Villareal beat Real Mallorca for the first time since May 2009 with a slender 0-1 win in front of 17,775 sweltering fans on Friday night. The pitch side temperature at kick off was 34ºC and just about all of them were drinking copious amounts of water to keep hydrated.
The price of a 50cl bottle of water is now 2.50€ inside the Son Moix but the club should really have been handing out “free” bottles of water included with the cost of admission when it’s so hot, as a health and safety gesture.
There was a real buzz in the bar before the game as fans were anticipating 10 million euro record-signing Sergi Darder making his first home appearance. Unbelievably coach Aguirre picked the same starting XI that were sluggish first half against Las Palmas last weekend, choosing Amath as the front player alongside Muriqi. Once again Amath was poor in attack and consistently gave the ball away. For me, the Senegalese player is second division and shouldn’t start a game.
Aguirre’s decision not to pick our two new record signings from the start (Darder and Larin) was a real head scratcher. If we pay top whack for players, they should be on the pitch from the word go. Within a minute Omar Mascarell was booked by referee Alberola Rojas for a hard tackle. Surely an early warning would have been correct, not brandishing a card before the clock had even reached 60 seconds. The first half was purgatory, the most excitement being when Darder was seen warming up just before the break.
After a torturous first half the second period wasn’t much better, not helped by what looked like a bad injury to captain Antonio Raillo. He went into a tackle with Villareal’s big Norwegian striker Sorloth and Raillo fell to the ground screaming in agony. He looked in big trouble as the medical staff spent ages on the sideline attending to him. It didn’t look good as he was stretchered off to rapturous applause.
Then more disaster for Mallorca as their defensive resistance crumbled. Villareal scored a fortuitous goal in the 62nd minute. Villareal won a corner on the left, the ball bounced off Muriqi’s shoulder and despite a splendid Rajkovic save, ex Mallorca player Gerard Moreno poked in the spillage, 0-1. In truth the opening goal came as no surprise to the record first home match-day crowd as Villareal passed the ball better and looked the stronger side against a poor Mallorca side who only came to life five minutes from the end. The feeling was that we lost this game because of coach Javier Aguirre’s conservative approach. I wish he’d stop playing five at the back at home, let’s have two up front and give Muriqi the ball. He had another poor game but it wasn’t his fault, he got no service.
The coach has a lot of work to do on the training ground this coming week as we killed the game with our negative tactics. Morlanes and Mascarell in the engine room never got up a head of steam and we never got going in midfield. Boy, did we miss Kang In Lee on Friday night’s showing.
At his post match press conference Aguirre claimed that this group needs time and he didn’t want to make excuses, “Villareal beat us well,” and the person responsible for the day’s defeat was himself. He finished by saying Raillo’s injury worries him more than the result.
The much-anticipated introduction of Sergi Darder went down like a lead balloon. He, like many Mallorca players on Friday night, hardly had a kick.