Win over Osasuna. It is the only recipe. The only way out. The only method. What Espanyol must do this Sunday to mathematically achieve a permanence which has been considered virtual for weeks, with 39 pointsbut what three losses in a row to which more bloody they have contributed to postpone, sowing doubts, criticism and a rarefied atmosphere in their wake. The one that will probably be expressed in the RCDE Stadium. And the one that is the fruit, among many other adventures, of a bad second round.
LaLiga Santander
*Data updated as of May 3, 2022
The contrast between the first part of the championship and what has happened since the equator leaves two readings: either that initial performance was above expectations what really the staff has suffered an unjustifiable slump. Two options that, more than excluding each other, are complementary. In eleventh position, with 26 points (seven wins, five draws and seven losses), Espanyol finished the first round. just half, 13 points (three wins, four draws and eight losses), accumulates in the second round, which gives him a fifteenth partial place. And 27 goals received.
If the League had started in the second round, Vicente Moreno’s team would be today at only one point of the descenso, which with 12 would score Alavés and Mallorca; Rayo Vallecano, with 11, and the eight from Granada would close the classification. So what finished the first round ten points from that area of teams that fall to the Second Division (Alavés and Elche scored it, with 16), and just four from a seventh place (Real Sociedad, with 30), which could give access to Europe and that in the second stage of the championship is already 11 points.
Vicente Moreno gives directions on the Bernabéu sideline.
AFP7 via Europa Press
In this bipolar Espanyol the baggage away from home does not come out well, but neither does the one at the RCDE Stadium. Part by part. If in the first round the parakeet group managed at home 20 points out of a possible 27 (74%), in the second they have so far garnered 11 of 24 (46%). Y out the drama arrives six points out of 30 (20%) until matchday 19, and two points out of 21 at stake (9.5%) since then. A vertiginous descent into hell that only the mattress of the beginning can cushion, and that only a victory against Osasuna can and should sentence.