Posts Tagged ‘Good Riddance’

Sid Lowe: Divine intervention may save Espanyol

A religious pilgrimage has been followed by an upturn in Espanyol’s form meaning their new stadium may not have to host second division football

Five colossal cranes still tower over it, glinting as the sun sets behind the hills, but work is virtually finished, contracts exchanged and keys handed over. After a decade as a tenant rattling round someone else’s neglected gaff, RCD Espanyol finally have a home of their own. It’s time to bid goodbye and good riddance to a cold, grey athletics arena where you need binoculars to see the subs’ bench let alone their team-mates on the pitch. A cold, grey athletics arena that, despite its beautiful, almost mystical location on top of Montjuic, never felt quite right, that has a pitch that’s cut to bits and a dressing room where the paint peels off the walls.

Time to say a big hello to Cornellà-El Prat: a proper football stadium, steep stands up against the pitch, decked in blue and white. At Montjuic Espanyol have an average attendance of just over 20,000 (in a stadium with over 55,000 seats), huge tarpaulins covering their blushes and thousands of seats at each end. At Cornellà, things will be different. A €53.4m arena, Espanyol’s new home occupies 81,163 square metres, has 40,500 seats breathing down the players’ necks, solar panels on the roof, and even a cemetery for pericos who have passed away. Dead parrots, in other words.

With an “Elite” rating from Uefa, it is the kind of ground they proudly insist will be worth 10-15 extra points a season, once it’s been inaugurated against Liverpool on 2 August. No wonder it’s been building to that moment pretty much ever since they departed the Sarrià in 1997. No wonder it’s been at the centre of everyone’s thoughts, even to the detriment of the team, the director general describing this season as “a journey across the desert”, the end in sight; the director of marketing insisting: “I was essentially brought to oversee the move.” A new home that brings new hope.

There is just one big problem. Cornellà will be the newest and best stadium in the division but that division might well be the Second. They wait 11 years for a fresh start, the opportunity to take a step up, build on a fifth place, two Copa del Reys and a Uefa Cup final, becoming a real force with a clearer identity than ever before. And instead, they face a first relegation in 15 years. As the Barça fans’ joke goes, Espanyol’s new ground will be called the SEAT stadium because, never mind Madrid, Barcelona or Sevilla, it’s more likely to host Córdoba, Ibiza or Toledo.

The collapse has been dramatic. Halfway through last season, Espanyol were third, Uefa Cup runners-up, unbeaten in 14 games and with three players in the Spain squad. Then suddenly, the wheels came off and the divisions between players, coach and club surfaced; the uneasy truce was broken. Raúl Tamudo, Dani Jarque and Iván de la Peña suffered injuries and Carlos Kameni went to the African Nations Cup. Espanyol lost three on the trot. The worst implosion in La Liga history was about to happen. In March they were still hanging on to a European place; by the end of the season, they were 12th, closer to the drop. They didn’t win one of their last ten matches and scored only three goals – two of them penalties, the other a deflected fluke.

Albert Riera left for Liverpool, Pablo Zabaleta for Manchester City and the coach, Ernesto Valverde, went to Greece, his frustration with the club eating at him. Although they won their first two games – Steve Finnan joined them as league leaders – poor results followed. Under coach Tintín Márquez they collected 12 points in 13 games, under his replacement Mané just three in six. Former player Mauricio Pochettino became the club’s third coach, taking president Dani Sánchez Llibre’s total to five director generals, six technical secretaries and 13 coaches in 11 years.

Pochettino got three draws but his side were then beaten by Sevilla. Espanyol still couldn’t score. Luis García hasn’t scored in six months. Raúl Tamudo started the season nine goals off the all-time La Liga record for a Catalan and is still six away. The absence of the injured playmaker De la Peña was particularly felt. With him starting, they lost once in seven, winning three; without him they were winless in 17. De la Peña returned and unbelievably Espanyol beat Barcelona. Two goals made him the side’s top scorer with four goals. “We’ve been liberated,” Pochettino declared.

They hadn’t. Three defeats and a dramatic draw with Mallorca followed. With ten weeks left, Espanyol were bottom on just 22 points, eight from safety. Even four wins in ten games – as many as they’d managed in 28 – might not be enough, leaving them two short of the 40-point mark. It was, cruel culés cackled, going to take a miracle for Espanyol to survive.

