The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful: When football isn’t enough, the rough, smooth and David Villa of it all

The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful: When football isn’t enough, the rough, smooth and David Villa of it all A round-up of some of La Liga’s most intriguing storylines across the week, traversing through the good, the bad and something beautiful. The Good: When football isn’t enough At the start of April, Elche went down 1-0 to Rayo Vallecano, and Sarabia told the press that he was ‘convinced we will stay up’, citing the collective spirit as his main rationale. It was the traveling journalists from Elche that felt this was the answer of a manager who had run out of them.

Since that day, Los Franjiverdes have won three straight games, lifting them out of the relegation zone, and four points clear of the drop with five games to go. Naturally Sarabia is preaching caution, but wins over Valencia, Atletico Madrid and Real Oviedo, the latter making them the second-most in form team after Barcelona over the last five games. “We’ve improved our set pieces and high pressing.

We haven’t changed our core principles, but we’ve focused on certain details that we didn’t work on as much before,” Sarabia told Cadena SER on Monday. “When football isn’t enough for certain things, there’s Affengruber,” he commented after the win over Atletico, in which Affengruber had grabbed the game by the collar, and dragged it into Elche’s lair, lionisation intended. Affengruber scored the opener, forced a penalty and a red card by pursuing Thiago Almada to edge of his own box, then assisted the winner.

“He inspires the team, when you have that animal behind…” melted Sarabia. Four days later, it was his defensive partner, the 35-year-old Pedro Bigas, that arrowed the ball from 35 yards into the top corner to set in motion their win over Oviedo. Bigas, in his fifth year with Elche, is perhaps the first lieutenant of Sarabia.