Pala is an ancient Basque Pelota modality, with roots going back at least the 17th Century.
Invitation to a Game of Argolla, a painting (ca. 1665-1670) by Bartolome Murillo, shows the ancestor of the implement used today, though the actual game played at the time was more like croquet than Pala. Another painting,
The Game of Pelota by Francisco de Goya (1779) clearly shows what looks like a modern pala corta or pala larga bat. The sport did not become professional until about 1904 and Bilbo (Bilbao) has always been an important location. (
InnPala Pala history article by Jesus Azurmendi).
It has had its ups and downs over the years and now has the smallest roster of any of the professionally played modalities. It is not covered particularly well in the press, as far as I can tell. Usually, the only matches covered are tournament championship matches. The website of
InnPala and
Munduko Pilota Batzarra (Basque Pelota World Council) cover some professional Pala (but MPB does not cover this tournament).
I wanted to recap this tournament as exhaustively as I could. I did not follow it in real time. That meant I wanted to find not just joko (set) scores, but individual game scores also. Innpala sometimes covers the game scores at its
Twitter feed. Game scores are also sometimes available at
Innpala Fronton Facebook. But there is no full coverage. Knowing how the tournament works helped me to get started. A Liga
preview article (
Deia) informed me that the tournament would start on the weekend of October 26, 2018. Experience covering previous Liga competitions reminded me that the 8 Liga matches are usually spread over 10 weeks. The first three Jornadas (rounds) are usually played at various locations (identified in one of the above and/or below sources), the last seven almost always at Bizkaia, Bilbo (Bilbao). I didn't know where the other locations were and had to do some research to find them.
I knew that there was at least one newspaper,
Diario Vasco, that had the electronic equivalent of "
Agate pages," those very small type pages that provide results, but little more, of the more minor competitions in American sports (high school and small college results, for example).
DV has a magnificent archive of around 1,500 BP articles going back over the last 12 years. You can browse these stories, but page by page browsing is very time consuming. The Internet addresses provide a clue as to how to streamline this process. Go to the
DV pelota page. At the bottom of any page that lists the titles of articles, there are numbered links to older articles. If you click on any number and then pay careful attention to the address, you will see how you can move through articles much faster by making a simple change to the address. Higher numbers take you further back into history. So if you know the date, or even approximate date (I still don't know the exact date of some of the below listed matches--the date I give is my best approximation), you can move to the date you need pretty quickly.
Once you get to the Cartelera (calendar) page that you need, you will almost always find the matches you are looking for with results broken down to the game by game scores. I was able to find information on every Liga match but one, which I was able to infer from the final joko standings provided by InnPala.
One of the problems for an American reader in interpreting the scores is that for many matches the tradition is to list the score by color rather than by winner. In most BP matches there is a red team and a blue team. The scores are given in that order. I almost always adjust that and give the scores, winning team first. There are so many scores below that I decided to simply cut and paste them out of the Carteleras. This caused many mistakes when I tried to reconcile the match scores with the InnPala table. It also caused many mistakes when I tried to translate the raw Joko scores into match wins and losses (another bias of an American observer). Nothing in this competition was decided by match wins and losses. Everything was decided by total number of Jokos won.
Putting together the historical winners of this tournament going back to 2013 presented a whole host of other problems that challenged my Librarian skills. The main one was that I never knew the date of old finals. I only knew that the tournament was almost always played in December and January. This is where being able to locate
DT Cartelera dates by using the address trick really came in handy. It didn't, in the end, keep me from having to move page by page at some times, but the titles of other stories and my knowledge of players' names helped a lot. There were also other general BP sites that gave me clues. And patience helps a lot. Sometimes, if you haven't already found out, sites that you think might give you easy access to the information you need, do not, because they are poorly organized. This is where simply Googling players names and years (to look for this AND that in Google simply use the "and" connective. For exact phrase searching surround the phrase with quotation marks). For Twitter there is a search syntax that allows you to search old messages (which came in very handy in locating joko scores from 7 or 8 years ago). You can use
Twitter advanced search. Once you do a search, copy out the address. Here are a couple:
A.
https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=fusto%20OR%20ibargarai%20from%3Ainnpala%20since%3A2014-01-20%20until%3A2014-05-30&src=typd
This is a date limited search for players Fusto or Ibargarai in messages sent between January 20 to May 30 of 2014 from the Innpala twitter feed. Once you have this, simply replace the variables you need with anyone from any site and then the delimited dates.
B.
https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=from%3Ainnpala%20since%3A2016-01-01%20until%3A2016-02-01&src=typd
This is a simple date limited search for every post from Innpala in January of 2016. Note that the advanced search page is very powerful, it allows phrase and "Boolean" searching (AND or OR) as well as several other variables. Whatever Twitter search you do, copy out the address and you won't have to use the search page again.
Facebook allows basic AND searching and several delimiters.
One other item. Often times you will type in an address and get no retrieval. Many websites have gone out of "print" but that doesn't mean they are not still available in some form. The best place to start for this is the Wayback Machine at
Archive.org, This great site trawls and saves uncounted numbers of websites as they were. This can be a life saver in this type of research.
================================================
Back to the Liga competition.
