La Liga Weekly

The second half of the season is viewed by many teams as a chance to right the wrongs of the first half. It’s like a new beginning and for many teams you reall’y can’t blame them for having that kind of outlook. Take Girona for example. The northern Catalans are next to last and are mired in a fairly miserable season. Their new manager, Josu Uribe is charged with trying to get this side back to the safety, a tall [...]

Some upsets over the weekend in the Segunda including Gimnastic upending Elche 1-0 but instead of reviewing this past slot of games, it is the time-honored tradition of detailing the best and worst of the first half of the season in the Spanish Segunda. Best Team: Deportivo. No wait. Elche.. Hold on, it’s Almeria…. Um, but you could make an argument for Hercules. Ah! Don’t forget Valladolid… Or even Celta! You get my point. It’s hard to say who exactly has [...]

This weekend marks Jornada 21 in the Spanish Segunda and even though we actually started with Jornada 2 because of the strike,  we are actually halfway due to Jornada 1 being made up back in early October. Yet for just the first time this season Deportivo sit at the top of the table even though that is where many expected them to be at this stage. There was a time back in the Fall where Deportivo was ninth and Jose [...]

So often great teams are defined by who leads them. Whether it’s Steven Gerrard dragging Liverpool up by his bare hands against Milan in Istanbul or Franz Beckenbauer calmly and decisively leading West Germany to victory in the 1974 World Cup despite going a goal down inside the first minute to the great Dutch team of that era. All teams who win at the highest level need one man who will do whatever it takes to win and get the [...]

There will be no Barcelona Observer or Real Madrid Corner this week, as if anyone had anything to say other than that today the two giants in Spanish football will face each other in the second rivalry match of the campaign. Sorry, but I refuse to call this a derby match. I´m sort of a stickler for certain bits and derbies are matches between city rivals. The expectation is that José Mourinho will play it close in the first match, [...]

5 years ago Marcelino García Toral was on top of the world. He guided not only Recreativo de Huelva to promotion in 2006 and their best ever finish that year at 8th on the table the subsequent year, but repeated the feat at Racing Santander the following year finishing a club record 6th on table.  He turned down an opportunity to guide Valencia CF and went to the second division with Real Zaragoza to rescue that grand club. He was [...]

Athletic Bilbao: with Pep Guardiola on a series of yearly contracts, the Spanish media continues to speculate about possible replacements should the Barcelona manager choose to follow his muse out of town. One of the names mentioned by Guardiola himself is current Athletic coach Marcelo Bielsa. It would be a return of sorts to the Ciudad Condal, as Bielsa spent a few short months in 1998 in charge of RCD Espanyol. Bielsa refuses to speak about hypothetical situations, and Athletic [...]

José Mourinho has been pining for an English return practically from the moment he was fired, or stepped down, or was let go by the Russian oligarch at Chelsea FC. It´s an issue that crept up when he was holiday for that year in 2007-2008, when he on the sidelines at the Giuseppe Meazza Inter, and practically from the moment he stepped foot at the Santiago Bernabéu. It´s a love-affair from the moment he stepped off the plane. He suits [...]

What started out as such a promising week on the Copa front for the Segunda sides ended in disappointment as Alcorcon and Cordoba exited the Copa in midweek games. For Alcorcon, they were played off the field by Levante but for Cordoba it was all heartbreak succumbing to an 89th minute Espanyol goal that sent the Pericos through to the quarters. How will this affect these two sides in league play this weekend? Good question. Both clubs are very much [...]

Headline: That was certainly the headline that was running around newspapers yesterday, and not just the usual suspects either, no there were call coming from all over the world in favor of just handing the reigns to the Argentine Ballon D´or winner. I wish they would just stop with the heavy-handed praise for a kid who is just beginning his career. He´s the best there is at the moment, but not the best of all-time, not yet at least, but [...]

Local derbies rarely pass with little incident. In the early kick off on Sunday in England, the two Manchester sides produced one of the most memorable local derbies in recent memory. Or at least since the 6-1. In Spain it was the turn of Espanyol and Barcelona to put on a show. If what followed might not be worthy of the tag “classic”, it can certainly be described as important. Both in terms of what that point means to each [...]

We cover La Liga, the Spanish Primera and Segunda here, and we try to offer the league with an unbiased eye or at least not so biased an eye that would force you to keep coming here. It´s not about separating into our tribal councils, it´s about sharing our passion for our league and our teams. So I try not to let my colors show all that much, but I´m an RCD Espanyol fan at heart. I bleed blue and [...]