The clash of the bottom two in La Liga saw Javier Aguirre’s resurgent side overcome Espanyol – and Storm Fabien
“This is the game,” Pablo Machín said but things weren’t going as planned, his weekend beginning badly and ending worse. Storm Fabien hit Spain, blowing through at 100km an hour, and east of Madrid an overhead cable came down, leaving him and his team trapped inside a train. Meanwhile, about the same time Espanyol were stuck in Guadalajara, pleading in vain for the league to delay the following morning’s kick off, Machín’s opponent was sitting with his feet up in front of the telly at home, the day’s problems slipping away. Which wasn’t the way Leganés manager Javier Aguirre planned it either but, like almost everything he’s doing, it worked.
“Chance,” he called it, which it wasn’t. Virtually none of it is, however much he likes to portray it that way. “The weather was worse yesterday, it was raining, horrible,” Aguirre explained on Sunday as he looked back on the last session before the biggest match of the season – bottom against second-bottom. “A final for the dethroned,” AS called it, while Marca went for “Hunger Games” and El Mundo Deportivo declared it “life or death”. “We trained awfully: awful, awful, awful,” Aguirre continued, “so I had two options: let it go, or really lay into them. I held off for a bit. I went home, watched Valladolid, made myself a gin and tonic, nice and cosy, and I completely forgot to lay into them. And look: it turned out nice.”
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Barcelona 4-1 Alavés; Eibar 3-0 Granada; Leganés 2-0 Espanyol; Levante 3-1 Celta Vigo; Mallorca 0-2 Sevilla; Osasuna 3-4 Real Sociedad; Real Betis 1-2 Atlético 2; Real Madrid 0-0 Athletic Bilbao; Real Valladolid 1-1 Valencia; Villarreal 1-0 Getafe
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