Sevilla and Iago Aspas triumph in a strange tale of four beaten goalkeepers
Four different goalkeepers played and all of them conceded goals in a thrilling game that saw Sevilla stay fourth in La Liga with a 3-2 defeat of Espanyol
Sevilla's forward Iago Aspas, third from right, celebrates after scoring the 90th-minute winner to decide a bizarre game against Espanyol. Photograph: Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images
First up was Antonio Alberto Bastos Pimparel, better known as “Beto”; next came Francisco “Kiko” Casilla Cortés; and after that, Pau López Sabata. Then, in the last minute, it was Sergio Rico González. Four men now forever bound together by fate, making history together.
Carlos Bacca slipped the ball to Iago Aspas inside the Espanyol penalty area. He controlled and struck a low shot towards the far post. His was the 27th shot of a wild game and up on the scoreboard it said: Sevilla 2-2 Espanyol, 89 minutes. The ball went past Rico and into the net, just as it had gone past Beto, Casillas and Pau and into the net before: for the first time ever in Spain, four different goalkeepers had conceded in the same match.
Which neatly underlined the madness of a brilliant game, the penultimate match in a brilliant weekend of football in Spain. The stadium erupted and so did Aspas; Sevilla versus Espanyol had got the end that it deserved and so had he. He had waited an entire year for this. Spanish football had waited more than 100 of them. Over 90 exhausting minutes there had been one red card, two Sevillas, three posts, four beaten goalkeepers, and five goals.
It had all started with Sevilla’s goalkeeper Beto bringing down the Espanyol midfielder Salva Sevilla as he went round him and prepared to roll the ball into an empty net. Bafflingly, Beto did not walk then, getting a yellow card rather than a red one, but he did walk at half-time with an injury. Four minutes before, down at the other end, Espanyol’s goalkeeper Kiko Casilla had walked too. Quite literally. He came sprinting out of his area, handled the shot that was floating over his head and into the net, and just kept going, not even looking at the card he knew was coming – until it did come and then he went back for a word. On came Pau and on came Rico and on went the game. And what a game it was.
Back and forwards it went. Even when it was Sevilla rolling up the pitch, hitting everything but the net, rattling the post twice in two minutes, three times in total, Espanyol scored. From 1-0 to 1-1, from 2-1 to 2-2 and then 3-2, it now had a finish to match. A penalty from Cristian Stuani had put Espanyol into the lead after Beto had taken out Sevilla on 14 minutes; Diogo Figueiras then belted in a ridiculously brilliant 40-yard equaliser that looked like a tackle that had gone horribly right, but which he later insisted he meant; Vitolo put Sevilla back in front on 35 minutes; and then Víctor Sánchez curled in a superb equaliser, 10-man Espanyol suddenly level with just over 10 minutes left. And then Aspas had made it 3-2 right at the end.
Off he went, screaming, tearing off his shirt. No pretence, no posing, no pre-planned celebration, just joy uncontrolled; the lid blown off at last. The referee pulled out a yellow card – Sevilla’s eighth; the most a team have ever had without getting a red – but Aspas did not care. And why should he? In the week in which he had watched from the bench as Sevilla were knocked out of his competition, he had finally been given a chance in the league and he had rescued his team, made a point and extracted a little revenge for Sevilla too.
Sevilla had enjoyed the best first half to a league season in their history, but the second half began with defeat to Valencia and on Thursday night they had been knocked out of the Copa del Rey … by Espanyol. At 2-2 Sevilla would have still gone a year without losing at home, having last been beaten there on 9 February 2014, but a draw would have done little to lessen the disappointment of a painful week. A win changed that. “Congratulations to the team for standing up to be counted after such a difficult week,” the manager Unai Emery wrote on Twitter.
As for Aspas, it was even bigger. If Sevilla have gone a year unbeaten, he has gone a year unused. Aspas is Sevilla’s top scorer in the Copa del Rey, on seven, and he had become a regular starter in it. But the competition’s secondary status is inescapable and when it really mattered Unai Emery did not call upon him as they sought a quarter-final second-leg comeback against Espanyol on Thursday, condemning him to yet another night on the bench. He had not started in the league all season, just as he had not started much last season. Aspas had been easily Celta de Vigo’s most important player but he made only five league starts for Liverpool having joined them for €10m, and four of those came before the end of September 2013.
“He’s come from a year without playing,” Emery explained last night, “and he has two strikers ahead of him [Bacca and Kevin Gameiro] that scored 42 goals last season.” It is not just them: in the other attacking positions, either wide or off the striker where he could theoretically play, Sevilla also have Gerard Deulofeu, Denis Suárez, José Antonio Reyes, Aleix Vidal and Vitolo. Aspas knows that but, proud, passionate, intense, extremely competitive, a football player who remains a football fan, it wasn’t easy to take. Opportunities were few. When he was overlooked against Celta earlier in the season, he spat: “Always the same.”
So Aspas resolved to prove his coach wrong, throwing himself into double sessions. Staff were impressed; in fact they were taken aback, struck by the way he rebelled against his fate, admiring his effort. As for the fans, they chanted his name: they wanted to see more of him. Still the chances were few, though. At the end of 2014, a year in which he had started just one league game across two countries, Aspas said: “I hope things change in 2015.”
