Poor Union Deportiva Almería, they’re never going to win. They took 16 shots against Celta de Vigo, 17 against Villarreal and 18 against Atlético Madrid and didn’t win. They rattled off 19 against Betis and Rayo, 20 against Girona and Real Madrid and didn’t win then either. Their striker scored a hat-trick in five minutes and 25 minutes, and it was no use. Nothing is, not even scoring two against each of the top three. They have been through three different goalkeepers and three different managers, and all of them have the same win rate: 0%. “You could have 30,” said Gaizka Garitano, the latest of the coaches, but what difference would it make?
Nope, Almería just can’t buy a win, which might be an idea. Garitano said maybe he and his assistant, both grey now, should go down and defend the dead balls and that might be too. Actually having a forward is another. Twenty one-games in and Almería have not celebrated victory once. Bottom on six points from 63, 10 from safety. The last time they won a game was last season, eight months and four managers ago. “Sometimes it seems impossible,” Garitano said recently, and today it feels more impossible than ever. They are the 21st century’s worst Spanish top-flight team; no one has closed the first half of the season this badly since Sporting Gijon in 1997-98, and they were, quite literally, the worst team ever, finishing an entire season on 13 points.
Carry on at this rate and Almería will threaten them, which isn’t the kind of record anyone wants and which doesn’t make very much sense any more. This is getting silly now. Defeat at Osasuna apart, there is a case for saying that they could be unbeaten in the last nine, a little hope let in – and that’s despite that run including matches against first, second, third, fifth and sixth. They have drawn the last three at home, without conceding. Bad to begin with, they’re improving, they’re competing, but try as they might – and, boy, are they trying – Almería can’t win to save their La Liga lives. The closer victory seems, the more it hurts when it slips away again, the more they feel like the damned, some cursed club. It is, the Spanish line has it, as if a one-eyed man has looked at them.
They couldn’t even win when they went 3-0 up against Granada, the second worst team. “Everything that was good in this game, we did,” Garitano said after they faced Real Sociedad but they didn’t win then, conceding on 91 and 95. Las Palmas beat them on 94. Against Betis they hit the bar twice, and drew 0-0. They had Atlético desperately hanging on but lost. They went to Barcelona, scored twice and lost again, Sergi Roberto getting two. Last week they battered the league leaders and drew, Girona coach Michel declaring the 0-0 a “great point”. Then this Saturday, Almería went to the Santiago Bernabeu, scored inside a minute, led 2-0, and put the ball in the net three times.
And still lost.
“It feels like someone has decided that we can’t win,” said the full-back, Marc Pubill.
Osasuna 3-2 Getafe, Real Madrid 3-2 Almería, Real Betis 2-4 Barcelona,
Girona 5-1 Sevilla, Rayo Vallecano 0-2 Las Palmas, Villarreal 1-1 Real Mallorca, Valencia 1-0 Athletic Bilbao, Celta Vigo 0-1 Real Sociedad, Alavés 1-0 Cádiz
This time it was someone in a small room 25km away, or so it goes. A man called Alejandro Hernández Hernández, the referee so good they named him twice: the man Real Madrid TV have laid into pitilessly (pitifully, too) and accused of having it in for them, not that that makes him so different, and who Almería would prefer never to name again. “It’s such a shame: all the effort the players have made, the situation they’re in, and then they see what happened … in the end, it’s a fucker for them,” Garitano said after his team had been beaten 3-2. Which was about all he was going to say, biting his tongue so hard there was a metallic taste in his mouth. “Giving my opinion is pointless; you get punished for speaking. I am so ‘overheated’. I don’t have words for what happened. You all saw what happened.”
What happened was this:
A neat, slick move was finished off by Largie Ramazani to put Almería into the lead after 43 seconds, sending him backflipping into the corner, and then on 43 minutes Edgar González smashed the shot of his life past Kepa Arrizabalaga to make it 2-0. On 57, Jude Bellingham scored a penalty, given for a handball from Kaiky, to make it 2-1. Six minutes after that, Madrid were opened again, Sergio Arribas making it 3-1 – only for the VAR to rule it out, pulling the play back to penalise Dion Lopy for catching Bellingham in the face with a hand as he turned in the middle of the pitch to start the move.
Five minutes later, Vinicius made it 2-2, meeting a cross and turning the ball into the net with a twist of the arm as if he felt like Chicken Tonight. Initially ruled out for handball by referee Francisco Hernández Maeso, Hernández Hernández called him to the screen and decided it was a shoulder instead. On the touchline, Garitano was waving his own arms about, as if he was going to walk. That’s it, finished. Enough. No point playing any more. He might have wished he had when the inevitable happened. Bellingham, superb in the second half, thought he had put Madrid into the lead and although that was ruled out for offside, this was only going to end one way. The board went up with 11 minutes added time; just before the hundredth, the Englishman’s header went across the six-yard box and there, steaming in, was Dani Carvajal to win it, the place going wild.
