Sevilla 0-2 Racing; “The worst one yet”

By: Anthony | January 26th, 2009

So yeah, needless to say the performance of my boys was a total joke overall. You know your team sucks when the biggest highlight of the match was an 18 year old Finnish kid coming on for his debut. But yes folks, thats about as exciting as it got for us Sevillistas last night.

Good news though, my exams are all over so my attention will be solely on this blog (seeing as I don’t have a life) and you’ll be hearing more from me from now on.

Anyway, back to the match, or lack of one.

We did start with Kanouté up front with Luis Fabiano and both Capel and Adriano on the wings because Navas was out injured. Romaric set up as the defensive midfielder and Renato sitting just behind the strikers. Fernando Navarro, Squillaci, Escudé, and Drago made up the back four which had a bad day at the office to say the least.

We started strong, applying the pressure on Racing right from the get-go, but this all changed when we gave away a stupid freekick just outside our box. Munitis swung it in onto the head of Zigic who got it on target but in stead of pushing it over the bar fumbled it in front of goal and César Navas was there to tap it in.

So just as things were looking promising and that this was going to be an easy victory for us, of course we go and complicate things by conceding such an early goal. Zigic is obviously their huge target man and Kanouté didn’t exactly mark him well, he got away much too easily.

A few minutes later Palop gathered a simple cross at Racing were attacking and threw it out to Adriano on the flank to start the counter attack, as the Brazilian was chasing it he was brought down from behind by Oscar Serrano which resulted in a questionable straight red card for the Racing midfielder. Let’s be honest here, Adriano did exaggerate that a hell of a lot and looking at the replay is should have probably on been a yellow.

With about 10 minutes left in the half we couldn’t do anything against a 10 men Racing side so we went into the break down a goal.

At the re-start Jiménez took off Escudé for Chevantón in hopes that we would exploit their weakened lineup with 3 strikers now on the pitch. Apparently it wasn’t too successful as 5 minutes later we gave away another freekick in a similar spot and of course who got on the end of it? Zigic. Now it’s hard to ask a striker to play defensively but it’s not rocket science really. Just stand in front of him so he can’t get the open header or flick on, which is exactly what he did, touched it with ease past Palop.

Fabiano had numerous chances to score, but it definitely was not his day, he couldn’t hit a barn door if it was right in front of him.

Shortly after Pukki was brought on for Drago and the crowd went crazy. I don’t know what it is about this kid but we’ve been waiting for so long for him to finally get his Sevilla debut. It’s a shame really that he got a perfect opportunity to score but hit the keeper, none the less, this was definitely the moment of the match from my perspective. I think it’s just something special when you know you have a player who loves the club and wants to be there. When he first arrived to Sevilla Atlético from FC KooTeePee (I’m not making this shit up) in his home country of Finland he was so ecstatic to be here and it’s not often that you sign players like that, let’s face it, more times that not, people are in it for the money, Teemu on the other hand, saw it was a real opportunity.

He really did have the best opportunity of the match but like I said, hit it straight at the keeper. He couldn’t believe it as he bit the fringe of his jersey and looked to the heavens in shock. Poor kid.

That’s about as close as we came though because the final whistle blew shortly after leaving us empty handed and rightfully so. We played awful, there’s no excuses for the way we performed, the players just simply didn’t want it.

We have some serious problems to address because there’s no excuses for not being able to score a single goal after being up by one man for over 55 minutes.

Jiménez’ tactics are horrible, I don’t know what it is but I think the players and fans have all lost faith in him, we’ve dropped far too many points, much too often this year. It will be interesting to see what happens at the end of the season because right now I can’t see him being sacked as it would have too much of an emotional impact on the team to change him at this point in the season.

It’s clear that we need some new faces in the team because right now we definitely do not have what it takes to push higher in the table and compete, we’re stagnating at that 2/3 league spot.

What kills me the most is that Real Mierda is now ahead of us, I can’t express my hate for them enough. They play shit, and still manage to beat Depor. Whatever, thats luck, surely the “honeymoon period” under Juande Ramos can’t last much longer and we can expect to see their typical Schuster-esq form soon.

The good news is that Villarreal drew a stubborn Osasuna and Valencia lost to a resilient Mallorca which leaves us quite comfortably in third place.

We now look ahead to Thursday when we play Valencia at home in the second leg of the Copa del Rey. It’s a simple situation really, we’re down 3-2 but got those 2 crucial away goals, we need to go all out for it and try and get a couple early goals because I don’t want to see us holding on and playing a defensive setup, we’ve seen what happens when we try to do that, we allow the pressure to mount on us and eventually concede. Although we know Valencia is some tough opposition, there’s no reason that us, a team ahead of them in the table, shouldn’t be able to beat them.