La Liga: Reflections on contrasting fortunes of season's final day

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  • Champions: FC Barcelona.

    On the Madrid metro on Sunday morning you couldn’t really escape the country’s economic recession if you’d wanted to – on a morning when Spain was being asked to shake off the hangover of the end of the league programme the previous night and then vote in important regional and municipal elections.

    I’d flown down on Saturday with my son to see the Rayo Vallecano v Real Sociedad curtain-downer, a game on which nothing was hanging but a ground that my son had always wanted to visit. It didn’t disappoint, but back to the metro. 

    A procession of individuals passed through the train every few minutes making extraordinary speeches to the people seated, begging for money amid graphic and desperate descriptions of their lives. As any one of them slowly approached, people shuffled uncomfortably, looked at their feet, at their mobile phones, their newspapers – anything to avoid eye contact with the metro-surfing speech-makers.   

    It’s always difficult when you come up against something face to face. If it’s not there in front of you it doesn’t matter, it ceases to be your immediate concern.  Where is this all leading?  Well – it just reminded me, during a heavily-charged weekend of football, that it’s easy to forget about the fate of relegated teams when you’re comfortably off yourself, warm in the after-glow of your own success.

    Valencia celebrate as Almeria toil.

    Without wishing to cheapen people’s personal tragedies with an unnecessary metaphor, it was nevertheless an extraordinary end to the La Liga season, in which the annual triumphs and tragedies were played out in their inevitably parallel fashion. Someone has to win the league, get into the Champions, and three teams have to go down. 

    On the day when people celebrate in ecstasy, others trudge back to the dressing-room in a state of near agony.  It’s the nature of sport, and long may it continue, but the manner in which both Almería and Eibar dropped into the Second Division does raise some concerns. 

    To return to the metro metaphor, the rich aristocrats Barcelona  were 2-0 and cruising at home to Deportivo, the beggars on the train.  Up in the Basque Country, Eibar were winning 3-0 at home to relegated Cordoba and had collected enough euros from the passengers to eat for another day.

    But in the 66th and the 75th minute, Deportivo took advantage of the fact that their hosts were more focused on Xavi Hernandez’ imminent departure from the pitch, on the day of his league ‘adeu’, and scored twice, radically changing the immediate futures of two clubs in a stroke.

    Deportivo needed the point as badly as Eibar (and Almería) needed them to lose. Xavi went off in the 85th minute, but five minutes before he did, Albert Lopo, Depor’s centre-back, asked Xavi to ‘go easy on us’ – to ensure that Barcelona took their foot off the pedal.  They did, and Deportivo miraculously escaped. Up north, with some resignation, Eibar learned that their fairy-tale was over.  

    It isn’t Barcelona’s fault that Eibar have gone down, and the fate of a little community miles to the north-west was of little concern to them on a day of celebration and homage, but there was a game to play, and Deportivo were there in the flesh. 

    Players are only human – and just as Atletico Madrid allowed Granada to draw in Los Carmenes and also avoid the drop (at the same time securing third place for themselves), it proves the metro point. In-your-face proximal suffering is hard to take. It affects you and it pricks your conscience in a way that distant suffering does not.

    Eibar and Almería will take it on the chin because it’s true, as the cliché goes, that if you haven’t done your homework during the season, and you leave it all until the last night, the essay that you rush will probably earn you a fail. Such is the madness of the last game here in Spain, season after season, that if you go into it hoping for fate to be kind, then it just might not be, and you only have yourself to blame. 

    And Deportivo could easily point to the lack of professionalism shown by already-relegated Cordoba, Eibar’s opponents on the day. Whereas Almería were always likely to struggle against a pumped-up Valencia, Cordoba took a mere eleven full-time professionals all the way to Eibar by bus (the other teams in the relegation struggle protested to the league authorities) and included three players from the youth team, two of whom eventually played. Unsurprisingly, Eibar won 3-0.

    However, none of this should detract from what has once again been a wonderful season in La Liga, a topsy-turvy campaign that returned the usual two protagonists to centre-stage after Atlético’s feats last season, but which impressed by dint of its quality and the über-human feats of Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and company.

    Xavi was feted at Camp Nou.

