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“What can I say?” Pablo Fornals said, “really nice”. Mostly, in truth, it hadn’t been, but it was in the moment when he had illuminated everything, taking Batista Mendy, César Azpilicueta and Kike Salas out for a walk – first this way, then that – and it was now, the 144th Seville derby finally ending 20 minutes behind schedule and with a Real Betis win.
“You dream of playing games like this, just playing them,” Fornals said as high in the south-east corner of the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán Stadium, 600 supporters in green sang, adding: “so to score and win, well, me, my teammates, all those lunatics up there and back home, you can imagine how happy we are”.
Imagine it? You could hear it, celebrations just getting started on the pitch and in the stands. You could see it on their faces too, all except Antony who was wearing civvies, a blue cap on backwards and a cut-out Isco mask. The Brazilian and the brother he had “become”, had missed the game that consumes the city, the end of the world every time. One suspended, one injured, two wild swipes had done it: two moments so silly it was hard not to laugh and Antony actually cried, live on TV, while everyone else feared the worse. Now though, he too was happy, cameras on him again as he headed down to the pitch to piggy-back teammates and wrap a flag around Fornals, whose outrageous opening goal had set up a 2-0 win.
On a Sunday afternoon when the game was stopped after objects were thrown, the two teams taken off for 15 minutes and brought back out again for just two more, Betis won a Sevilla derby at the Sánchez-Pizjuán for the first time since that “Kings Night” 5-3 in 2018. It was also the first time they ever had with Manuel Pellegrini in charge. At 72, here was something new: two days after the engineer who never wanted to be a coach in the first place and became the best they have ever had – the best Málaga and Villarreal have too – had extended his contract for two more years.
“There is no A team and no B team,” Pellegrini said, but he does so love it when a plan comes together and here it had. Well, sort of. This didn’t quite play out the way he expected. Three days before, Isco had been accidentally booted by Sofyan Amrabat, his own teammate, ruling them both out just as Isco had returned from a four-month absence. The same night, Antony discovered his appeal against a red card for an acrobatic overhead kick on Joel Roca’s face had been turned down. And the next morning, Giovani Lo Celso had left a clinic saying there was still hope, yet that had gone too. In 24 hours, perhaps three of Betis’s four best players found out they couldn’t play. The good news was that one could, and can he play.
When Antony found out about the ban after Betis’s Europa League win over Utrecht, his voice cracked, his head shook slowly, his eyes started to sting, and silence fell. “It’s a sad moment; there was no bad intention,” he said, eventually. “It’s the most important game of the year. I’m sad and angry because I wanted to be there with my teammates.” Which in the end he was, if not quite as he wanted: having watched Betis win from a glass fronted box, a shield against the gestures he threw at the fans and the things they threw back, he joined celebrations. Isco meanwhile was at home watching on telly, seven stitches in his foot.
They hadn’t exactly seen a classic, which in truth the derbies rarely are. The first half wasn’t so much bad as just nothing at all, 45 minutes that might as well not have been played. The second half took over an hour after objects were thrown, Azpilicueta sweeping up the lighters from the pitch and appealing for fans to stop, both teams and their managers gathered in a huddle in the middle of the pitch before the referee took them off. By the time they came back 15 minutes later, police climbing into the stands, the place was half empty. There were only two minutes left and, 2-0 down to Fornals’ opener and Sergi Altimira’s superbly taken second, still without a win since battering Barcelona, many didn’t see the point in hanging round any longer and couldn’t take much more.
Diario de Sevilla said José Ángel Carmona played as if he was “driving around London”. Whatever they meant, and you would like to think it was that he just sat there, never actually moving and getting increasingly angry, it probably wasn’t a good thing. They also asked if Akor Adams and Fornals were playing the same sport. Just about the only time Isaac Romero made proper contact, it was with Valentín Gómez’s legs. At times, Azpilicueta seemed to be trying to hold together the defence on his own. And if there is an obvious pun to use when it comes to Odysseas Vlachodimos, there’s an even more obvious one in Spanish: said out loud, the Sevilla goalkeeper’s surname basically means “we fucked it up”.
“Every time we made a big mistake, we had to kick off again,” the Sevilla coach, Matías Almeyda said, and there was something in that. There was even more in his admission that his thoughts were not for sharing – “I can’t and shouldn’t express them” – and that he had reached the point where he was no longer sure what the solution is. A long, largely aimless punt from keeper Álvaro Valles and a horrible error from Mendy started it all, leading to the first goal. “After that mistake, everything changes,” Almeyda said. “When you make a mistake in a derby, anyone can collapse. There’s a desperation to show passion without thinking.”
And yet for all the absentees, for all the passion, the noise and the nerves, all that usual stuff about there being no favourites and no league positions, the form book defenestrated, in the end the analysis is very basic: Betis are just better, Sunday’s rivalry revealing an inescapable reality. Sevilla have the lowest salary limit in La Liga and spent zero euros in the summer. Almeyda is the seventh coach Pellegrini has faced in this fixture and his players are not as good. On Sunday, perhaps the best of them, Rubén Vargas and Gabriel Suazo, were missing. And if Betis’s best were missing too, Antony and Isco out, there is a strength in depth, other footballers on the bench.
Fornals first among them. While Mendy’s error had been catastrophic, it still took something special to make the opening goal of it and Fornals delivered. Dispossessing Mendy, he went left, taking three players with him, then cut back right again leaving two of them on the floor, Azpilicueta and Salas sliding by like cartoon characters off a cliff, before beating Vlachodimos.
La Liga results
ShowReal Sociedad 2-3 Villarreal, Sevilla 0-2 Real Betis, Celta Vigo 0-1 Espanyol, Girona 1-1 Real Madrid, Mallorca 2-2 Osasuna, Barcelona 3-1 Alavés, Levante 0-2 Athletic Club, Atlético Madrid 2-0 Real Oviedo, Getafe 1-0 Elche
“I’ve watched it back a few times,” Fornals said later. “Because I remembered robbing the ball but not the cut backs and all that stuff.” Everyone else did. There was a reason Antony looked for Fornals when he came on at the end: funny, likable, the perfect teammate and a superb footballer. When he was 16 and playing in Málaga’s academy, Fornals would go to watch Isco play in the first team; now, 12 years later, Isco, watching from home, posted a message to the former West Ham midfielder putting himself “at your feet”. This was a good time, Isco insisted, for Fornals to ask for anything he wanted, your wish my command. “What a way to play football,” he wrote.
Nor was it just the goal, Fornals’ third of the season. Luis Milla is the only non Madrid or Barcelona player with more assists. From deep midfield – a new role found for him as Pellegrini squeezes as many technical ball-players in as he can – or further forward, he has become vital, as good a midfielder as any Spain has in La Liga right now.
When the Betis president said last week that they had to fight the pessimism as the players fell, Amrabat injuring Isco and himself, standing there with a guilty look, and Antony’s appeal falling on death ears, he could do so with some confidence. And so it was, the Sánchez-Pizjuán becoming Betis’s place. “New King,” one cover went for, Fornals crowned.
“The goal was nice, but what I hold on to is that we have been able to take that weight off our shoulders: that’s really important for the recent history of the derbies,” he said. “This is a real high. I don’t know if my kids saw it, but tomorrow, I’ll tell them all about the battle.”
