Andrés Iniesta: Football isn't a science. We play this way because it suits us
It has become the home of the local peña or supporters' club, the walls covered with newspaper cuttings and shirts, a mini-museum collected by the Barcelona midfielder. Every time Andrés is in action, the bar is packed.
On Wednesday they witnessed another piece of history, it just wasn't exactly what they had in mind. The evening before, Iniesta, Xavi Hernández and Lionel Messi posed for photographs with Celtic's shirt to mark the club's 125th anniversary. The following night, the celebrations became even greater when Barcelona were beaten and Rod Stewart cried. "We have beaten the best team in the world," said the Celtic manager, Neil Lennon. Iniesta scored in the first game against the Scottish champions but not this time. This time, there were shades of Chelsea about it. Chelsea last season, that is.
They have seen better nights, all right. The memorabilia reveals as much. When Iniesta scored the last-minute goal at Stamford Bridge that sent Barcelona through to the 2009 European Cup final, it led to a 40% increase in the birth rate in Catalonia. That night his grandmother was watching from hospital, leaping up and down shouting: "My grandson! My grandson!" Others were in Bar Luján, just as they have been for European Cup finals, European Championship finals, the World Cup ... and that goal in South Africa, Kazinform has learnt from the Guardian.
"My granddad opens up for the big Spain or Barcelona games," Iniesta smiles. "I still have the boots I wore in Rome in 2009. At the Wembley final, I swapped shirts with Paul Scholes. And from the World Cup final ..."
He pauses to think. That night at Soccer City when Spain won the 2010 World Cup final, Gerard Piqué took his memento when he took a pair of scissors to the net, while the vest Iniesta wore in memory of Dani Jarque, the Espanyol centre-back who died of a heart attack, is on display at the stadium of Barcelona's city rivals. Iniesta, who struck the only goal against Holland in extra time, can remember the moment perfectly. He talks about "hearing" the "silence" as he waited for the ball to drop; about knowing that he just needed gravity do its thing or as he puts it "wait for Newton", then hit it, convinced he would score. But he's not sure now what booty he left with. "I think," he finally responds, "that I kept the boots."
Fuentealbilla is deep in Don Quixote country. Iniesta left there at the age of 12 - he has been at Barcelona so long that he recently admitted that he felt "a bit Catalan too" - but he keeps coming back. When he first arrived in Barcelona he wanted to turn straight round again. He admits that when his parents came to visit he wouldn't just sleep in the same hotel room as them, he would sleep in the same bed. The rest of the time he slept in La Masía, the Catalan-style farmhouse that stands alongside the Camp Nou, looking out the window and wondering.
"Those days were the worst of my life," he says. "You're 500km away, you're without your family. You're from a small place where you can walk everywhere and the change is huge. There were lots of nights I thought: 'I want to go home.' Very hard moments. I'd think I was never going to make it. But you have to be strong. Even at the age of 12 you think: 'I have to fight. I've come this far, there's no going back.'"
Sacrifice and redemption are central to Iniesta's experience. For a player whose game seems so effortless, so natural, so smooth, the story he tells is surprisingly tough. So, in fact, is he. There is no other way to say this: Iniesta is small. Not just small-for-an-athlete small, but small: 5ft 7in and slight. But there is a steel to him, a competitive edge too easily overlooked. Leaning back on a wooden bench, Iniesta speaks evenly and rationally but every now and then it comes through in his words too.
"If there's one characteristic all players have it's precisely that," he says. "They all have that gene, that competitiveness, the ability to overcome obstacles, to fight, a willingness to sacrifice. It might look easy to reach the top and stay there, to play for your country and win things, but it isn't. All players that have achieved those things have that: the big ones, the small ones, the good-looking ones, the ugly ones, the nice ones, the not so nice ones ... they all have that will to succeed.
"When you win something, that comes to mind. I remember when the referee blew the final whistle in the World Cup final, the first thing I thought of was the pain. The suffering. Instead of thinking: 'I'm a world champion,' I thought of that. It had been a hard year with injuries and I didn't think I'd make it. If you win without sacrifice you enjoy it but it's more satisfying when you have struggled. The World Cup meant so much because of the journey there."
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