The official calendars may have said one thing, but the true subject of the celebrations in Bilbao was football, and football only. The cafe owners normally serving the dark-suited businessmen on the banks of the Nervion instead welcomed full families, unfailingly decked in the red and white of Athletic.
Among them soon, though, stirring perhaps a little groggily from the taxing activities of the night before, was the red, sometimes white, and sometimes blue, of Manchester United. Visitors from afar, welcomed to Bilbao by a local population with a firm set of beliefs in how the game should be played and how the traditions to which clubs should stick.