The leadership slipped through so many fingers that at the end of it all Villarreal looked down and found that, somehow, it was still sitting there in the palm of their hand. On the weekend that Levante got their first victory and Málaga got their first goal, none of Spain’s top six got a win. Four of them had the chance to go top – Celta, Barcelona, Villarreal and Madrid, one after the other from Friday to Saturday to Sunday, from the first game to the last – but none of them took it, which meant one of them had to. Up in Galicia, down to Andalucía, across to Valencia and in to Madrid, 1,844km all the way, the story was repeated, first place chased round the country, always just out of reach, only to finish up back where it had started. At the Madrigal.
Week seven ended on Sunday night with the derby in Spain’s geographical centre – the reason Madrid became the capital in the first place – and with Villarreal, beaten for the first time this season, top for the second successive week and the second time in their history. It had started on Friday night up in the north-west in Vigo, where Celta hit the post, the bar and the goalkeeper Vicente Guaita, Getafe resisting what one report described as an early “footballing storm”, if not quite the storm of previous weeks, and top spot resisting too. No one knew it yet, and frankly few watched it either, but a pattern was emerging across the country, from end to end and side to side.
Victory would have made Celta leaders, taking them to 17 points; a 0-0 draw meant that a victory for Barcelona the next afternoon would make them leaders instead, 723km to the south. Barcelona were under pressure. Luis Enrique played the external enemies card, but their real enemies are on the inside. On the inside of their bodies mostly, but not only: Leo Messi was out and with the transfer ban in force plus Rafinha and Andrés Iniesta injured, they needed two youth-teamers to fill up the bench. Hammered by Celta on their last trip, they had squeezed past Las Palmas and Bayer Leverkusen. “People want things to go wrong for us and for it to all explode,” Luis Enrique said. “But we’re like a cork: we always stay afloat.”
As his team left the Sánchez Pizjuán in Seville early on Saturday evening, beaten 2-1, it did not feel that way. In fact, they felt sunk. But by late Sunday night, it turned out he might just be right after all.
Barcelona’s players headed out of the stadium and to the bus, an opportunity lost. When Neymar’s free-kick hit one post, ran all the way along the line and, with Coke sliding in and Gerard Piqué not, somehow did not go in it seemed to sum it up. That was one of three times Barcelona hit the post in a game in which they had almost 30 shots, Luis Suárez and Sandro adding to the tally, and as it slipped away, spinning along the line while Piqué watched it, worried that he was offside and convinced it was going in anyway, it seemed to take their hopes with it. “Damned posts!”, El Mundo Deportivo’s cover ran.
Barcelona had been unfortunate. Luis Enrique was not entirely unjustified to insist that they had actually played well, at least once Sergio Busquets was back playing where he is supposed to play, while Neymar took on responsibility without Messi. But Luis Enrique also admitted “a manager of Barcelona can’t ever be happy when we’ve lost.” And, besides, this was not solely about fortune and nor was it an isolated result. With a short squad, injuries and a tough fixture list, the first half of the season feels as long as they feared. They are scoring fewer and conceding more; they have their worst goal difference since 2008. There is so little in reserve that Luis Enrique is not using all his available subs, players are fatigued already and there is still the trip to the Club World Cup to come.
And yet the perspective shifted this weekend; 24 hours can be a long time in football. It is tempting now to wonder if the worst of it may be almost over: Barcelona have been away to Athletic, Atlético, Celta and Sevilla; Messi should be back by the time El Clásico comes around on 21 November. And in the end it was not so bad; they have lost twice already this season, beaten in their last two away games, unconvincing even in victory, their worst start for almost a decade, and yet they are level with Madrid and only one point off the top. Because the following day, the pattern continued. From Vigo and Seville to Valencia and Madrid.
In the office under the north end at the Vicente Calderón, they were preparing for the Madrid derby. On the television screen high on the wall, they saw Levante’s Deyverson volley in the only goal with seven minutes left against Villarreal, who’d played almost an hour with 10 men. First Celta had blown it, then Barcelona had blown it, now Villarreal thought they had blown it too. Out the door, through the gate and up the stands, the derby was about to start, a red and blue mosaic covering the whole ground except the corner where 500 Madrid fans were, a banner declaring: “Maximum rivalry, [but] violence never.” Everyone was watching, apart from the new mayor who admitted she does not much care for football.
It took just eight minutes for Madrid to take the lead when Karim Benzema headed in Dani Carvajal’s superb cross. It was the first time they had scored at the Calderón in the league for six hours and it was taking them top. When Keylor Navas saved Antoine Griezmann’s penalty before half time – “God helped me,” the goalkeeper said – the chance seemed to have gone, the game over, drifting towards the end. This was not much of a game. In fact, it was mostly awful. With 20 minutes to go there had been just two shots on target: the goal and the penalty. It would finish 4-2; Jan Oblak did not make a genuine save. Navas ended up making two.
Even the atmosphere went flat; the Calderón fell quiet, as if just waiting for it to end. But then Rafa Benítez was waiting for to end too, apparently unaware (or perhaps too aware) of how precarious the lead was. Carvajal had gone off injured, replaced by Álvaro Arbeloa; Isco and Benzema departed too, after 65 and 76 minutes.
Ultimately, the wait proved too long. Afterwards, Benítez returned to the same line continuously: Real Madrid had controlled the first half and had only been an effective counter-attack away from making it 2-0, for which there had been plenty of opportunities. “Four, five, eight,” in Benítez’s words. Quite apart from the underlying question – is the occasional counter-attack the extent of this team’s ambition? – that was not entirely true. There had been no chances; there had not even been many promising breaks. “There were no counters,” Diego Simeone claimed. What few chances there were at the Calderón were Atlético’s.
Simeone had not given up yet; Yannick Carrasco, Jackson Martínez and Luciano Vietto were all sent on and they were all involved when the goal came. Arbeloa was robbed and then outrun, Jackson’s cross eventually finished by Vietto with seven minutes to go. 1-1. And it could have been even worse. Leaping up and down, Simeone roared the Calderón on and they roared back. For 10 minutes, it was frantic, a real contest at last, some excitement, and in the last minute Navas made a superb stop from Jackson. A draw was bad enough. In the build-up to the game, Benítez recalled that he got his first ever bonus following a derby, handed 50 pesetas, about 20 pence, for a draw when he was just 13. There would be no bonus for this. “It feels like two points lost,” Benítez said afterwards. First place lost too.
Villarreal were travelling north up the east coat, defeated but league leaders once more. First Celta had blown it on Friday, then Barcelona had blown it on Saturday, then Villarreal thought they had blown it on Sunday, only for Madrid to blow it instead, handing it back to them. Next week, five teams could go top: one point separates the top four, three points separate the top five and four points separate the top seven. Of those, only seventh-placed Eibar won this weekend, a feat that warranted just a 100-word match report in a sports newspaper 52 pages long.
The same paper opened the weekend with the front page headline: “Golden League”, written in huge yellow letters. This was not what they meant – they were talking about the tedious Ballon d’Or business, more evidence that, as Juanma Lillo put it, the garnish has eaten the steak – but this was better. A weekend in which the teams in 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th all won, but the teams in first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth did not. Competition for a league accused of being uncompetitive. Under the cramped room beneath the stand at the Calderón, Simeone smiled.
“They’ll be surprised elsewhere in the world,” he said, “but it’s more fun this way.”
Talking points
• The streets outside the Sánchez Pizjuán were packed; a crowd gathered round a table piled high with T-shirts declaring “refugees welcome”. Inside, the club’s anthem carried round, acapella. The noise rose, chants incessant. Supporters were determined to play a part too and they did. Sevilla were under pressure: two points off relegation, just one league win and suffering injuries, they had lost more times at home in a month than in the previous year and it was not just that they had been beaten by Juventus in Turin in midweek, it was that they had not even competed: the shot count had read 24-1 and the one had been irrelevant. This was not the way it was supposed to be; the character, the personality, had gone.
Against Barcelona, it returned. Unai Emery talked about the need to win, not only for the points but to reassert that synergy between the stands and the pitch. Here, it happened. Two second-half goals, from Michael Krohn-Dehli and Vicente Iborra, followed by a Neymar penalty, gave Sevilla a 2-1 victory and Emery his first ever win against Barcelona 21 games later. His press conference was surprisingly quiet, calm, reflective; down on the touchline he had been the opposite. He had not so much punched the air as pummelled it on to the ropes. This was huge.
Ten second-half minutes were decisive, goals coming on 52 and 58, and Sevilla had ridden their luck, the play still intermittent, Sergio Rico’s saves decisive, but the significance could not be overstated. “Vital, necessary, indispensable,” one local paper put it, leafing its way through a thesaurus. The front of Estadio Deportivo declared: “With a pair [of balls]”; “spirit and pride,” it added.
“One of the images that stays with me is them celebrating a save with anger; that’s character, personality,” Emery said. José Antonio Reyes referred to “the team that’s never defeated”.
Five weeks into the season Sevilla were bottom. It is true that two of their home defeats had been against Atlético and Celta, no disgrace; it is true that, while they were dreadful at Las Palmas and in Turin, they have not always performed as badly as results suggested; it is also true that, just like this season, it took until week six for them to win last season and look how that ended up. They have had injuries (at the back particularly) and their top scorer Carlos Bacca is among one of 13 players to leave in the summer, with nine coming in. It is natural that it should take time. “Some of the players are new and some of the solutions we have are too,” Emery explained. “We had to grow again.”
