A little before midday on Wednesday, Villarreal’s players strolled out into the sun at Castellón airport in their bright yellow tracksuit tops and boarded flight YW2003 bound for San Sebastián, pausing first to pose for photos at the foot of the stairs. As the hundred-seater plane edged its way on to the runway for takeoff, players, coaching staff and president on board, cameras rolled and clicked. Reporters took notes. A small crowd gathered behind a metal fence and when it climbed into the sky there was a smattering of applause. Villarreal disappeared over the horizon, ready to knock Real Sociedad out of the Copa del Rey.
Every other week, front covers giddily splash on a photo, and not normally a particularly good photo, of Real Madrid arriving at their latest destination as if they had never seen an airport before, but this was different: they had never seen Castellón airport before, except on the front of Villarreal’s football shirts. For five years, Castellón Airport sponsored the province’s most important club, Champions League semi-finalists and runners-up in La Liga, handing out almost €20m and watching Villarreal go down and go up. It was just a pity that they could not watch any planes do the same.
Ceremoniously opened by the president of the Valencian government Francisco Camps and his counterpart in Castellón Carlos Fabra in front of 1,500 people and at a cost of over €150m euros, a couple of planes stick out of a frankly weird €300,000 statue near the entrance but there were no planes anywhere else. The statue was based on the dark-glasses donning Fabra – “I love knowing that I inspire artists” he said, not long before he was sentenced to jail for tax fraud – but looked more like it had been based on some cartoon monster with a hideously bloated face, the runway was too narrow and they didn’t have approval for planes to land there or any airlines that particularly wanted to.
And so it was that Castellón became a phantom airport standing empty around 40km up the road from Vila-Real, a monument to waste and corruption. Its opening was declared a “historic day for a province that has been forgotten”, but no flights arrived or departed for four years. Until at last, 2015 came and so did clearance. Two old blokes with a helicopter and nothing better to do touched down on the tarmac said hello and left again and then, at 12.09pm on Wednesday came the first ever real flight, the hope that maybe the airport can work after all (although current commercial estimates suggest 35,000 passengers, not the 600,000 originally claimed) when Villarreal boarded a charter heading north.
Villarreal say they will fly to every game from Castellón now. The first time had been lucky and the symbolism matters for club and community. Thirteen hours after taking off, they were back, touching down just after 1am having knocked Real Sociedad out of the Cup and two days after that they defeated Athletic Bilbao 2-0 at El Madrigal, with goals from Denis Cheryshev and Bruno Soriano. Villarreal are flying, all right: 15 games unbeaten, 20 of the last 24 points, quarter-finals of the Cup, through in Europe, four points off a Champions League place, the only team to win at the Vicente Calderón in 20 months and the only team – the only people, in fact – to fly from Castellón, ever. “Unstoppable,” said the headline in the newspaper El Mediterráneo.
How times have changed. It is just two years since Marcelino took over as coach at the Madrigal. After his first game in charge, a 5-0 defeat at Real Madrid’s B team Castilla, El Mediterráneo warned of “[the mess] that awaits you, Marcelino!” Villarreal were down in the Second Division and a quick return didn’t seem likely, with the team down in 10th after 22 games. But under the new coach, they lost just two of their remaining 21 league games and were promoted in second place. Relegation had even done them good, the president said; it had become the nudge they needed to restructure and the fans responded with their team: last season, their first back in the top flight, they never slipped below seventh once, returning to Europe.
This season has been even better. Villarreal have 19,396 season-ticket holders, 11,548 of them in Vila-Real itself – that’s a quarter of the population of the town. They are watching one of the most exciting, most enjoyable teams in the league and one of the most successful too. This weekend was week 19 in the league, the halfway point at which every team has played every other team once, before a mirror-image second half or vuelta begins, and the manger rightly described it as: “An extraordinary first vuelta.” He said: “Last season we had 34 points [at this stage]; this season, it’s 35.” Only once in their history have they enjoyed a better first half.
Saturday night was typical of them; they may have ridden their luck a little to start with but ultimately they won against Athletic Bilbao the way they have been winning against most teams. Few sides counter-attack like Villarreal do and few sides are so direct. But this is not “counter-attack” or “direct” in the dirty-word way it is so often meant here; this is not a long ball up to a lonely forward, Villarreal are not a team to sit back, hang on and take the few chances that fall. Nor are they are a team that depends on an individual, even if there is plenty of individual skill, even if Vietto was voted player of the month in the month that he turned 21 having managed to make Diego Godín – yes, Godín – look a bit daft, and Denis Cheryshev has more assists than anyone in Spain except Cristiano Ronaldo.
Last season Gio Dos Santos was their most important attacking player; this season he has started just six times in the league. But if the personnel changes, the philosophy doesn’t. “It all starts with the idea that football is collective,” Marcelino says and that is quickly clear. Ten different players have scored for them and their counter-attacks usually involve four or five men, not just one hoofing the ball up the pitch and another running after it. This is about coordination.
“You have to know how to attack, how to counter-attack and how to defend,” Marcelino said this weekend. “When a team goes 15 games without losing it is because they have very good players and a collective idea of how to play that works. We’re a more competitive team this season than last; we have more patience”. He is right, and there is greater “pausa” to their game now, but patience does not always appear a virtue for Villarreal: at times there’s something almost obsessive about the way they go forward and it can be thrilling to watch: precise and quick in their passing, sharp in their movement, swarming forward together, alert to the interception, closing passing avenues, going straight for the throat.
