Ask the Spanish about Joaquín and they’ll remember the jokes, the dances, the stories. But there’s more to him than thatYou must be Joaquín, they said, and he was: unique, no one quite like him, a cheeky scamp with a glint in his eye, a grin on his face, an endless supply of gags, the uncontainable urge to tell them and, armed with a gaditano accent, the delivery to do them justice. Ask anyone in Spain for their favourite Joaquín moments and their face will light up much like his and they won’t want for one. Or two, or three, or four.Maybe they’ll say the day he was presented at Málaga and decided that keepy-ups were fine but stand-up was...
Málaga, Las Palmas and Deportivo La Coruña will almost certainly be relegated after Paco López returned to his boyhood club to mastermind their stunning surge towards safety“Keep calm,” Levante’s manager, Paco López, said but he knew better than anyone that it was a bit late for that. Maybe tomorrow. For now, Sunday lunchtime in the Valencian sunshine, it was time to enjoy it, like he’d said from the start. His players had thrown shirts into the crowd and turned the pitch into a mosh pit, pushing and pogoing, dancing round a circle, emotion escaping as they embraced and 24,001 red-and-blue flags waved: 24,000 around the ground and one high above them all. Along the east stand, the division’s team’s flags...
Diego Simeone’s side retain faint hopes of winning La Liga but both teams seem more concerned with European ambitions when they meet at the BernabéuOn the eve of the Madrid derby Zinedine Zidane was asked to whom the game mattered more. “Both,” he said, but many wondered if the right answer was actually “Neither”. The word repeated most in the build-up to this match is “decaffeinated”. These city rivals have faced each other in three finals over the last five seasons – two European Cups, one Copa del Rey – and met in last year’s Champions League semi-final too. Both have also won La Liga and they have European quarter-finals of their own next week, so it is understandable that...
Sevilla had been agonisingly close to beating Barcelona but substitute Lionel Messi came on after an hour to score an equaliser in the dying minutesIt took FC Barcelona 358 days to lose their record and 54 seconds to get it back again. Saturday night, week 30 in La Liga and Sevilla were 2-0 up at the Sánchez Pizjuán, but it could have been three, four or five. They had overrun their opponents and although they were exhausted they didn’t have long to hang on now. On the touchline, the fourth official was fiddling with the board; high above him, the scoreboard crept beyond 87 minutes, and there would only be two more added. Alongside the time were two names: goalscorers...
It may be only two years since the club were last in Europe’s premier contest but it feels like a watershed as a return looms“They’re all talking about that long run in the dressing room,” Gabriel Paulista said. It had been 14 years, after all. On Saturday, Valencia beat Sevilla 2-0 at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán, the first time they had won there since May 2004, back when Pep Guardiola was a midfielder, not a manager, Lionel Messi had not played a senior game and Sergio Ramos was just starting out, a 19-year-old dreaming of Claudio Caniggia. Of the 30 footballers who took to the field that day, he and Dani Alves are the only ones still going and now...