There may not be many more Seville derbies for Joaquín Sánchez, but even at 37 he managed to settle the latest oneAt the end of the final training session before the Seville derby, coach and captain sat on the bench together at the Benito Villamarín, surrounded by empty green seats. The following night 53,451 people would fill Real Betis’s stadium with noise but for now it was quiet. “So,” Quique Setién asked, “what do you think? How do you feel?” Joaquín Sánchez looked at him and said he didn’t know; still not quite right. He knew better than anyone that this was the game – nobody’s played more of them – but a calf injury meant he was yet to...
The derby, one of the few matches of the penultimate weekend with anything riding on it, didn’t disappoint Betis’s bus made its way through a cloud of green smoke, while Sevilla’s passed the police cordon down the last, short stretch of empty street, turning off palm tree avenue to the Benito Villamarín. It was momentarily quiet outside, just a few stall holders in the sunshine, but inside the bus was different. On the right, a window had been smashed – not there, but four kilometres away, where a Sevilla fan had waved his team off over-enthusiastically – and sitting alongside it was the manager Joaquín Caparrós, exposed and in his element. Someone had put the club anthem on and he...
Fergus Dowd, an IT systems analyst for Dublin, won the backing of Luís Figo, Roy Keane and a film director to help rescue from obscurity Patrick O’Connell and his exploits at BarcelonaLike absolutely no other middle-aged IT systems analysts from Dublin, Fergus Dowd went to a Blyth Spartans match and wound up spearheading an international campaign to resurrect the memory of a former Manchester United captain who saved Barcelona from extinction. Sometimes, apparently, it takes an extraordinary Irishman to tell the story of an extraordinary Irishman.Patrick O’Connell, a footballer with what might be classed as scoundrel tendencies as well as qualities that enabled him to become a heroic manager, had lain in an unmarked London grave for 57 years until...
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...
It took until the sixth game for Alavés to win and by then two coaches had gone. Now survival in La Liga is within reachIn the words of one player, Abelardo Fernández is “an ordinary bloke” but he is doing extraordinary things, from revolution at the Molinón to resurrection at Mendizorroza, where at the end of their victory over Deportivo de La Coruña on Saturday, Alavés fans did something Alavés fans never do: they turned their backs on their team. Turned their backs, put their arms around each other’s shoulders, a human wall stretching across the east end of the ground, and bounced up and down, singing. In the middle of it, drums were held up and flags waved. At...