Valencia 2-0 Sevilla; 1 Down, 37 to Go

By: Anthony | September 2nd, 2009

Well it’s the same story every year isn’t it? We have an awesome pre-season, make a couple huge team-changing signings and get our hopes up so high we can hardly reach them.

Last year after we absolutely crushed the pre-season and won two tournaments we headed into our first game against Racing Santander who are a mediocre La Liga side at best and drew 1-1 which made us as fans question the true strength of our squad.

This year, same story; We sign 3 prolific players in the transfer window and appear to have one of the strongest squads in La Liga only to go into the first game of the season and lose 2-0 to one of our direct rivals.

Luckily for us, we’ve never known to have been strong starters but rather strong finishers. I’m not taking this defeat too close to heart, I really don’t believe it’ll affect us that much overall when looking at the whole season.

Anyone that has read my blog since last season when I started writing will know that I am a huge critic of Manolo Jiménez and can often be very pessimistic. Having said that, I do have a lot of critiques about this match but more positives to take out so let’s get the negatives out of the way so we can all be happy by the end of this post.

Problem 1
Manolo Jiménez’ tactics once again in my opinion were questionable. I never have liked Duscher and think he’s just useless on the pitch. Yesterday proved my point – I thought we bought Zokora to be the holding midfielder we so desperately needed? What was the point of buying him if we were going to stick to a player who we considered to be the source of one of our problems from last season? I just don’t understand it, maybe you can help me out on this one.

Problem 2
Romaric has labelled to be out for about 3-4 weeks which is a massive blow to us also considering my mouth was watering at the thought of him and Zokora dominating the centre of midfield in an all Ivorian connection. Guess I’ll have to wait a month for that.

While that is negative enough all on its own, Romaric is the centre of my own personal controversy. Don’t get me wrong, he never did anything wrong, but it was rather what Jiménez did with him. Okay, so we all saw Romaric limping off in our first match against Valencia and he was substituted by his compatriot and countryman Didier Zokora. This is a perfect example of Jiménez’ negative tactics at their finest as neither Duscher and Zokora are creative or attacking minded players and as was displayed, we lacked any creativity and therefore did not create many chances. Sure, our bench really didn’t have an out and out creative central midfielder but we’ve seen Navas play as an attacking midfielder before so why not put him there with Perotti moving to the right and sub Capel on the play on the left? Works for me. Another option would have just been to play a three man midfield and sub Negredo on to play with three strikers. Regardless of what we could have done, what we did, did not work and we paid the price eventually.

Problem 3
Our star striker Frédéric Kanouté will serve a suspension for his (undeserved) red card which is a huge blow to us considering big Freddie is probably our most consistent performer, match after match. He is always a threat to defenses and was our top scorer last season.

No need to worry, be happy my fellow Sevillistas!

Moving right onto the positives though as Kanouté’s absence through suspension will mean the probable start of new boy and record signing Alvaro Negredo alongside Brasilian hitman, Luis Fabiano. It is a mouth watering striking partnership and one many teams would love to have but we didn’t really get time to see them play together so we will see next match how well one can partner the other when we look to win against Real Zaragoza at home.

We lost, that’s an obvious statement. It’s never a good way to begin a season but at least it wasn’t against some newly promoted team or a team considered to be one of La Liga’s whipping boys. It was Valencia, a team who we know can compete with the big boys and has a solid squad.

An average man can have the most expensive tools in the world but that doesn’t mean he’ll be a good carpenter. Jiménez definitely has the squad to do damage in the league this year but whether he chooses to utilize our players properly or not is yet to be seen. Hopefully he proves everyone wrong.