    Xavi Hernandez leaves the stage, but the legacy of his sheer will-to-win brilliance will live on, and of course, he can still add another two trophies to his medal haul of 25, a haul that has made him the most decorated Spanish player in history. The best? Probably, yes. 

    Barcelona’s greatest team and the national side’s most golden era coincided with his emergence. There were other great players around too, but Xavi was the fulcrum, the brush that spread the glue. He was the type of player that Real Madrid never really found.  Not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing of players, he simply never gave the ball away. 

    It sounds like a dumb statement of homage, but there was a point in a game against Valencia, at the height of tiki-taka mania, where Xavi spun around, in that characteristic directional change that he had so perfected, and played a ball to Dani Alves that was slightly too far in front of the Brazilian. The ball sped out of play, and Alves looked almost dumfounded by the mistake. 

    Xavi, as if appalled by this single lapse in fourteen seasons, remonstrated with Alves, then with himself, then with the grass. It was as if his world had collapsed about him in ruins. One misplaced pass! It barely happened again.

    Xavi was a minimalist painter, but he took the genre to such heights of perfection that one can only conclude that he was an exception, a player so spookily disciplined that he almost always made the right decision.  It’s a skill that’s impossible to coach.  Now he’s decided to go, and that’s probably right too, before he inevitably declines.  It will be interesting, nevertheless, to see what part he plays in next week’s King’s Cup Final (happily for him at the Camp Nou)and then in the Champions final against Juventus.  

    Meanwhile, over at the White House, Carlo Ancelotti appears to have become the latest victim of Florentino Pérez’ house of cards.  If the rumours are confirmed, the Italian will be Perez’ ninth victim since he took over the reins at the Bernabéu in the year of the millennium. 

    He had a three-year sabbatical between 2006 and 2009 but his permanent search for the perfect coach is becoming more absurd, more Sisyphus-like every year – rolling the boulder up the hill but always seeing it roll down again.  It’s become a situation of in-built incoherence, and Pérez, like a slightly deranged emperor, surrounds himself with a smaller coterie of people each year, presumably because he would prefer not to hear the truth.

    Even Cristiano Ronaldo tweeted something on Sunday to this effect, saying that he was hoping he could work with Ancelotti again next season.  Ronaldo, fresh from another hat-trick in the bizarre 7-3 win over Getafe (that’s 48 league goals for the season, and 61 in total) knows that his word has some weight, and the tweet was a deliberate message in Pérez´ direction. 

    Meanwhile, Rafa Benitez appears to be well-placed, but the public prefer Jurgen Klopp, in the event that the present incumbent is shown the door. Klopp seems to be on Liverpool’s agenda too, but responded to a journalist’s question on Sunday about whether he spoke Spanish by replying ‘Una cerveza por favor’ (a beer please) in a pretty decent accent. Well actually the beer’s better in Liverpool, but he doesn’t need to know that yet. 

    The two European finals will again feature Spanish clubs (Sevilla and Barcelona), with both sides favourites to win. In the Second Division, Betis’ 3-0 at home to Alcorcon means that they are back in the top flight, a mere season after going down, whilst down in the Second Division ‘B’ 30,000 spectators, amongst them major shareholder Carlos Slim, saw Oviedo draw 1-1 with Cadiz, another ex-top flight side fallen on harder times.

    And down in the Madrid neighbourhood of Vallecas, where David Moyes’ Real Sociedad won 4-2 against Rayo Vallecano on a final day of astonishing friendliness and model behaviour for a hosting football team, an elderly gentleman stopped us on the way out, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he’d identified us as outsiders and wanted to tell us. 

    “I’ve been a paid-up member of this club for 59 years” he announced, through broken teeth. “It’s fantastic.  It’s the best team in the world!” He meant it too, even though they’d just lost 2-4 at home and were selling their top scorer, Alberto Bueno, to Oporto. Happy with their lot, with a team that totally identifies with the local scene, they must wonder just what all the fuss is about over in the Bernabéu.  

    Every season I think I’ll fall out with football, but I never do, largely because places like Rayo Vallecano, Oviedo and Eibar keep me going. It can be wonderful at the top too, but that football only exists because of the solidity of the bases below. 

    On a day when some were  toasting their success and counting the luverly money, others were searching desperately for the sticking plasters. They’ll find them. They usually do. 

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