Six teams went into the final game within two points of each other and the last relegation place. There was drama and tears“Life hits you hard sometimes; this is one of those times,” Papa Pezzolano said when at last it was over and it was confirmed that his team was the one heading to the second division, hope eventually extinguished in the 100th minute of the final day of the longest season. “The dressing room is destroyed,” the Real Valladolid coach admitted as his voice cracked and the tears came. Across the way, that could have been meant literally; in there, the beers were open and Getafe’s players, survival secured, were climbing on tables and leaping about, crashing into each...
A macabre final day in La Liga ended with a Hitchcock-style twist and horror for the most unlikely relegation candidates “Hitchcock could have written this,” Sergio González said when it was all over. Cádiz’s coach was shattered, soaking wet and could hardly walk, T-shirt muddy and back gone, but he’d do it all over again. Even the bit where, liberated at last, he threw himself through the rain and on to the grass at the feet of his players and their fans. Especially that bit: this was a team picture they had desperately wanted to take, the photo of a first division side. It had hurt, the man who hid his fears from those he led struggling to get up...
Álvaro Cervera, lauded by fans as the club’s greatest ever manager, has moved on with the club struggling for survivalÁlvaro Cervera had the look. He also had the T-shirts, the slogan and even the sign, a symbol all of his own. Not for him a bat beamed across the sky but a pair of stylised yellow specs, like some sort of short-sighted superman. Which he kind of was and always will be now, even for those who accepted it was time to let go: a cult figure in Cádiz, city of carnival and comedy. This great counter-cultural anti-hero who changed them and let them change him too, if maybe not quite enough in the end. ‘Mr Glasses’, Salvi Sánchez called...
The La Liga side rightly left the pitch against Cádiz over alleged racial abuse, so why did they end up coming back on?Every time the camera focused on Mouctar Diakhaby sitting in the stands, and Juan Cala still on the pitch, it felt worse. An opportunity lost, everything the wrong way round. On Sunday afternoon Valencia became the first top-level team in Spain to walk off the pitch in protest at alleged racist abuse suffered by their player, only to turn and come back on again.Now the game, which no longer felt like a game, had started again – without the abused and with the alleged abuser. Diakhaby sat in silence, arms crossed, the mask over his face not really...
This is the worst position Barça have been after 10 games since 1971 and no team has won La Liga from so far behindRonald Koeman spent much of Saturday night just sitting, staring at his feet, which was probably better than looking at his team. Out on the grass before him they were busy bringing any lingering hope of winning the league to an end six months early and in a way so absurd, so stupidly familiar, as to be almost funny – if you’re not their coach. One down through an eighth-minute own goal from Óscar Mingueza, another one from Pedro Alcalá had just brought them level and offered a way back, when it happened again: the moment that...