The impossible task of La Liga’s Tormalet, playing the big four one after the other can end a season before it’s started unless you’re Real Valladolid.
It’s been dubbed the grand slam, the queen’s stage, the perfect storm and the month of misery, described as pretty cool, pretty silly and pretty unfair as well as real rubbish. Grabbing his gut and reaching for the roll, Atletico Madrid Coach, Javier Aguirre, called it ‘that shitty run’. It’s been likened to a valley of tears and an unbridgeable river, but most have made a mountain out of it. Some say Everest, others say Kilimanjaro and still more say Tormalet, after the Tour de France’s toughest mountain climb. Jose Luis Mendilibar, by contrast, says ‘chorradas’. Bollocks.
And not just because he has the foulest mouth since that weirdo on the word drank a pint of congealed curry juice. No sir. Mendilibar says so because he figures worse things happen at sea. Like cruises. More importantly, he says so because while everyone else collapses exhausted, muscles knotting, bottom blistering, heart ready to explode, on Saturday night his Real Valladolid side glided past to claim a polka-dot jersey, a bunch of flowers and a kiss from a couple of marvellous mademoiselles. "You lot keep making up names for it: Everest this, mountain that, Tour the other," flashed Mendilibar, pointing at the press. "But Bah! Bollocks!"
In August, the LFP led by Jose Luis Astiazaran, the man who took Real Sociedad to the verge of extinction had the brilliant idea of a fixture list where everyone plays Sevilla, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Villarreal in a row. Twice. A fixture list in which all four, plus Valencia faces each other over two six-week periods that should decide the league and everyone twiddles their thumbs the rest of the year. It threatened to sink poor Sporting Gijon: they waited 11 years to return to Primera and didn’t so much face an uphill start as the need to crank an Austin Metro into gear on the Eiger. With Antonio Cassano, a bell boy, 700 loose ladies and three croissants in the boot.
Although they recovered brilliantly, sporting lost to Barcelona and everyone else, conceding 13 goals in three days. They weren’t alone either: before this weekend, eight teams had endured the full four-game Tormalet and not one had picked up a single victory. From a possible 96 points, collectively it managed eight. And then along came the King of the Mountains, Mendilibar’s Valladolid.
This was the week when La Liga was supposed to kick off. Sevilla faced Valencia, ready for a surge of super Sundays (or Saturdays or whatever day the league decides on). The paranoid Real Madrid President, Ramon Calderon, sporting a tie that was too tight and a face so red it was just a couple of nobly bits short of Darth Maul, desperately invited his squad and the club photographer to dinner and offered them $2.5 million (£2.1 million) to win five games while everyone else waited for them to spontaneously combust. Barcelona was supposed to secure their 10th successive win against a Getafe team led by the man with Jennifer Anniston’s jaw. And Atletic, now freewheeling on the flat, were supposed use everyone else’s Tormalet to close the gap.
But just when you wondered if mice really do lay plans a dream skirting board all of their own, perhaps they gang aft agley. Barcelona drew, leaving third division Mighty Oviedo as the only team with 10 successive wins. Madrid was rubbish but won $20,000 (£16,975) each. Atletico blew it in the 95th minute. At the Pizjuan, the fussy referee Teixeira Vitiens tried to ruin the game, as if Unai Emery and Manolo Jimenez or their players needed any help. It produced a desperately dull goalless draw in which Valencia discovered a cunning new pass the 40-yarder back to their goalie. It suggested neither side can win the league.
So it was that the weekend was trumped by the team finishing their mountain stage not the ones starting it. Battered by Barcelona, Valladolid beats Sevilla and Madrid 1-0, then on Saturday secured a 3-0 victory over Villarreal thanks to two goals from Jonathan Sesma and one from Luis Prieto, racking up nine points from four matches more than the rest had managed in 32. Tormalet? Chorradas! Valladolid was ‘the unexpected colossus’ cheered one local rag. It had won its first away match and better still inflicted Villarreal’s first defeat this season its first since April in fact and its first at home in nearly a year. It was impressive too even if it was given a helping hand by the goalkeeper, Diego Lopez. Quick, direct and intense, it never let Villarreal settle, even making Marcos Senna look average.
For MendÌlibar, it was a vindication. A kind hearted yet potty-mouthed anorak, who preferred watching Poli Ejido to celebrating winning the league at Lanzarote, he famously made his squad stand in huge bins full of freezing water at Eibar, where he just missed an historic promotion and rather than forcing erring players to perform press-ups he has them do Arab Springs. He failed at Athletic Bilbao but led Valladolid to the second division title, kicking the ball rather than lumps out of opponents and breaking record after record. He then kept them up on a relative shoe-string and despite losing his best player, continues to employ an occasionally suicidal, but refreshingly bold high line that threatens to make a club only really famous for Spain’s coldest ground worth watching, especially against the primera’s peaks. "Not that it’s worth a cucumber if we lose to Mallorca," MendÌlibar smiled.
As for the Villarreal Coach, Manuel Pellegrini, he wasn’t feeling so bright, nor sitting so tight. "It’s been a black night," he said. But he shrugged: "It had to happen sometime". But while Villarreal continues to play beautifully and is just four points adrift, there are worrying signs as it embarks upon its climb. It has an infuriating tendency to waste opportunities to take a real step towards greatness, too often fail to kill games it dominate, especially when Nihat Kahveci and Joseba Llorente both now injured are absent and are starting to look surprisingly tired. Then again, maybe there’s an even simpler explanation for Saturday’s defeat. The centre back Diego Godin didn’t play. And Pascal Cygan did.