Sevilla v Valencia Preview – Sat. Nov. 22nd GolTV 4pm EST

By: Anthony | November 21st, 2008

Its a huge understatement to say that the next four weeks are going to be difficult. We have Valencia tomorrow followed by Barca, Real and then Villareal, but then again we’re Sevilla, better than all of those teams mentioned. Our game tomorrow is against a Valencia side who are drawn on points with us, and have made several defensive blunders of late most notably last week in their loss to Sporting.

All isn’t well in Nervión however as Jiménez faces serious selection problems due to several injuries to some of our key players. With Abdoulay Konko, Julien Escudé, José Angel Crespo and Ivica Dragutinović all possibly out with minor injuries Jiménez must ask himself the question; do we play our strongest starting XI but risk them not fully recovering or save them for the next month of our congested schedule? Well the answer should be simple, Barca or Real are no better than Valencia so might as well play them because without them who the hell is going to mark Villa and Mata?

Back to the good news. Fabiano is absolutely killing it of late and he has 7 goals in 7 matches to prove that, also now being paired back with his partner in crime Kanouté he can hopefully expect more success to follow. Capel has fully recovered from his injury but it is reported he will be a sub tomorrow due to the fact that he is not match fit. The corresponding fixture last year saw us walk out of El Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán with all 3 points when Fabiano, Kanouté and Poulsen scored in our 3-0 thrashing of Los Ché (Does this really have anything to do with tomorrow’s fixture? No, but it’s good to know anyway). Also another point worth mentioning is that we have only conceded 8 goals this season, a league best which we share with Barca, and Palop will be looking to maintain this against his former club.

With Real playing poorly, Villareal playing mediocrely and Barca bound to lose sooner or later, this is a perfect game to win so we can carry on and hopefully win the next three (wishful thinking).

This game could set the tone for a difficult month ahead and can also literally make or break our season. A win here could see us back to our confident selves as we were prior to our 4 game skid a few weeks back and hopefully see us go on and beat Barca next week as well. We really do not have time to drop points, anything dropped can see us out of Champions League contention and falling behind at this stage in the season is definitely not a good thing.