“It is difficult to put myself inside the head of one of the players,” Andoni Zubizarreta tells The Athletic. “A Copa del Rey final means so much. The game itself, but also the build-up, the fans, the flags, the noise, the stadium, the families, the travelling. All that is the final — not just the 90 minutes — and all that is not going to be there this year. The players will just go to their hotel, stay within their ‘bubbles’ and then play a game in an empty stadium. So predicting what will happen without all that is very difficult.”Zubizarreta knows the full experience very well, having kept goal in five Copa del Rey finals — winning three, including the 1983-84 edition, when Athletic Bilbao last lifted the trophy. That victory was followed by two million fans lining the banks of the Nervion river as Zubizarreta and his team-mates floated through Bilbao city centre on the mythic Gabarra barge.Athletic and Basque neighbours Real Sociedad reaching the 2019-20 Copa final sparked ideas of similar celebrations among both sets of fans and an immediate scramble for tickets for the first ever cup final between the two clubs after more than 100
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