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Cardiff City pay tribute to Emiliano Sala at game against Bournemouth – video

Bobby Reid gives Cardiff win over Bournemouth on day of emotion

This article is more than 5 years old

As the Cardiff supporters continued to sing Emiliano Sala’s name long after sewing up victory, Neil Warnock was among those fighting back the tears on an extremely poignant evening in south Wales. Bobby Reid, surrounded by his teammates, held aloft a T-shirt displaying Sala’s face as the football fraternity united to pay their respects to the striker, who disappeared in a light aircraft alongside pilot David Ibbotson over the Channel Islands almost a fortnight ago.

The locals describe Sala, whose name reverberated around the stadium from start to finish, as the best striker the club never had. This win over Bournemouth – Cardiff’s first this year courtesy of two goals by Reid on his 26th birthday – was unquestionably for Sala and Ibbotson.

“I was all right until the final whistle went and I went on the pitch,” Warnock said. “Emiliano would have been with us today and I said to the lads: ‘You have to perform.’ I thought today the whole club was amazing – I was the proudest man to be manager of the whole club. The noise volume, I’ve never heard anything like it. Ever. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. I felt immensely proud of everybody. It was as if we had to show our support for him and coming back to the main stand to see my wife and my kids up there it just hit home that we done him proud. It was almost like we couldn’t be beaten today – the crowd wouldn’t let us be beaten. I’m really proud and I’m sure he [Sala] would have been.”

After more than £324,000 was raised online, a privately funded search for the Piper PA-46 Malibu plane will begin on Sunday. The plane vanished en route to the Welsh capital on 21 January, hours after Sala had said farewell to his Nantes teammates having signed for Cardiff for a club-record £15m. He was due to train with his new team the next day.

The game itself was always going to be superseded by a series of stirring tributes paid to the pair in a truly moving atmosphere, with Cardiff fans serenading Sala in the 28th minute, a nod to his age, while an enormous blue banner was strewn along the foot of the Canton Stand before a ball had even been kicked. It simply read: “We never saw you play and never saw you score, but Emiliano our beautiful Bluebird we will love you forever more.”

There was a moving moment of reflection on the referee Jonathan Moss’s whistle – an impeccably observed minute’s silence – as the Cardiff fans held aloft yellow and blue placards to create a mosaic that spelled out the Argentinian striker’s name.

On entry to the ground, every fan was handed a yellow daffodil – the national flower of Wales and also of significance to the Ligue 1 club, whose nickname is the Canaries.

The atmosphere hours before kick-off was understandably sombre, as fans added to the rows of daffodils laid around the Fred Keenor statue, while others placed scarves, handwritten letters and flags in tribute to Sala. One note, in blue ink, read: “RIP Sala, our beautiful bluebird.” Another, with the words printed and taped on to a Cardiff home shirt, said: “The most painful goodbyes are never said and not explained.”

In the programme dedicated to Sala, a joint-statement by the Cardiff board expressed how they had been moved by the “goodwill of the football world”. The nature of the growing number of tributes reflected that, with Argentina, Barnsley, China, Liverpool and Wolves shirts among the dozens amassed over the past 12 days outside the stadium.

Warnock turned away as Reid dispatched a fifth-minute penalty down the middle of Bournemouth goalkeeper Artur Boruc’s goal after Steve Cook’s silly handball, and was celebrating again just 15 seconds into the second half. Somewhere, you would like to think, so too was Sala. As Cardiff said beforehand, at times like these “the spirit of humanity and unity comes to the fore”.

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