La Liga’s relegation race ignites as Espanyol end 143-day winless streak | Sid Lowe

Manolo González cut an emotional figure on the touchline after his side’s long-awaited win. Photograph: Alejandro García/EPA

Just not if Athletic came instead. “We didn’t deserve all that,” González said, but they deserved this. Now it was done, if not yet done in a season with the tightest, most demanding relegation battle anyone can remember, in which three points separate 12th and 19th. Even Ernesto Valverde, the coach of the ninth-placed Athletic team they had just beaten, said he was worried that they could still go down. “We can’t be forgiven for the last 18 games and it has cost us the world to win,” Milla said. “It’s a relief to win, but we haven’t done anything yet.”

Milla had scored a superb volley and García had secured the win, a little room to breathe before the next battle. Asked if these had been the hardest days of his professional life, González said: “I would say almost of my life generally. After the death of my uncle, it’s been the worst period.”

A manager’s life is some life, his especially. A man who would wear his heart on his sleeve if there was a sleeve big enough. When he was a kid González would not talk if he lost and his mum, Dora, knew not to even try. Nicknamed Stoichkov for his temperament – not his talent – he always felt his head was the reason he did not make it, although injuries did not help either. When he tore his cruciate at 19, playing in Primera Catalana, the opportunity had probably already passed but he kept going in amateur football. Coached by a man called “Puchi”, an almost legendary character in local football, there was dynamism, togetherness, lessons learned even from a level where the bingo on the bus was as competitive as the matches. Every Friday they would all meet up at his mum’s Galician restaurant on Valencia Street, González arriving on the back of his friend Alex’s scooter, a 49cc Derbi Vamos.

By then González was already doing his badges, becoming a coach, and some of that spirit would be taken with him – the same corner routines would be too – but it was not much of a career, so he had a day job. If day is the right word. It was not until 2018 that he asked for a leave of absence from driving the Tusa bus from Badalona to Barcelona and back, on the 5am run or the night shift. When he got the Espanyol post in the second division in 2024, promoted from the B team, a huge opportunity was also an obligation. If they had not have gone up, he knew, he was dead and so was the club. If they did not then survive in Primera, ditto. This year was supposed to be different, but here they were again.

Kike García was on the pitch for six minutes before his late goal for Espanyol. Photograph: Pedro Salado/Getty Images

Things can change fast in football – “one day you’re John Travolta, the next you’re Manolo González”, Espanyol’s coach says – but no one could have imagined or explained this. “I don’t have a clue about football: it’s incomprehensible that they had gone 18 without a win,” Valverde said. “It was as if we were the worst team in the world, losing 20-0 every week, but it wasn’t like that,” Milla said. They were not that bad, not half-a-season-without-a-win bad, but they just could not win. This was worthy of study, so University of Vic in Catalonia did just that, a sports psychologist conducting classes on Espanyol and their mental block, choking under pressure. And yet they were not that bad either: it was not like you the team was obviously terrified, totally tied up, and nor is the tension that unusual.

This is all of them, in a relegation fight where the pressure is intense and only escaped for so long, the Sarlacc pit always liable to pull you back in, those clambering out of it likely to as well. “I have a friend who says: ‘How comfortable you were at home and you go and get yourself involved in this madness,’” the Sevilla coach Luis García says. García, who was entrusted to save a Sevilla side that, he says, were “really hurt”, likens this relegation battle to the cruise ship cabin in the Marx brothers film A Night at the Opera, 17 people crammed into a two-birth: with two games to go 13 teams could still mathematically go down, Europe and relegation are five points apart, eight teams are within three points of the two remaining relegation places, and even 43 points might not be enough. No one is safe, even when they think they are, and no one is entirely sunk. Apart from Oviedo, obviously.

Not even Levante, who spent six months in the relegation zone and came out of it on Tuesday night, after twice coming from behind to secure a second successive 3-2 win, completing a run where they have lost just one in six and two in 11, and would be in a Champions League place if the table had started when the coach Luis Castro did. They then slipped back into the relegation zone again on Wednesday night after Sevilla won 3-2, coming back from 2-0 down at Villarreal to make it three wins in three – as many as they had collected in the previous 13 – and climbed all the way from the relegation zone to 10th in three days. After Alavés kept a clean sheet for the first time in 20 games against a Barcelona team that failed to score for the first time in 54 of them. And after Espanyol, who watched in terror as everyone else started winning, finally got a victory of their own, players and supporters in tears when at last it was over.

Akor Adams scored the winner against Villarreal to move Sevilla up to 43 points. Photograph: José Jordan/AFP/Getty Images

All of which leaves Girona in 19th, Levante in 18th, Mallorca in 17th, and Elche in 16th all on 39 points, 15th-placed Alavés on 40, Espanyol, Valencia and Osasuna in 14th, 13th and 12th respectively on 42 and 11th and 10th placed Rayo and Sevilla on 43. “A heart attack every game,” as García puts it, pleased for the players he said were in tears two weeks ago. “Nobody thinks we deserve to go down,” said Castro, as Levante fans waited at the airport to greet his team home, but he knows they still might. “Football’s cruel because tomorrow we have to think about the next match,” said the Alavés coach Quique Sánchez Flores after a night that was historic but not quite enough.

But tomorrow is another day, and it looks different now, hope which is also what kills you, replacing the hurt. “It’s been incredible, infernal,” González said. “It’s impossible to explain: maybe in a few years I’ll be able to but not now. It’s been very, very hard. There are people in there playing for their futures. Since I’ve been here it has been life or death, leaping with no safety net. My family have suffered with me; they’re the ones you think of, the ones who see you struggling every day. You have to be strong but, bloody hell, we all have limits. Tonight we lifted a huge weight off our backs. This is a huge shot of energy, bloody hell. I haven’t slept a lot lately, but that’s a coach’s job. Maybe tonight I can sleep right through, the way God intended.”