The Premier League’s lack of downtime is much maligned – but few clubs are truly idle over an ever more frenzied ChristmasThe Champions League returns this week and, for many, the most thrilling football tournament in Europe and arguably the world starts now. The wheat has been separated from the chaff, the Juves and Bayerns from the Qarabags and Maribors. As the first country in the history of the competition to have five teams through to the last 16, England’s interest in the knockout stages has never been greater, even if José Mourinho believes it will end sooner rather than later because of the absence of a winter break in the football calendar.Speaking in November, the Manchester United manager poo-poohed...
After a tense buildup to the Catalan derby, Espanyol came close to repeating their Copa del Rey heroics until a late interventionThey were seven minutes away when Gerard Piqué appeared before them, a finger on his lips in the rain. “It was symbolic,” he said, and he made sure of that. Espanyol, the only team to have beaten Barcelona in almost six months, were leading again. For the second time in 18 days Barcelona had taken the short bus ride to the RCDE Stadium and, for the second time in 18 days, they were losing 1-0. After Barcelona’s defeat to Espanyol in the Copa del Rey, Gerard Moreno’s header left them on the verge of a league loss after 21...
They train on a pitch surrounded by rubble but a Copa del Rey win over Real Madrid is the latest step on Leganés’s ride“It’s very noisy in there,” Asier Garitano said. It was Wednesday night and they were going wild in the Santiago Bernabéu dressing room, wild on the pitch and then wild on the bus as it travelled down the Castellana, 17km south to Butarque, where they arrived long after midnight and with no intention of going home. “It’ll be a late one,” grinned captain Martín Mantovani. Leganés had just made history. “Look around you, it happened,” Nereo Champagne had told Nordin Amrabat as he stood staring wide-eyed at an 80,000-capacity arena long-since empty but for a few hundred...
Pablo Machín and his players have transformed the club and, with it, the town. This never used to be a football place focused on its own team. It is nowIt took Lionel Messi two seconds to work out what was going on, Pablo Maffeo says, and not very much longer for him to say sorry; he was just doing what he’d been told to do. It was September, FC Barcelona’s first ever visit to Montilivi in primera, and it wasn’t a whole lot of fun for either of them. Everywhere Messi went, Maffeo went too. There was no getting rid of him, so Messi wandered about, mostly staying out the way, and struck up conversation. He asked how old he...
Zinedine Zidane’s side have dropped more points than in the whole of last season and are 19 points behind Barcelona after Villarreal won at the Bernabéu – at their 19th attemptSergio Busquets probably felt like hiding behind his hands. “The ghosts appeared,” he said. It was a cold, dark night and everywhere he looked they were there. If he looked left, especially. Blue and white figures flew past. Over the other side, on the touchline, Ernesto Valverde pulled his jacket up tight and peered through the pouring rain. “You must have thought: ‘again’,” he was asked afterwards, when it was finally over – the match, the curse, probably the title, too. “Exactly,” he said. Everyone did. The day before, Barcelona’s...