the knack of being in the right place at the right time for “lucky” striker’s goals, penalties blasted into the net and, on one occasion, a decent turn of pace from a player who, reportedly, did not possess such a thing as he left a centreback floundering in his wake before scoring.

The impression I got from watching that video was that Emaliano Sala was an example of that quite rare thing in football, a late developer. His CV up to the age of about twenty six had been a moderate one, but there were definite signs of a big improvement at a stage in his career when you would have thought the chance for such things had gone.

Virtually everything I read about Emiliano said he was someone who was not born with a great degree of natural talent, but he had made a career for himself through sheer hard work and now he has been taken from us just as he was about to start performing for a manager and set of fans that, probably more than anything else, love a trier. Throw this in with that heading ability, which may have proved truly devastating against defenders who are not as used to facing opponents like him as their predecessors would have been a decade or two ago, and I feel Emiliano Sala could have been a real hero among City fans on a scale we’ve not seen in ages -instead, there’s just that feeling of devastation I keep coming back to.

RIP Emiliano Sala – Cardiff City fans never got the chance to watch you play for our team and you never even got to meet many of those who would have been your team mates here, but we’ll never forget you.