Training drills repeat the routine over and over: players crossing paths, opening space, always moving, support arriving from further back. “When we have it, the player has to have multiple options to pass,” Marcelino says. The first goal against Athletic was scored by Cheryshev – “Cherished”, as predictive text would have him – and was beautifully taken, serving as a good illustration of their style. Sprinting into space, Cheryshev brought down a superb pass with a glorious touch, stepped around Gorka Iraizoz and finished. It took until you saw the replay to appreciate how the space had been made for him by the movement of Ikechukwu Uche.
It was just before half-time when that goal went in and Villarreal were on their way to another victory – one that would put them 16 points ahead of Athletic. At the halfway stage they have lost just four times and it could even have been better. Look at the defeats: against Valencia and Sevilla they felt that they could have had more; against Barcelona they had hit the post twice before Sandro scored an 83rd-minute winner; and against Real Madrid they lost 2-0, but the shot count read 19-11 in their favour. So far this season they have taken 258 shots, second only to Madrid and Barcelona. And the really striking statistic this weekend was not that they had gone 15 games unbeaten but that they have now scored in 22 games in a row.
Marcelino has warned before that it is not likely that they will struggle to compete on three fronts, it is inevitable. But this weekend it started to look possible. “You don’t get tired of winning, so we’ll go for all three competitions,” said the captain Bruno Soriano. Valencia and Sevilla represent a serious challenge for the final Champions League place but it is not entirely out of the question and nor is the Copa del Rey or even the Europa League. Getafe stand between them and a semi-final against Barcelona or Atlético and few teams in Europe will want to face them. After all, El Madrigal is a difficult place to go. Or at least it was. There’s an airport now.
Talking points
“After one minute it was over. One-nil down in a minute, there’s no story … There were few fouls, few bollocks, and that hurts me. I feel ashamed when I see – fucking great! – that Iniesta is more aggressive than we are. That hurts. With the greatest of respect to Iniesta, we all know he has other qualities … Barcelona scored two from dead balls against us and they don’t [score from dead balls] against anyone … We went out there before the game to ask Barcelona’s players for their shirts. Turn off the lights, let’s get out of here. It hurts. I feel ashamed … I am sorry and they’ll be sorry too. The players who play will be the ones with balls. I’ll go down to the Second Division but with warriors, with players who have the knife between our teeth. They may not have a fucking clue how to play football but they’ll have the knife between their teeth. If we don’t have the knife between our teeth, there’s nothing we can do. In this shitty life, either you’re good or you’re a warrior, but you have to have something … I know that Barcelona is not our game but either we change things or we’re going nowhere.” Córdoba’s manager, Miroslav Djukic, might have been getting mad but he might just have been getting it right too. Córdoba had won just once all season and were going down when he said that following their defeat at Barcelona. Now they’re 14th, unbeaten in three having picked up seven of the nine points on offer since then and scored the fastest goal of the season, after just 10 seconds against Eibar this weekend.
Losing at Barcelona beats winning there, anyway. Just ask Celta. They won 1-0 at the Camp Nou. Since then they have not won in nine. And they’ve only scored once.
Benzema. Oh la la.
And on the 29th day, Luis Enrique repeated a starting lineup. Barcelona were better for it, too. You never know, he might even stick to this now. Barcelona had gone four games without a win on the road until they produced their best away performance on Sunday night. Neymar was brilliant and while Luis Suárez got increasingly frustrated, running everywhere but unable to score, Leo Messi got a hat-trick as they defeated Deportivo 4-0. The hat-trick is the 33rd of his career and takes him to 19 league goals this season.
Good for Villarreal, bad for Athletic. 19 points in 19 games makes this the worst first half of a season in their history.
And speaking of 19, (as Paul Hardcastle was, very fast), that new No19 Atlético have got looks alright …
It’s not just Villarreal. “Unstoppable” cheers the front of Sevilla-based sports daily Estadio Deportivo this morning. While Athletic endure their worst start to the season, Sevilla have had their best … and that’s with a game in hand still to play too (albeit at the Bernabéu against Real Madrid). They beat Málaga 2-0 with two wonderful goals – the first brilliantly made by Gerard Deulofeu, and scored by Carlos Bacca; the second brilliantly made and finished by Denis Suárez.
It’s been some week for Felipe Caicedo. Three goals in less than half an hour, two in the Cup and one in the league, both as a sub, have taken him to seven goals for Espanyol – all of them at home.
It took David Navarro just five minutes to get a red card this weekend. It’s tempting to add: “that’s five minutes too long.”
Yes, AS really did splash a ouija board session on its front cover on the morning of the Copa del Rey clash against Atlético in midweek, in which mad Madridista Tomás Roncero and some equally mad mates called upon the former Juanito to help them from beyond the grave as they sought another famous comeback (of which, incidentally, for all the talk, there have not been any in two decades now). “Are you there Juanito?” they asked. “Yes” ... “Can you give us a score?” “3-0.”
Three-nil, eh? Well that went well. Forty-seven seconds later, the “prediction” was in pieces.
Oh, look, here’s another one. “A clear run to the Cup.” “Lim’s Cup”, no less. So, how did that go, Super Deporte?
Results: Córdoba 1-1 Eibar, Real Sociedad 0-1 Rayo, Valencia 3-2 Almería, Villarreal 2-0 Athletic, Espanyol 1-0 Celta, Getafe 0-3 Real Madrid, Atlético 2-0 Granada, Deportivo 0-4 Barcelona, Sevilla 2-0 Málaga, Elche 1-0 Levante.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion