New manager will have to deal with a powerful dressing room and a club that demands success with style“It’s not normal to take over at a team that’s top,” Quique Setién said after the call that took him from a stroll among the cows in Liencres, Cantabria, to a job among the sacred cows at the Camp Nou. “When you’re out of work, waiting for an opportunity, you imagine a team near the bottom, in trouble,” said Barcelona’s new manager. Instead on Sunday night he will occupy his place in the dugout at a place where they have not seen their team lose for 38 games, going back more than a year – not since the last time he was...
The Spanish trophy’s derided trip to Jeddah sees Barcelona fans buying just 300 tickets and Valencia shifting as few as 27The sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo last week offered advice for football fans travelling to Spain’s new, revamped Supercopa, which begins with Valencia v Real Madrid on Wednesday night and Barcelona v Atlético on Thursday before Sunday evening’s final between the winners. The fourth of an eight-point checklist informed them they would not be allowed to take ham or any pork product, “even if it is vacuum packed”. A couple of days later one Barcelona fan told the radio show El Larguero that he would be doing so anyway but not many will defy the rules – if only because not...
Abelardo’s side sense a ‘turning point’ in their season. It needs to be: no team has survived on fewer than 12 points at halfway“Maybe I’m a masochist,” Abelardo Fernández had said and maybe that explains everything: it explains why they called and why he came; it might even explain why this could just work. That, at least, is the hope and at least there is hope now. The noise had just about died down, supporters heading home happy, when Espanyol’s new coach appeared, their third in half a season. It was almost midnight, cold outside, and his throat was raw but he was smiling. “You have a bad time of it, you suffer, but you enjoy it,” he admitted, “and...
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...
A thrilling finale left honours even but Valencia on their knees after the Real goalkeeper headed upfield and caused mayhem“I’m two metres tall; that frightens people,” Thibaut Courtois said. It was late, it was loud and he had nothing to lose, so there he was: Real Madrid’s goalkeeper, up the other end, running into the Valencia penalty area for one last shot at saving this, the fear he said his opponents felt about to become real. “It was his idea,” Zinedine Zidane admitted, and it was an idea that had been going around his head since the moment Carlos Soler had given Valencia the lead with 12 minutes left on Sunday night. “I thought: shit, the game’s escaping us, I...