Yet it was still hard to escape the feeling that something was missing; that Sevilla have just not been Sevilla: flat, uncompetitive, unconnected, as if exhausted already. It was that personality that was not there. “Some of the traits that identify us returned,” Emery admitted on Saturday, and beating Barcelona serves to reinforce that, not jut an end but a start too. “We played with intensity and aggressiveness, two facets that have not always been there and that I think are necessary: we had to find the synergy and today we found it.”.
There was something else too and the response to it suggested that this might prove a turning point for Sevilla, emotionally at least. Emery had opened by saying: “Good evening, the dressing room is strong: we’re exposed to speculation, opinion, but it’s a group, a team.” It was a curious opening and down in that dressing room, a place Emery pointedly referred to as a “sanctuary”, they were expressing the same idea. One by one they did so, as if protesting too much. Rumours, some of them extremely personal, had circulated of divisions, conflict and fights. Proper fights. Now a photo appeared of the whole squad celebrating in the dressing room together, players swift to put it on Twitter and Facebook. Above them, a message is painted on the wall: “Feeling! [Team] Union!”
“This is our response to people looking for trouble in our family,” Grzegorz Krychowiak said. “And people say we’re not united,” Éver Banega wrote. “This is for those who say there are problems,” was the message from Vitolo. “A picture is worth more than a thousand words,” said Iborra.
That was not all he said; he also wrote a message entitled, Full stop, no more, in which he declared his pride in his family and thanked supporters and team-mates, “this family”, for their “unconditional support”. “To talk about certain things that have happened over the last few days would only make certain people with no feelings seem important, misinformers who invent things so that others who have no personality can give credence to baseless rumours,” Iborra wrote. “The place to talk was where we did: on the pitch. Sevilla is what matters.”
• “I promised the players three days off if they beat Sporting and Rayo Vallecano, because I didn’t seriously think they would … but these guys will kill for three days off,” said Pepe Mel after Betis won 2-0 in Vallecas. Returning to the club he had coached down in Spain’s Second Division B, he got a huge ovation from the home fans. So did Joaquín, just for being Joaquín.
• When Arbeloa came on, Atlético’s fans started chanting “Cono! Cono! Cono!”. And there are still people who doubt the importance of that squiggly line above the ñ.
• Ángel Correa was exciting again and the three substitutions worked fantastically well, but there are still some doubts about Atlético, despite the comeback. Fernando Torres does not entirely convince – he was fortunate that his poor touch led to the penalty after he had lost the ball – and Simeone admits that it is not ideal to move Griezmann’s position around, forcing him to “sacrifice himself for the team”. Atlético’s manager was happy, though, and not just with the point against Madrid. “We have new players and it is not easy to come here and get used to our systems,” he said. “Thirteen points in seven weeks is not too bad. We have played Sevilla, Barcelona, Madrid, Villarreal, Eibar away …”
• In a weekend when the fates of the top six, or at least the top four, were nicely interconnected in a way that too rarely happens, it felt a bit odd for a game as big as Athletic versus Valencia to not be one of those involved. One thing that was not remotely odd, mind you, was the sight of Aritz Aduriz scoring again. No one has scored more than him this season in all competitions. Valencia took the lead with a lovely free-kick from Dani Parejo but Aymeric Laporte, Markel Susaeta and Aduriz made it 3-1. Valencia’s crisis deepens.
• Deportivo are the other team in the top six and they probably deserved more in a 1-1 draw with Granada.
• Málaga had not scored in six games; after six minutes against Real Sociedad they had scored twice. David Moyes’s team have just six points after seven weeks of the season, yet this might just have been the best they have played. In the week in which Moyes fulfilled his promise to help Iñigo Martínez get back into the Spain squad, it was he who made two dreadful mistakes, which Charles took advantage of to put Málaga 2-0 up. Imanol Agirretxe pulled one back to make it five for the season, one behind Cristiano Ronaldo and level with Nolito and Ronaldo (who got all five in the same game). He then hit the bar with a lovely lob before half-time and might have had two more with headers in the second half. Another chance was wasted when Sergio Canales and Carlos Vela got in each others’ way. As la Real went forward, Málaga caught them, Charles hitting a hat-trick. “The situation is not good,” Moyes said. “But I think the team is improving and even today I saw some good signs. The dressing room is quiet and that’s good: it shows that they came here thinking they could get something.”
Results: Celta 0-0 Getafe, Sevilla 2-1 Barcelona, Granada 1-1 Deportivo, Espanyol 1-2 Sporting, Las Palmas 0-2 Eibar, Málaga 3-1 Real Sociedad, Rayo Vallecano 0-2 Betis, Athletic 3-1 Valencia, Levante 1-0 Villarreal, Atlético 1-1 Madrid.
