Real Betis v Celta Vigo was supposed to be the end. But one coach looks like he will still be standing after a dramatic finaleMaybe the best way to grasp what happened on Wednesday night and what it meant is to pause it and watch it back again frame by frame, a thousand things in a single shot, a thousand more in the next. Look at Celta de Vigo: you can actually pinpoint the second where their hearts rip in half. It’s the same second when life floods back into Betis. The clock shows 89.47 and the ball drops to Nabil Fekir, near the penalty spot. Stop it there: everyone’s looking at him, close. Only Iago Aspas isn’t in the...
This wasn’t supposed to happen. But Granada are only the third promoted team to ever be top of La Liga as late as thisThe first clásico weekend has a habit of shaping the season, a glimpse of the way things are and the way they’re going to be, pieces starting to fall into place. Take last year, when Barcelona beat Madrid 5-1 at the Camp Nou in Week 10, got Julen Lopetegui the sack and won the league. Or the year before when they got a 3-0 victory at the Bernabéu in Week 17 and won the league; the year before that when Madrid got an 90th-minute Sergio Ramos equaliser that felt like a winner in Week 14, held on...
Imanol Alguacil’s team are rocketing this season with a style of football that is delighting their fans and playersThere was one loud explosion and then six more followed. Across the city they knew that could mean only one thing: Real Sociedad had won again. A tradition from la Real’s old Atoxa ground, momentarily lost after they left in 1993 but recovered at Anoeta in 2009, a single firework is set off every time the visitors score and two are lit when la Real do. That way, the theory goes, in the boats on the Bay of Biscay they always knew how their team were getting on. And although moving to a ground on the other end of town means news...
Week six had been marked by kids, born after 2000, but also by two veterans at the other end of the scale“I like the goal, yeah,” Zinedine Zidane said, “but I like controls more, and his control was the hostia.” Which was one, pretty good way of putting it. The hostia is the body of Christ, the holy host, the consecrated bread, and bloody brilliant – a Spanish equivalent of the dog’s dingly-danglies – and Real Madrid’s manager was right. What Rodrygo had just done was special; where he had done it and when he had done it was, too. It was 10.30pm on Wednesday when James Rodríguez’s long, high diagonal reached him way over on the left. His first...
The team were incapable of the basics against PSG and it is a wonder Spanish clubs have not exploited the weaknesses moreAs Thomas Meunier and Juan Bernat capered through the open savannah that archaeologists believe was once populated by the Real Madrid midfield, the mind was drawn to another Parisian night two and a half years ago, when Ángel Di María orchestrated an even more emphatic victory for Paris Saint-Germain over a Spanish side. As it turned out, that 4-0 win over Barcelona didn’t turn out particularly well for PSG but, more generally, what on earth is going on with midfields in La Liga?On a night when Atlético twice conceded goals on the break at home to Juventus, the issue...