"When you see him score that goal at Anoeta, you feel like leaping onto the pitch and hugging him," Xabi Alonso says, and he wasn't the only one. Nor, more importantly, was the kid he's talking about as he takes shelter from the rain at Zubieta, just south of the city of San Sebastian.
It was late on a Saturday night in mid-October when Julen Lobete's last-minute shot almost took the roof off the stadium and carried Real Sociedad to the top of the table where they have been since, and few understood better what it meant than the former Liverpool and Real Madrid midfielder.