SPIKE doffs its three-cornerned hat to yesterday and today’s Herald newspaper, for its reaching out to football fans, in Glasgow last night, to witness the all-Spanish UEFA Cup final.
Yesterday, vendors in the city’s George Square were spotted folding the main newspaper into its sports supplement, which itself had a four-page wrap-around preview of the match – all in Spanish, ahead of the encounter between Espanyol and Sevilla – won by Sevilla.
Hence, both Hugh MacDonald and Martin Greig’s polished prose was entirely in Spanish, just like today’s coverage of the game.
Remarkably, all the translating was carried out by one person: Sandra Marimon. While today’s first edition was mostly pictorial, subsequent editions had the reports converted from English into Spanish.
It is too early to say what uplift in sales will result from the initiative, but the gesture is impressive enough, and is a hark back to football’s Champions League final, hosted in Glasgow five years ago, when, again, The Herald produced a wrap-around specifically for visiting fans, this time of Spain’s Real Madrid and Germany’s Beyer Leverkusen.