But if that was what it was going to take, that was what Pochettino was bloody well going to get. He packed his bag, rounded up his wife and his No2 and hiked 12km to Montserrat, a religious mountain and shrine with restaurants, gift shops and the Morenata – the black virgin, supposedly found in the ninth century. A shrine rescued from anarchist looting during the civil war, where Catalan intellectuals barricaded themselves away from Franco’s police and Jordi Pujol’s political party Convergència was founded. Where FC Barcelona celebrate their successes and where a puffing Pochettino, continuing a long tradition of footballing superstition, pleaded with the virgin to save the region’s other, often forgotten club.

And so she did. Last night, Iván Alonso’s header gave Espanyol a 1–0 win over Racing and carried them off the bottom for the first time in over a month. Since his pilgrimage, Pochettino’s side are unbeaten, have clinched seven points and back-to-back home victories. They have climbed to four points from safety and Sporting de Gijón, who have won just two in ten, face Espanyol on Thursday. Survival remains difficult but their run-in isn’t as bad as it could be – Betis, Valencia, Athletic and Málaga at home, Sporting, Atlético and Almería away. Like the Bride of Frankenstein, Espanyol are, incredibly, alive. “The Miracle,” cheered AS, “is possible.”

When Pochettino hiked to Montserrat, Sánchez Llibre’s eyes darted about shiftily. “I can’t join him because I’ve got two hernias,” he claimed, fumbling for an excuse. “If someone gives me a lift I’ll do half of it. Or maybe I’ll walk from Montjuic to Cornellà instead.” Yeah, maybe. And thanks to a puffing Argentinian and an obliging virgin maybe, just maybe, he’ll do it as a First Division president after all.

Results and week 31 talking points:

Another week on and nothing changes at the top. Real Madrid and Barcelona both won 1–0. Does anyone really need telling how they did it? Nice to see that anti-Madrid refereeing conspiracy in full flow.

Atlético Madrid’s club shop was broken into on Thursday night. Someone threw a manhole cover through the window and stole hundreds of shirts. It’s a good job they didn’t break into the trophy room. They might have made off with a carpet.

Tough choice for goal of the week, with Emana, Arango and Apoño scoring absolute belters for Betis, Mallorca and Málaga respectively.

La Sexta have come up with the bright idea of putting the yellow cards on the screen in graphics underneath the team’s names, as if they were goalscorers. Which is fine normally but on a night like last night when Sevilla face Valencia, you end up not being able to see a thing. There were 15 yellows (or at least there were when this column lost count) in a game that was a cheat-fest, packed with scything challenges, dreadful dives, utter lunacy, appalling refereeing, and some shameful play-acting. It was fantastically entertaining in a comically dirty sort of way, but also pretty awful. Cor, who’d have thought it with Carlos Marchena, David Albelda, Diego Capel and Fernando Navarro playing?!

All should become much clearer over the next few days, with midweek fixtures as well as weekend ones. And thanks to those geniuses at the league, the big – really big – run of games is about to crank up for the second time this season, starting with Barcelona v Sevilla on Wednesday night.

Results:

Getafe 0–1 Barcelona, Atlético 3–0 Numancia, Athletic 0–1 Deportivo, Málaga 1–1 Mallorca, Recreativo 0–1 Real Madrid, Valladolid 0–0 Villarreal, Almería 2–1 Osasuna [Now that's a header], Espanyol 1–0 Racing, Valencia 3–1 Sevilla, Betis 2–0 Sporting

Latest La Liga table

Lawrence Donegan: Hard to pine for the days of Deadly Doug and his ilk

Football's rich list is out and the news for the game's billionaires is not good, or at least not as good as it used to be. Roman Abramovich is down to his last £7bn, Joe Lewis reduced to abject penury on £2.5bn. There is some argument over whether West Ham United's owner, Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, ever quite achieved billionaire status in the halcyon days of Iceland's financial boom but, as he seeks a buyer for the club in an effort to pay off his creditors, it is safe to say his credit has been well and truly crunched.

Pass the hankies. On second thoughts, don't bother.

After all, one of the consolations in not having nine or more zeroes before the decimal point makes its appearance on your bank balance is the consolation that comes from reading stories about the travails of those who do.

This newspaper carried one such story the other day.

"Era of billionaire bail-outs over" ran the headline over remarks made by Keith Harris, an investment banker and one-time football administrator.

"We're in the toughest economic situation anybody has endured in our lifetime, and that means we are unlikely to see much activity on the football takeover scene," he said.

There seemed to be a certain wistfulness to Harris's remarks, which from his own viewpoint was understandable. After all, he helped broker many of the deals that brought the billionaires into the English game and he faces the future not knowing where his next lucrative facilitation fee is going to come from.