Not as wild as Almería, and just about everyone else, mostly for everyone else’s reasons. “The feeling I have is that we have been robbed,” midfielder Gonzalo Melero said.
“Every decision went their way. The first is a foul on me and the second is a handball. But I am wound up now and so it’s hard to analyse it all well,” Edgar added.
“I understand Gonzalo but if he looks calmly, he’ll see all three were right,” Carvajal said, but the VAR footage, which is released post-game in Spain now, didn’t really help; Almería publicly questioned the way it had been applied, why all the images weren’t provided to the referee. On the penalty, Almería claimed that Joselu had pushed Kaiky and that, in front of him, Toni Rüdiger had done the same to Edgar. But in the VAR conversations, that possibility was not discussed, nor checked.
When the referee was given the footage of the Vinicius goal he was shown an angle from behind and high up, further away, where it looks like the ball came off his shoulder – trying to distinguish between shoulder and arm seems pretty absurd, by the way – and not the nearer front-on angle where it looks like his arm, closer to elbow than shoulder. “It hits his shoulder,” Hernández Hernández tells Hernández Maeso. The ruled out goal, meanwhile, was given for a hand off that had happened just in front of the referee on the pitch.
“You don’t need to go to the VAR,” Melero insisted. “It hurts to say this, but there’s just nothing good about it. Spanish football is light years behind. Today has gone beyond all limits. It was incredible. More couldn’t have been done to ensure that they won.” Edgar alleged differential treatment too; opponents allowed to say whatever they wanted, his team cut down with cards. “I understand that we’re Almería and they’re Real Madrid but this is a competition that but it should be fair for everyone,” he said.
Ramazani tweeted that famous Didier Drogba rant at Stamford Bridge after that semi-final against Barcelona. “No words,” he added. Cesar Montes just posted a zipped mouth emoji. “The robbery of the century,” the Diario de Almería called it. On their website, Almería didn’t call it anything. “Don’t expect a match report,” they said, “everything’s crystal clear.” Vinicius called it a golazo.
On a Sunday with 22 goals in four games, including the wildest you will ever see from Jesús Areso; with two hat-tricks, one of them secured in six minutes, and two 16 year olds in the same starting XI for the first time ever (strike breakers apart); a Sunday with Isco dancing, two 3-2s, a 4-2 and a 5-1, this dominated everything – and it will do for days. Down in Sevilla where Barcelona had just beaten Betis 4-2, Xavi Hernández – whose club is being investigated for paying the vice-president of the referees’ committee over 17 years – said something “didn’t fit”. Catalan daily El Mundo Deportivo shouted: “What a robbery!”
Here were the usual teams, the usual battle: the pain, the protagonism routinely denied to the rest, the ones who actually suffer most, whose anger could be best explained, whose wildest words could be best understood and even excused given all the tension, everything at stake. But Almería couldn’t even win that.
Another day, another defeat. This shouldn’t happen. Nine teams have smaller budgets than Almeria and they spent €60m (£51m) in the summer, but they are bottom and there’s little sign of them leaving there. The day Luis Suárez scored that hat-trick, he was stretchered off with a broken ankle, and they lost a three-goal lead, which sums it up. He is almost back and played a few minutes last week but he is the only real striker they have and it may be a little late now and nor is it just bad luck. The day Garitano claimed that everything good in the game came from his team, he admitted: “Everything that was bad, we did too.”
Union Deportiva Almería are not the worst team around, but they could yet become the worst team ever: with every passing week, every victory denied, the fatalism grows, the crueller the outcome the deeper the pain. Two more, and Almería will have racked up La Liga’s longest winless run of all time. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter what you do; sometimes, somehow, it just won’t happen. Sometimes or all the time. “You feel powerless, like you don’t know what’s going on,” Edgar said on Sunday. “We’re not bottom because of the referees but it hurts for this to happen.”
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Girona | 21 | 26 | 52 |
| 2 | Real Madrid | 20 | 30 | 51 |
| 3 | Barcelona | 20 | 16 | 44 |
| 4 | Athletic Bilbao | 21 | 17 | 41 |
| 5 | Atletico Madrid | 19 | 16 | 38 |
| 6 | Real Sociedad | 21 | 11 | 35 |
| 7 | Valencia | 21 | 3 | 32 |
| 8 | Las Palmas | 21 | 4 | 31 |
| 9 | Real Betis | 21 | 0 | 31 |
| 10 | Getafe | 20 | -2 | 26 |
| 11 | Osasuna | 20 | -6 | 25 |
| 12 | Alaves | 21 | -8 | 23 |
| 13 | Rayo Vallecano | 20 | -8 | 23 |
| 14 | Villarreal | 21 | -14 | 20 |
| 15 | Mallorca | 21 | -6 | 20 |
| 16 | Celta Vigo | 21 | -10 | 17 |
| 17 | Sevilla | 21 | -9 | 16 |
| 18 | Cadiz | 21 | -16 | 15 |
| 19 | Granada | 20 | -19 | 11 |
| 20 | Almeria | 21 | -25 | 6 |
