Independent, a lost decade | Profile

Hitting rock bottom is supposed to generate a break, mark a turning point to improve in everything that comes after. Getting foot in the last basement should leave some teaching. El Loco Bielsa explains it every time he is presented with a result-oriented proposal: “Failure is formative, it makes us solid, it brings us closer to convictions, it makes us coherent.” Learning above all, bad experiences as a foundation.

I know, this has the tone of those self-improvement phrases mounted on photos of a sunrise that pay off so much on social networks. It is not the case. Nothing further than proposing a self-help message. Here we are going to talk about Independent.

This week marked the tenth anniversary of the descent of Red to B Nacional. What seemed impossible, that nightmare that happened to others, we suffered on June 15, 2013. It was a tragedy that marked us, a date that went through history. But the most dramatic thing is that that 15-J did not promote a new paradigm or follow an awareness to avoid possible relapses. Ten years ago, we could say, in Independiente the lost decade began.

Eight dates before the unfortunate Saturday, Miguel Brindisi had started as coach. He arrived with Grondona’s blessing, which happened to be a reasonable illusion. Don Julio was not going to allow the club that had taken him to the AFA to be relegated.

Card error. As the outcome drew closer, inexorably, we resorted to the miracle. Even if it benefited the Devil, we deserved a divine gesture. We were wrong again. With the fait accompli we resign ourselves to thinking that we were going to come back better, stronger, that we had hit rock bottom and that what was to come could not be worse. We screwed him up again. Nothing that happened since then deserves to be told in a TED talk. And little by little we became convinced: after hell there was more.

The club continued with the same self-destructive vocation that Andrés Ducatenzeiler had planted in the early 2000s. And worst of all: the fans naturalized that of balancing on this eternal slide that leads us to nowhere. We resign ourselves to a board of directors of two people, to groping the club’s idols, to bring substitutes as if reinforcements, to suffer the growth of others. We get used to not being what we had been. We were so innocent that we even convinced ourselves that with the Holanist spring we were going to recover our mystique and identity, that with our arms raised was enough. How clever!

It is sad to see how the club is fraying, but it is even sadder to realize that we did not learn our lesson. If ten years later we have to collect from the fans, if we are still concerned about the average, we are aware of how Arsenal turned out and we bitch when the damn Union thinks of winning a game, then that June 15 does not correspond to anything. The only thing that remained from the season we played in the B Nacional was a waterfall of memes and obvious jokes. Oh, and a hideous shirt with white and red vertical batons just like the Estudiantes.

Twenty years ago that the fans bet on changes that in the end worsen what they find. The club is evidence that you can always be worse. That idea that hitting rock bottom is a starting point to improve did not happen to Avellaneda. We tore up self-help manuals.