January suggested that they would not but then on Sunday, at last, Emery did call upon him in the league. And with the help of Beto, Casilla, Pau and Rico he made history. “Iago, Iago … Aspas!” cheered the cover of the local sports daily, Estadio Deportivo.
“I found out yesterday that I was going to play,” Aspas said afterwards. “We had players injured and there was a lot of tiredness that had built up in the squad, so the manager thought it was right to give me the opportunity to play. Players are always egotistical and it hurts us all not to play, so it’s a tough job for the manager. I’m grateful to the fans because it is not easy not playing and there were moments when I was worn down but they gave me strength. I have been doing all I can to get the chance to play for a long time now, working in the shadows for an opportunity, and tonight I got my reward.”
This was the first time Aspas had started all season; he’d made eight appearances and none of them for longer than 20 minutes. His minutes played read 7, 10, 17, 19, 16, 11, 8, and 7. In other words, when the ball dropped to him in the 89th minute of the game, with the score at 2-2, he had played just five minutes fewer against Espanyol than he had in all the other league games put together. He had played superbly too: quick, mobile, clever in his movement, but he had been denied by Casilla’s handball and saw another shot came back off the woodwork. “I tried to leave my skin out there on the pitch,” he said, but it looked like he would leave empty-handed.
And then, with the score at 2-2 and the game’s fourth goalkeeper standing before him, Iago Aspas got one last chance.
Talking points• In the week in which the president of the league wrote a letter to the president of the federation complaining that he had called him a “dickhead” in front of the presidents of all the regional football federations, and demanded that they have a meeting, while the president of the federation tried to get the minister for sport kicked off all the Fifa committees he’s on, when he’s not actually on any, and the week in which the Spanish transfer window shut two days earlier than everyone else’s, it was again left to the football to rescue Spanish football. “Played by geniuses, run by idiots” indeed. Everywhere you turned last weekend there was drama and brilliant football, records broken and runs ended.
• Real Madrid conceded after 38 seconds but played superbly, all neat touches and flowing moves, and scored four against Real Sociedad, including a gorgeous goal from Karim Benzema. Aritz Aduriz went to 99 league goals as he scored two brilliantly taken efforts in Athletic’s 2-0 win over Levante – their first win in eight weeks and one that leaves Levante without a win in eight, and next up for them are Málaga and Barcelona. After a mere 273 days, Almería finally won at home. Borges scored twice on his debut as Deportivo beat Rayo. Celta, who beat Barcelona on 1 November but hadn’t won since, losing eight and drawing one of the nine, finally won, with Nolito getting the goal. Granada, now under Abel Resino, won for the first time in 17 games. And Atlético beat Eibar in the mud, the way that football’s supposed to be.
• And then, late on Sunday night, came a proper belter. It was not just Sevilla-Espanyol that finished 3-2; Barcelona-Villarreal did too. On 1 February 1998, Dmitri Cheryshev scored against Barcelona; on 1 February 2015, his son Denis did too.
Denis, who joined Real Madrid’s youth system and is on loan at Villarreal, put them one up at Camp Nou. “Do you still have a Real Madrid badge on your shin pads?” he was asked afterwards. “Yes,” he replied, grinning. “But I didn’t score with my shin … this one came off my ankle. And, besides, it ended up being worthless.”
Not exactly. This was a brilliant game, hugely enjoyable, and if Villarreal were beaten for the first time in 19 games, if they did not pick up any points, they scored in their 26th game in a row - in fact, they became the first team to score more than one at the Camp Nou this season - and they rightly departed feeling a certain satisfaction. Hope, too, with these teams due to meet in the Copa del Rey semi-final. “Frustrated? Frustrated is if they score six against you. Our objective is to carry on the way we are. Messi was absolutely decisive again,” Villarreal’s manager, Marcelino, said afterwards.
Twice Barcelona came from behind to equalise and then Lionel Messi scored the winner, curling in a wonderful shot with his right foot while Rafinha (who was superb) and Neymar got the others. That’s 342 goals in Messi’s last 342 games for Barcelona now and eight of his 22 this season have been scored with his right foot. But the game is probably best defined by this: Víctor Ruiz scored for Villarreal, momentarily seeming to put them 3-2 up, only for it to be (rightly) disallowed. Messi produced a superb pass for Neymar, who neatly hopped past one challenge and then got wiped out by the goalkeeper, but got no penalty. Luis Suárez got knocked down, got up again and, falling down again, headed wide from less than a metre. All in 28 seconds.
The crowd of 60,000 was Barcelona’s worst attendance of the season; those that did go saw the best game of the season.
Results: Rayo 1-2 Deportivo; Real Madrid 4-1 Real Sociedad; Eibar 1-3 Atlético; Granada 1-0 Elche; Celta 1-0 Córdoba; Levante 0-2 Athletic; Almería 1-0 Getafe; Sevilla 3-2 Espanyol; Barcelona 3-2 Villarreal; Tonight Málaga-Valencia.
Guardian
