Sevilla 1-0 Depor; MISSION COMPLETE

By: Anthony | May 24th, 2009

What a night for us, it was like we were playing in a final of a major tournament. We have officially achieved what we set out to this season and that is to qualify for next year’s Champions League.

You knew it was going to be a special night when Javi Navarro was presented to the afición and was warmly welcomed with a massive ovation. This came after Javi “el capitán” Navarro announced his retirement a few days ago due to his ongoing injury struggles.

We completely dominated Depor from start to finish but struggled to capitalize on our chances. The boys from A Coruña relied on their counter attack but Squillaci and Escudé held down the back line perfectly, thus, Depor struggled to created many clear-cut scoring opportunities.

It took until the 90th minute of play for Diego Perotti to make a run down the left flank, only to find out he had no where to go so he played it back inside to Koné who passed off to Renato who spotted Adriano on the right side who finally put in a perfect cross for the Argentinean Perotti who never stopped moving after his run and as a result got his head on the end of it putting us up 1-0 with no time left to play. El Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán erupted and our bench cleared to jump on top of the goal scorer, Perotti in sheer happiness.

It was so fitting for the kid who has been our most consistent and stand out player this year to get the goal which sends us to the Champions League next year. He’s already a part of Sevilla history and only 20 years old. I really can’t even say enough about him, he’s such a good player at such a young age and we’re so lucky to have him as a part of our squad – I can only imagine what massive role he will play in the future of Sevilla Fútbol Club.

This is how it all went down:

This video gives me goosebumps and fills me with so much pride. I never realized just how much I love this club and how my emotions run in direct correlation with the success of Sevilla.

It truly was a historic night in Nervión and despite whatever has been said this season, we have to tip our hats off to Manolo Jiménez. I’ve been one of his biggest, if not the biggest critic this season but at the end of the day he got us to a position which is highly respectable and is also where we aimed to achieve. I guess because we’re a big club now that we have higher expectations and because he wasn’t able to achieve above and beyond what we wanted then we labelled him as a failure. Sure, he’s no José Mourinho or Guus Hiddink but he’s not half bad. His heart is with the club and whatever happens after this season, I won’t really have a bad word to say about Manolo.

We travel to Numancia next week to finish off the season and since they’re already relegated and we’ve already qualified for the Champions League you can probably expect either an extremely boring clash or an extremely entertaining one filled with quick attacking play. I really hope both teams go for the throat and don’t hold anything back so us as the fans have quite the spectacle to watch.