Games in the region were called off but elsewhere, players and coaches with ties to the area had to push grief aside
Thousands of people were at Mestalla this weekend, huge queues all along Avenida de Aragón where Valencia’s players arrived, but there was no game on, not here. They came instead with water, food and clothes for victims of the greatest natural catastrophe the country has seen: floods that have killed more than 210 people and destroyed towns and lives in the Horta Sud, just inland and south of the city, where a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours. Hundreds of cars and vans turned up and unloaded, and many more made their way by foot. More than a million tonnes of aid filled the space under the stand, silent above them.
Three-and-a-half kilometres away at the Ciutat de València, home of second-division Levante, the scene was much the same. Across the bridges that connect the city to the areas hit hardest, more came, carrying shovels and buckets. On the morning that Valencia had been due to play Real Madrid, 10,000 volunteers gathered at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències, taken by bus to the areas affected, when they could get there at all. In the mud with them were some of the footballers they should have been watching at Mestalla.
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