Natalia Pablos’s 350th goal for Rayo Vallecano was also her last.
The striker played her final match on 13 May 2018. Rayo hosted Madrid CFF on the closing matchday of the league season and won 3-2. Natalia scored the goal that settled it.
The career that had begun in Vallecas when she was 14 ended, on the pitch, with another goal from the player who had scored more than anyone else for the club.
Not all of them carried the same weight. Two of them she did not even score in a Rayo shirt.
Four years before her farewell, Natalia had scored the two goals that took Spain to the first World Cup in their history.
More than 300 goals before leaving Spain
Natalia Pablos joined Rayo in 2000. During her first spell she won the 2008 Copa de la Reina and the three consecutive league titles played between 2008 and 2011.
She also finished as the league’s leading scorer in 2007/08 and 2008/09, with 24 and 29 goals respectively. In November 2012 she reached 300 goals for the Vallecas side.
Four months later she left Vallecas.
The captain was 27 when she signed for Bristol Academy in March 2013. She arrived in England after more than a decade at the same club and several years without playing for Spain.
Her first season ended with Bristol as runners-up in both the English league and the FA Cup. It also changed the striker’s international career.
The English calendar also left her a gap in winter. Between November 2013 and February 2014, with the league in England on its break, Natalia went back to playing for Rayo for four months.
As she later recalled in an interview with Panenka, her time at Bristol allowed her to rediscover her game and return to the national side.
Twelve goals in ten matches
Natalia returned to the senior side during qualifying for the World Cup in Canada. She scored twelve goals in ten matches and finished as Spain’s leading scorer on the road to the tournament.
The last two came on 13 September 2014 in Iași.
Spain needed to beat Romania to secure top spot in their group mathematically and qualify for a World Cup for the first time. Natalia opened the scoring in the 28th minute and struck again in the 59th.
The 0-2 win confirmed their place in Canada.
Spain had played at the 1997 and 2013 European Championships, but had never reached the final stage of a World Cup. Qualification was sealed by a striker who had needed to leave the country to win her place back in the national side.
Natalia finished the campaign with twelve goals in ten matches. The following year she played all three of Spain’s games in Canada, against Costa Rica, Brazil and South Korea.
England and the return to Vallecas
The Madrid native left Bristol to join Arsenal at the end of 2014. In London she won the 2015 League Cup and the 2016 FA Cup before returning to Rayo.
“I’m coming back to Rayo, which is my home,” she said at her unveiling.
She played two more seasons in Vallecas and combined the last of them with her work as a teacher. She had decided to retire at the end of the 2017/18 campaign and told the club before the season finished.
Her 350th goal against Madrid CFF looked like the perfect ending, but the exit was not immediate. Natalia was under contract until 2020 and Rayo initially refused to release her. The intervention of the Spanish footballers’ union, the AFE, proved decisive in resolving the situation in September 2018.
“After 15 years, what you expect is to be thanked and allowed to retire,” she explained two years later.
Pablos hung up her boots with three league titles, a Copa de la Reina and 350 goals for Rayo. Also with an FA Cup, an English League Cup and the experience of having played at Spain’s first World Cup.
Asked whether she would trade her 350 goals for something she never managed to achieve, she chose an Olympic Games.
She never played at one. Even so, the story of Spain’s first World Cup cannot be told without the two goals she scored in Romania.
