Espanyol's backbone

First they were Fran Mérida and David López. Then the Barcelona man fell to make way for Sergi darder, sanctioned on the first day. This duo repeated in Majorca without excessive fortune. From two midfielders, Vicente Moreno passed three before him Atlético de Madrid and has kept the same formula. Manu Morlanes and Óscar Melendo they accompanied the one of Artà, immovable also the subsequent days, together with Keidi Bare or Fran Mérida.

The Blue and White coach has made up to five different combinations in midfield in the seven games played, but Darder is immovable whenever he has been available. The Spaniard is the fifth most used outfield player so far behind the centrals Leandro Cabrera and Sergi Gómez, by Raúl de Tomás and Adrián Embarba, less than a meeting of the Uruguayan.

The midfielder, who last year with Moreno improved his performance and his position was delayed to “see football face to face”As he acknowledges, he is the footballer who can give the most presentations in 4-4-2 and 4-3-3, a system that the coach alternates. The player has become multidisciplinary. He can start the play, receive in front of the midfielder or even finish plays, as against Sevilla: his powerful shot was about to become 1-1. The footballer has thrown eight times on goal, four of them the last league game.

Darder, who once cost eight million euros from Olympique de Lyon despite being in the perico subsidiary four years earlier, has accumulated 171 official matches in five seasons at the perico club in which he has lived through everything: European qualification, relegation , promotion … He faces his maturity in a course in which he aspires to overcome the 200 official meetings with the perico club, a circumstance that only 40 players have achieved. At 27 years old, the man from Artà is on his way to becoming another of the entity's historic footballers.