So here is what I found. The scores are presented exactly as they appeared in the
DV Carteleras. Each score is linked to its Cartelera. For the last four rounds, there are selected links to short match articles at InnPala Fronton Facebook and a full
Mundo Deportivo article for the final round of matches, where the Liga phase winner was determined. There was no IFF coverage of the first three rounds, I assume, because those rounds weren't contested in Bilbo.
===================================
Key; Blue team; Red Team; match record; number of jokos won and lost, individual joko scores. e and y=and. All Jornada links, unless otherwise specifically stated, are to
DV Cartelera pages.
Jornada 1 at Sopela (
1)(
2) October 26, 2018
Landeta e Ibargarai (0-1),
1;
Garate y Brefel (1-0),
3 (9-10, 4-10, 10-9 y 6-10).
Gaubeka e Ibai Perez (1-0),
3; Fusto y Gordon (1-0),
2 (4-10, 6-10, 10-9, 10-9 y 10-5).
Jornada 2 at Sestao (
1)(
2) November 4, 2018. This round was played on a 42 meter court.
Fusto y Gordon (1-1),
3; Necol y Urrutia (0-1),
2 (4-10, 7-10, 10-7, 10-6 y 10-5).
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez (2-0),
3; Landeta e Ibargarai (0-2),
1 (9-10, 10-9, 10-7 y 10-9)
1 point from the F-G v N-U match (Dan Necol Facebook video)
Jornada 3 at Mungia (
1)(
2) Nov. 10, 2018 This round was played on a long (54 meter) court. All others were played on a short (36 meter) court
Necol y Urrutia (1-1),
3; Garate y Brefel (1-1),
0 (10-8, 10-7 y 10-8).
Fusto y Gordon (2-1),
3; Landeta e Ibargarai, (0-3),
1 (10-5, 10-8, 7-10 y 10-6).
The rest of the Liga phase was played at Bizkaia, Bilbo (Bilbao) (
1)(
2)
Jornada 4 November 16, 2018
Fusto y Gordon (3-1),
3; Garate y Brefel (1-2),
1 (10-9, 6-10, 10-6 y
7-5). The match was ended by a ball that hit Garate in the cheek.
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez,(3-0),
3; Necol y Urrutia (1-2),
2 (7-10, 8-10, 10-3, 10-6 y 10-8).
Full match video for both matches (Dan Necol Facebook video)
Match article (Innpala Fronton Facebook)
Jornada 5 November 24, 2018
Landeta e Ibargarai (0-4),
0;
Necol y Urrutia (2-2),
3 (4-10, 5-10 y 8-10).
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez (4-0),
3; Garate y Brefel (1-3),
1 (4-10, 10-3, 10-3 y 10-5).
No match article
End of 1st half of Liga competition
Jornada 6 December 1, 2018
Landeta e Ibargarai (0-5),
0;
Garate y Brefel (2-3),
3 (8-10, 8-10 y 7-10).
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez (4-1),
0;
Fusto y Gordon (4-1),
3 (5-10, 4-10 y 7-10)
Match article (Innpala Fronton Facebook)
Jornada 7 December 8, 2018
Necol y Urrutia (2-3),
2;
Garate y Brefel (3-3),
3 (10-8, 7-10, 9-10, 10-7 y 8-10). Garat took a ball on the ankle in the second joko but continued.
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez (5-1),
3; Landeta e Ibargarai (0-6),
1 (10-9, 10-5, 7-10 y 10-9)
Match article:
Jornada 8 December 14, 2018
Necol-Urrutia (3-3),
3 Fusto-Gordon (4-2)
2 (10-9; 10-9; 3-10; 6-10; 10-5)
Full match video (Dan Necol Facebook video--begins at 1:09:08)
Match article:
Jornada 9 December 21, 2018,
Landeta e Ibargarai (0-7),
0;
Necol y Urrutia (4-3),
3 (4-10, 6-10 y 8-10).
===========================================
Gaubeka-Ibai Perez (6-1)
3 Garat-Brefel (3-4)
0--inferred. I was unable to find any information about this match. This joko scoreline is the only one that reconciles both the Joko win numbers and match records listed in the table of the main article. Any feedback would be welcome. I very much doubt that this mat took place on this date. Again, any feedback would be greatly appreciated
===========================================
No match article
Jornada 9 December 22
Fusto y Gordon (5-2),
3; Garate y Brefel (3-5)
2 (8-10, 10-7, 10-7, 8-10 y 5-10)
DV interposed the winner and loser, to the best of my knowledge.
No match article
Jornada 10 December 24
Fusto-Gordon (6-2),
3; Landeta-Ibargarai (0-8),
2 (10-6; 7-10; 10-4; 9-10; 10-4). This victory gives Fusto-Gordon 21 joko wins, top of the Liga table, and a place in the final. It is by far L-I's best effort of the competition.
Gaubeka e Ibai Pérez
(6-2),
1;
Necol y Urrutia (5-3),
3 (4-10, 4-10, 10-7 y 9-10). This game had no meaning for the Liga winner after the result of the first meeting. But these two teams would meet 4 days later (see linked post).
Match article for both (
Mundo Deportivo)
There were three small discrepancies I was never able to work out. I had N-U at 21-12 Jokos. Innpala had them at 21-15. I had G-I at 19-13. Innpala had them at 19-16. And I had L-A at 6-24 (8 losses). Innpala had them at 6-21. Number of joko wins, as you can see, was uneffected.
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