Eldesmarque said it best over the weekend: this has been the perfect week for Sevilla…if we win. Every single team around us, with the notable exception of Atlético, dropped points. That means we could jump Espanyol and be a point out of Europe with a win. It means those right behind us (Getafe, Rayo, Athletic) did not jump us this time, so we are set up to make it count with a win today.
Caparrós has done his share of flirting with management in the lead up to the match, saying such things as “any coach would be crazy about going to Sevilla”. I wonder if he’s asked any of the last four managers what they think. Maybe with a couple different words in there, say, “to go”, we might be a little closer to the current state of affairs at the club. Of course, this is all reversible with some positive results and confident players.
Now, on to the reasons we will lose this match: We’re not fast enough. We’re not strong enough. We’re not Navarro enough (he’s out with too many yellows). We’re not Perotti enough. Etc.
Vamoooooooooooooos (a perdeeeeeeeerrr)!!!
we’re also not spahic enough.
more than anything, this is a game that just seems so winnable and so potentially critical to the trajectory of this team. that’s enough for me. guaranteed loss.
haha, re: caparros’ “crazy” comment, when i first read that headline on marca, i immediately read it as “managers would be crazy for taking the sevilla job”. like, crazy stupid, not crazy happy.
this is now my most effective way to summarize this season for myself–if there’s an ambiguous word in any sentence that could turn a sentence either hugely pro or anti sevilla, i’m going to assume the negative connotation.
also, i’ll just agree with the general tone of the post and rene’s comment…something about this game being to winnable and so important just makes it feel like a definite loss. also, i invoke the trocho rule: if we play two good games in a row, we WILL lose the third. it’s science. you can’t deny it.
Looks like it’s not on TV here. Blah. Guess I’ll have to try and watch it online.
wow. that is one wet pitch… despite that we’ve been controlling pretty well, despite that free shot that was more or less at palop… we look ok.
lineup the same as last game minus navarro?
some good chances now. navas has had two shots saved nicely (though from tough angles)…
I’m not able to watch this game, but here’s what twitter tells me our lineup is:
Palop, Coke, Fazio, Escudé, Luna; Medel, Trochowski, Jesús Navas, Reyes, Manu del Moral y Negredo
wow. we are getting really close. more nice balls in the box… navas with a nice cross that manu puts a little over the crossbar. another one that skims across the goal mouth. keeping them in their half..
navas is awesome.
a little more difficulty for us getting out of the back for the last 10… then we have a counter that navas could/should’ve played back post to negredo. we end up getting wrongfully denied a corner… still dominating. but nothing to show for it.
wow. that was a missed opportunity. navas just had to lay it off for negredo and he could’ve tapped it in… navas puts his pass out of negredos reach and another one skims across the goal mouth.
actually yeah, that was a navas pass to manu, who then missed negredo… painful to rewatch… it was a bit contested, but could’ve definitely been a goal.
wow…. we are totally dominating and then mallorca puts a ball across on a counter which is then shot, hard, right at palop. again, we’re lucky this isnt a better team…
last one might not hvae been navas… my feed is mediocre.
we were MUCH better than them first half… we could be up 2 nothing easily… if we just keep it up, that goal should come. we’ve had really good possession for most of the half.
trocho and coke both have yellows… which makes me nervous. because we are one slippery surface inducing late challenge away from being down a man. lets get a few goals early in the second and take all three…. please.
Claaaasssic Sevilla. We’re so going to lose in the second half in spite of bossing the field for the first 45′. #ReversePsychologyWorks
YES!
after putting a dangerous free kick off the wall for a corner. reyes whips in a very nice corner which negredo flicks inside the back post… 1-0 good guys!!! lets go!!!
my feed is horrible, but i got to see the replay…nice goal!
beautiful counter and navas (who is all the way on the left for some reason) plays a beautiful ball in manu, who makes a very nice finish glancing in off the far post.
2-0. fantastic.
beautiful set of passing and great final pass from reyes in to navas who gets one himself.
this game has been great. i cant pick anyone who id say has played poorly. 3-0. kanoute about to come on for reyes who had a nice game. crowd solutes him.
