Sporting Gijón 1-0 Sevilla; “Time to Panic”

By: Anthony | February 1st, 2009

It definitely is, what an embarrassment. For the second time in as many weeks we’ve been up a man for the majority of the game and not only lost, but failed to score a single goal. There’s a serious crisis in Nervión now, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens but one thing I know for sure is this is unacceptable.

For a team that started the year so promising and was regarded as one of the only teams that would probably challenge for the title we’ve quickly fallen way off the pace.

Now after that defeat to minnows Sporting Gijón we still sit in third place, luckily Villarreal got hammered by Depor so we have a “comfortable” position in the Champions League spots. Although, the way we’ve been playing lately, nothing with us can be considered “comfortable”. This is the most erratic Sevilla side I’ve ever seen and although I was quick to jump to Jiménez’ defense before, there’s no way I can anymore, his tactics are so conservative and strange that he’s stripped Sevilla of the quality attacking football we were known and renowned for.

Like my buddy Aaron pointed out, at the beginning of the season our goal was to qualify for Champions League which we’re currently in line to do so Jiménez can’t be criticized like he is being right now, he’s also taken us to the Copa del Rey semis which we will play this Wednesday against Bilbao who have been in stunning form of late. If we don’t get our act together we’ll go crashing out of the Copa just like in UEFA.

I think it’s that the expectations surrounding our team have been heightened ever since having that extremely successful spell in which we won a record 5 trophies in 15 months. It should be obvious though that any team to lose after being up a man for over 65 minutes is extremely embarrassing and considering it’s now happened twice in as many games, there’s an obvious problem.

There were a few positive points today though, they were hard to come by but I managed to recall a few. Palop once again like he’s done so many times in his career saved a bullet of a penalty from Mate Bilic which gave us hope in the first half, unfortunately, about 5 minutes after this Sporting scored. Also in the second half Lautaro Acosta made his official return from a rather lengthy injury when he substituted on for the inefficient Chevantón who just hasn’t been the same ever since he’s come back from injury. Acosta almost found the back of the net on a couple occasions and I’m looking really forward to him playing a lot more in the near future as he’s a really promising young talent. Also Fazio returned from his lengthy spell on the injury table and even though he wasn’t a standout performer today, he made very few mistakes and was a solid defensive midfielder.

The starting lineup today was:
Palop
Crespo – David Prieto – Escudé – Drago
Duscher – Fazio
Jesús Navas – Romaric – Diego Capel
Chevantón

Once again a very defensive lineup away from home to a team that has a very erratically high goals for ratio. Jiménez obviously didn’t do his homework and we were punished for it today. I don’t understand the need for two defensive midfielders when Duscher can play the role by himself in a diamond midfield formation. Also Chevantón cannot play as a single striker because he’s small and quick, he needs a target man to play alongside or at least another guy to play off of, Acosta and him should have started since both Kanouté an Luis Fabiano are nursing slight knocks. Big Fredi did come on in the second half but appeared to be playing a more creative, play-making role, mind boggling stuff, I was so lost. It appeared to be too late, and he didn’t affect the game in any dramatical way. Diego Capel and Jesús Navas both looked lively as always and of course that’s a good sign.

All in all we played very poor football and couldn’t even penetrate one of the weakest defenses in the league, also factor in that they were a man down and it’s even worse on our part. This is seriously becoming annoying considering the ability I know we have in this squad and how we can perform when we really want to.

We now travel back home to Nervión to train and prepare for our Wednesday encounter with Athletic Club de Bilbao in the first leg of the Copa del Rey semi-finals. I’ve said it a million times this year but this is an absolute must win game, if we lose then Jiménez can kiss his ass goodbye and we should be expecting a new manager in Sevilla really soon, some rumours suggest Michael Laudrup who is currently at Spartak Moscow. We will need to win by a significant margin because going into San Mames and expecting a result is risky because this is like a sanctuary to Athletic and very few teams can go in there and come out with anything to show for.