Advertisement

Javi Martinez reportedly tried to sneak into Athletic Bilbao’s training complex to get the stuff he left

Dirty Tackle

It turns out forcing a move from Athletic Bilbao to Bayern Munich was only the initial stage of the covert mission Javi Martinez thinks his life has become. Martinez (who will henceforth be known as "Javi Bond") apparently left all his personal belongs at Athletic's training complex and hasn't had any human interaction with anyone at the club since he fled Spain at the end of August when Bayern dumped €4o million to trigger his buyout clause, so he of course had to retrieve his things in the most unnecessary way possible.

Marca has the details (which will be used as the screenplay for the Javi Bond thriller that will be in theaters next summer):

Athletic Club de Bilbao's training grounds, Ciudad Deportiva, in Lezama. Two o'clock on Sunday morning. A weekend off at the club's training facilities as there is no activity until Monday. The gates are closed and there is no-one around apart from the security guard who is suddenly startled by the arrival of a car.

The guard watches with great surprise as someone gets out of the car and jumps over a small fence to get to the building's main entrance. The guard is on his way to stop the person he assumes to be a thief, when he realises that it is Javi Martínez, the ex-Athletic player, now with Bayern.

The international midfielder asks the security officer to open the door to the dressing room because he wants to get his things (boots, clothes and other personal items) that he was unable to retrieve after the buy-out clause came into effect to end his association with Athletic.

Javi Bond eventually persuaded the guard to let him into the dressing room, but when he got there, the stuff he left in his locker was gone! According to Marca, he was only able to salvage a single pair of boots that "had been discarded nearby."

Few people would be surprised by a club clearing out the locker of a former player who left his things behind and didn't tell anyone he'd be back (in the dead of night) to pick them up. But Javi Bond is one of those few.

UPDATE: Javi Bond tweeted, presumably in reference to his late night retreival mission, "It's amazing that there are people who believe that this story is true..." Of course, he could also be referring to the story about David Beckham and Alexi Lalas buying Malaga, so who knows.

UPDATE II: Bilbao paper El Correo has put together a diagram of Javi Bond's daring yet very direct mission.