But if Harris is sad to see the end of the billionaires' era, there are plenty of others whose only inclination will be to wish such figures a hearty good riddance, having long viewed them as a malign influence on the English game. There is no need to search long and hard for evidence to support this view because it is everywhere, from the incompetence and PR-driven duplicity of the Hicks-Gillett "partnership" at Anfield to the unpleasant hubris that has been such a feature of Abramovich's time at Stamford Bridge.

The credit crunch may not have forced the Russian or the Americans to abandon the English game - not yet, at least - but it has all but guaranteed that their likes will not be seen around these parts for a long time to come.

Even the Keith Harrises of this world might acknowledge this to be a good thing, not least because after the constant upheaval of recent years the game needs a period of stability. Who knows, if that happens then there might even be time to reflect on the billionaires' era in English football and conclude that it wasn't entirely awful.

For a time Abramovich wielded his money like a wrecking ball but he did make Chelsea relevant once more. Hicks and Gillett may have failed in their promise to give Liverpool a new stadium, but so did the previous owners. The Americans also came close to losing a great manager in Rafael Benítez but in the end they reached an accommodation with the Spaniard and gave him the financial wherewithal to build a potential title-winning team. That has to count for something, right?

Likewise, the Glazers alienated many long-standing fans with their aggressive marketing methods and steep ticket prices, but would things at Manchester United have been any different if the previous owners had remained in charge? Would the team have won more trophies?

If there is a debate to be had at Old Trafford then there is none at Villa Park, where Randy Lerner has given a very good impression of being the perfect football club owner in that he has kept his nose out of team affairs and ponied up transfer money when required. Anyone yearning for the good old days when Doug Ellis was running the show?

It would require an uniquely warped view of how a club should be run to answer that last question in the affirmative. Yet the blanket dismissal of football's current billionaire owners, regardless of their identity or their actual records, requires us to hark back fondly to the days of Deadly Doug and others of that era because, if we are certain things are bad now, it can only be because we are just as certain they were better before.

The truth, of course, is that on balance English football is in much better shape now than it was and for this we owe the likes of Roman Abramovich and Randy Lerner a debt of thanks.

Findlay makes a racket and intends to fill his boots

Harry Findlay, the gregarious and not entirely self-effacing racehorse owner and professional gambler, has taken himself down under this month to watch the Australian Open tennis.

Findlay has been known to have a punt or two on tennis, estimating that he has won several million pounds over the years betting on the genius of Roger Federer. "The greatest player of all time," he says, "and I should know, because I know tennis better than anyone."

There is little point in arguing with Findlay when he makes such outrageous claims, particularly when it comes to tennis because, as he says, he knows the sport better than anyone. This is why he is worth listening to on the subject of what might be the greatest sporting events of 2009.

Some people can't wait for the return of Tiger Woods, or the seemingly inevitable Premier League decider between Liverpool and Manchester United. Findlay, however, has eyes only for the four tennis grand slam tournaments. "We've got five potential winners, all at the top of their game - Roger, Nadal, Murray, Djokovic and Del Potro. Honestly, thinking about the tournaments is keeping me awake at night. I'm so excited." And so he should be. So should we all.

Tevez talks his way on to outward-bound course

Making predictions is a precarious business in this day and age, when previous efforts at soothsaying are only a mouse click away, waiting to dredged up and ridiculed.

Still, Nostradamus suffered a few setbacks in his time but persevered, and look where he ended up. It is in this spirit of perseverance that this column predicts that Carlos Tevez will not be a Manchester United player after the end of this season.

It is one thing for the Argentinian not to live up to his reputation or his potential price tag. But it is quite another to issue Sir Alex Ferguson with ultimatums. You don't need to be Nostradamus to know that, merely one of the numerous former United players through the years who made the mistake of telling Fergie what he should or should not do.

Hoy misses chance to discredit honours system

The New Year honours list, with its petty distinctions and the awful snobbishness underpinning them, is never less than depressing but this year's was more depressing than ever. Some of the blame for this has to lie with Chris Hoy, who was offered a knighthood and accepted it.

Maybe I am a terrible judge of people, but if anyone appeared to be grounded enough and self-confident enough to recognise the honours system for the nonsense it is then Hoy was assuredly that person.

Alas, not even the Scot could resist the lure of the ermine. What a pity because, any way you look at it, his acceptance of the "top" honour served only to belittle the efforts of his Olympic colleagues who received what are considered to be lesser baubles.

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