Manuel Pellegrini’s brilliant side are dreaming of Champions League football after a fourth win on the bounceThere were some people on the pitch. Some Pokémon too and some bunnies and some bears. Lots and lots of bears. Lots of goals, too. At half-time in Real Betis’s final home game of 2021, on the night when they sang and danced and hugged and finished the year in a position higher than they have finished any season since 1935, a party breaking out in Heliopolis, it started raining cuddly toys. An annual tradition now, fans had been asked to bring theirs to the ground – no bigger than 35cm please, and no batteries included – and throw them from the stands, flying...
Dusan Vlahovic continued his prolific form at the weekend though his contract situation has the Viola Ultras unhappyDusan Vlahovic finished off a weekend’s work by playing Father Christmas. He had already delivered two goals for Fiorentina on Saturday, helping them to a 4-0 win over Salernitana at the Stadio Artemio Franchi, but while his teammates went to celebrate under the Curva Fiesole he took himself to the stand behind the opposition bench. A young fan had prepared a sign asking for the striker’s shirt. It was enough to get on Santa’s “nice” list.Privately, Vlahovic might have been happy for the excuse. His relationship with the Ultras who occupy the Fiesole has not recovered since the club’s owner, Rocco Commisso, went...
New RB Leipzig manager showed his ability to muster unity and his way of absorbing what a set of players need“We need the ball and we need to control the game,” said Domenico Tedesco, summing up his plans at RB Leipzig after a first game, and a first win. If the phrase was fairly anodyne in terms of a new coach setting out his ambitions for a club that wants to continue climbing, it pricked up the ears. This was not from what many thought was the Tedesco playbook.There was a circularity, if not an inevitability, about the 36-year-old pitching up here. Not just because of his fitting the youthful outlook of the club, and not just because he was...
Real Madrid’s manager knows it will be tough to beat Atlético on Sunday but the Italian is serene in his second spellHello again. The day that Carlo Ancelotti returned to Real Madrid, a chance conversation about something completely different unexpectedly bringing him back to Spain six years later, he looked around Valdebebas and saw familiar faces everywhere, comfort in the lack of change. “The same physios, the same kit men, the same journalists, the same vision, the same demands of greatness,” as he put it. “Everything is immutable: the only thing that changes is the coach.”It is there, anyway. Since he left, Madrid have been through five of them: Rafa Benítez, Zinedine Zidane, Julen Lopetegui, Santi Solari and Zidane again....
Roma manager is perhaps the last of the personality coaches, his capacity to inspire by charismatic authority now fading fastAfter his Roma side had lost 1-0 at Bologna, José Mourinho pursued the referee Luca Pairetto down the tunnel, enraged at the bookings that meant Tammy Abraham and Rick Karsdorp would be suspended for last weekend’s game against Internazionale. “I’ll have to invent the lineup on Saturday,” he later told the media. “Luckily, I replaced Gianluca Mancini. Otherwise, he may have been booked too.”With his captain Lorenzo Pellegrini out with a muscular problem and Stephan El Shaarawy suffering a calf problem, Mourinho had to field a weakened lineup against Inter – and nobody could be in any doubt that that was...