3-0 this is great
rakitic for trochowski…
i do wonder if we’ll ever see baba again. for a moment, he’d seemed so promising.
bad guys get one back on a very nice backheel to the corner, cross, and finish… im only half paying attention now cus i probably shouldnt be spending so much time watching soccer, so not sure what we could/shouldve done differently. very nice backheel though.
too much time left now… lets make sure we dont mess this up. 3-1
(@*#&!(*^#!!! in the 87th minute medel realizes he doesnt have a yellow card yet, so he kicks the ball away after the whistle… seriously. that’s a problem. how many before he misses another game?
full time. those are a great 3 points… standings are looking less and less awful but we still have a lot of work before this season is over.
next match will be one of our hardest, away at bilbao. 3 wins in a row! not bad but lets make it 4!!
If Bilbao is coming off a difficult Europa League match, things could be slightly less challenging for us. Great win!
true. but they won the first leg 4-2 away… so we’ll see how it goes. hopefully the tie stays close (but they go through) and their guys are exhausted for our match!
What an incredible series of results. Consider:
–We have scored as many goals in the last 3 games (9) as we did in the 10 games before that.
–Heck, the goals we’ve scored in the last three games are fully one quarter of our season total (36). One quarter! In THREE GAMES!
–In those three games, our goal differential has gone from -4 to +4.
–In this crappy Liga season, that GD is bested only by Atletico, Valencia, and the EE.
Finally (and I realize this is getting to be a blog post at this point), I stumbled across one more surprising stat looking up the above stuff: Remember how last year our big problem was that our defense was terrible? And we allowed something like a million goals every time a midfielder looked in our goal’s direction? And then how we sold our best defender, Caceres, to Juventus, so we were DEFINITELY going to be even worse this year? And how all we wanted was for our defense to improve? Well:
This year the only teams that have allowed fewer goals than us (32) are the EE teams (27 and 22). That is incredible.
I haven’t seen the game but the end result pleases me, not only did Sevilla win, but Dudu Awate (which I hate) conceded 3 and Tomer Hemed (which I love!) scored the consolation goal…
Dino, tell us more! Why do you hate Awate? Why do you love Hemed? I do not know much about these players.
Sorry i’ve been away
I come from a city called Haifa in Israel. Both these players started their way in my Team’s (Maccabi Haifa) youth ranks (albeit not at the same time).
Awate was a substitite GK so he left for a smaller team, from there he transferred to the city rivals (Hapoel Haifa) and won the championship with them, he came back to Maccabi on loan after the starting GK was injured for the season and we won the title with him, a fter the season ended he was to go back to his team when our GK suffered a second injury which again ruled him out for the season and Awate came back on loan. He destroyed our championship run with horrible mistakes (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9-tnDFjQxk) and also ruined our campaign in the champions league with horrible mistakes against Bayer Leverkusen. He was the national team first choice GK at the time (due to the injury of Davidovitz, the GK he replaced at Maccabi Haifa) and made a few horrible mistakes there too. All the while he was running a sort of a smear campaign against the injured GK he replaced (Davidovitz) and blamed everybody else for his mistakes.
I don’t know if you remember this, but when he plyed for La Coruna, he got in a fight with his substitute – Gustavo Monoa, which ended with Monoa punching Awate. Needles to say I wasn’t surprised.
Tomer Hemed is a different story. When he graduated the youth team, he didn’t get much of a chance in the first team. He spent 3 years on loans with smaller teams in the first and second division. Last year was his final year on his contract and he came back to the team due to injuries to other strikers. he spent half season mainly occupying the bench wjile the team stuttered and never complained, only worked hard. When the injuries mounted up, he got his chance and exploded. 12 goals in half a season, the coolnes, composure, work rate and team spirit he displayed were a huge part of the championship we won after our 2011 trauma (to be told at a later time) and when he left, even tough it was on a free transfer which the club hasn’t earned a thing from, everybody just wished him well.