Athletic Bilbao won 2-1 this Thursday to Atlético Madrid, in the second semifinal of the Spanish Super Cup what is being disputed in Saudi Arabia, and the next Sunday they will face Real Madrid in the final.
in a comeback, the goals of the team led by Marcelino García were scored by Yerai Alvarez and Nico Williams, the latter one of the Afro-Basque brothers who play for Bilbao; while goalkeeper Unai Simón had opened the account for those led by Diego Simeone, against of your fence.
The Rey Fahd Stadium in Riyadh is the venue for this Spanish Super Cup, the first edition of which was held in 1982, but since 2020 it faces the first two classifieds of the First Division League and the finalists of the Copa del Rey in Arab lands.
This semifinal had few attractions and was very frictional, to the point that the three goals came from set pieces.
Even so, In the last half hour of play, the Basques turned Slovenian goalkeeper Jan Oblak into a figure from the income of Nico Williams, who elaborated several dangerous plays with his brother Iñaki, the first Afro-Spaniards to play for Athletic Bilbao, a club in which natives of the Basque Country or, at most, Spaniards usually play.
For its part, At Atlético Madrid, Angel Correa started as the starter, while Rodrigo De Paul joined the complement. Just about the last minutes of the game, Cholo Simeone ordered the income of the Uruguayan Luis Suárez and the Brazilian Matheus Cunha, who despite being forwards they could not twist the result for the Colchonero, who at the end stayed ten due to the expulsion of the Uruguayan José María Giménez.
Who are the Williams brothers
Children of a Ghanaian couple who in the ’90s fled the war in their country walking through the desert, his parents met in a refugee camp.
then and as Iñaki told, the eldest of the brothers, Félix Williams and María Arthuer entered illegally jumping the fence that surrounds the Spanish city from Melilla, North Africa. From there they moved to Madrid and then to the Basque Country, where the father began to work as a farmer.
Iñaki was born in Bilbao and Nico, the youngest, in Pamplona; quickly the children began to play in the swimming club, which has an agreement with the Osasuna and that he transferred Iñaki to Bilbao when he was a teenager.
“My parents did not tell anything about their life as refugees and fleeing the war. Only when I was 19 years old, when we went with the family on vacation in Dubai, my mother began to cry in the middle of the desert and told us the history. Until that day they told us that they had come to Spain by plane, and not walking barefoot and fleeing from bullets”, the eldest of the brothers told the Spanish press when he made his debut in the First Division.
Iñaki, that played in the Spain national team called up by Vicente del Bosque, narrated that his parents were detained when they entered Melilla and that they were going to be deported, when a human rights lawyer advised them to claim that they were politically persecuted.
“My parents said they were from Liberia and fleeing the war. In Melilla, a person connected them with Cáritas de España and there they were told that someone in Bilbao he could receive them; Father Iñaki Mardones, from Cáritas Diocesanas, received them; my mother was eight months pregnant, I was born and they named me Iñaki in homage to Father Mardones”, said the striker with a marked Basque accent.
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