Another Quick Cut and Paste

By: Cesar | January 7th, 2008

Sorry, had to post this little ditty from one of my favorite football journalists, Phil Ball, who writes a weekly La Liga column on Soccernet.com.

Nothing new here, but still … We’re just not that good right now, are we?

the … derby, the rather less habitual one between Valencia and bottom-of-the-table Levante. Amazingly, Levante had not picked up a single point on their travels so far this season, and had never in their history picked up a point in the Mestalla. The game finished 0-0 and clearly served to only deepen the sense of panic on the New Year air in the city.

Valencia have now won only one game under Koeman, against the mighty Murcia, are out of the Champions and the UEFA, and although they still sit 7th in the table they’re a long way from the Champions League and the money it would bring them next season.

Perhaps that bid for Villa will be too tempting to refuse, even though it would leave them with a half-crocked Morientes, a stuttering Arizmendi and an out-of-depth Zigic, who looked fine at Santander but who has little understanding of the kind of touch-and-go system that Koeman is (unsuccessfully) trying to impose.

To add to the club’s woes, the three wise men, Cañizares, Albelda and Angulo, all of whom were swiftly dispatched to the rubbish heap by Koeman – an extraordinary decision given their pedigree and status at the club, are still there and making life difficult for the present regime, which is only to be expected. Albelda is taking the club to court over the cool sum of 60million euros, which is one hell of a lot of money but which legally might be his. Angulo and Cañizares would seem to be negotiating their way out more quietly, but to add to the club’s troubles, Manuel Fernandes, their player loaned out to Everton, apparently got into a Joey Barton-like scrap (although in this case with the police) in the small hours last week and is currently under arrest, unable to return to England. When and if he finally gets back to Merseyside, he can at least say that he has learned how to behave appropriately, in English footballing terms.

Whatever, in the last ten years, Valencia have only once finished outside the top five, winning two leagues and reaching two Champions League finals in the process. Maybe the cycle is about to bust, if their woeful performance at home to Levante is anything to go by.

The demonstrations against the president, Juan Soler, didn’t help matters, and in midweek the pressure is back on big-time, when the team travel to Betis in an attempt to save their season by staying in the Copa Del Rey, the competition they last won back in 1999 in the days when it was the icing on the cake for them. Now it’s the very crumbs.

There’s no easy explanation for what has gone wrong, but the problems seem to stem more from extra-footballing matters. It’s true that the average age of the players associated with the good times is somewhat too high, and that the authority of Ayala is missed, but the club had plenty of time to go about replacing him with someone more exciting than Helguera. Koeman seems to have decided that the basic problem resided in the dressing-room factions, built up over the past two seasons where one camp was with Carboni and the other with Quique Sanchez.

Quite what the president was doing all this time is an open question, but Koeman – either under orders or not – has presumed to have identified the guilty partners. In order to impose his authority and begin a new regime unfettered to the previous one, he has fingered the members of the officer class who were most likely to get in his way. Now the soldiers only have Koeman and his deputy, Jose Mari Bakero, to take their orders from, but in the short term it’s a high-risk strategy and one which seems, at least in part, to be contributing to the on-field problems.

MAJOR UGGH!!