A Red Rag To A Bull
Valencia feeling the heat after Barça humbling
After another crushing defeat, Valencia midfielder Rubén Baraja's advice that fans should 'burn down' their stadium is looking like a red rag to a bull, writes Sid Lowe
[16.12.2007] Valencia is the home of the three-fingered handshake, a city with a pathological penchant for pyrotechnics. The setting for the world-famous Fallas festival where the streets shudder and bang, where dogs hide under the table howling as neighbourhoods compete to build the biggest bonfire and blow off the most digits, where a bunch of nutters lock themselves in a big cage and chuck rockets at each other. A city with a burning obsession for burning things, where babies are born with a petrol can under one arm and a box of matches under the other, where happy football fans celebrate with smoke bombs and firecrackers and unhappy ones leave the team bench ablaze.
Valencianos certainly don't need telling twice to set fuses fizzing. So when Valencia midfielder Rubén Baraja suggested that the only thing left for fans to do now following "continuous protests and the worst insults", after reaching a point at which they "couldn't be any angrier", was to "burn down Mestalla" he really was asking for trouble.
But if Baraja was waving a red rag to a bull, his team-mates were standing there in a purple posing-pouch with a target painted on the front, munching on a bloody steak, flicking the Vs and gloating: "Bring it on, Bully, you wuss! Think you're hard? Pah! You don't scare me with your horns and your swingers, you're rubbish." Because, while Baraja sat sadly in the Mestalla stands on Saturday night, out on the pitch his team-mates were turning in another truly diabolical display in front of their flame-loving fans - one so bad that even the club's cuddly bat was covering his eyes (which, being a bat, wasn't actually necessary). One so bad that it seemed only a matter of time before Mestalla's crumbling concrete went up in smoke. Rather like the club's title ambitions, in fact.
Valencia versus Barcelona. A big night at Mestalla, covered by one Spanish television channel and not quite covered by another, whose cameras couldn't get the whole of the pitch in, as the TV war rumbles on; and proceeded by the "singer" offering the most out-of-sync lip-syncing since Silas. The perfect night, said coach Ronald Koeman, for his side turn the corner. Trouble is, waiting round that corner was a bunch of tooled-up hoodies with videophones. As Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the game, Joaquín, the cheeky scamp who admitted to being breastfed until the age of eight, harangued his team-mates by shouting "Come on lads, let's do them. There's not many of them and they're malnourished"; as Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the second half, Santiago Cañizares harangued his team-mates by shouting "Come lads, for ****'s sake, let's avoid this becoming an embarrassment."
It was too late. Within fifteen minutes Valencia had been one down, within half an hour it was two, by half time they had not had a single shot on target. Fifteen minutes into the second half, Valencia were three down - and if it didn't end up as humiliating as the night that Madrid tonked them 5-1, that was only because Barça eased off. And because Leo Messi hobbled off with an injury that will keep him out of next weekend's Barça-Madrid 'derbi'.
True, Barça played rather well, the returning Samuel Eto'o scoring a wonderful first and finishing a 20-pass move for the second, while Eidur Gudjohnsen capped his best performance since joining Barça with the third. But Valencia were desperate. Bill Werbeniuk could out-sprint Carlos Marchena and Iván Helguera. In flip-flops. Fernando Morientes might as well have stayed at home, so little did he see the ball. And Ángel Arizmendi is about as likely to score on Saturday night as Joseph Merrick. There is no pace, no edge, no spirit, no fitness, no togetherness and no confidence whatsoever. "The dressing room was like a cemetery afterwards," sighed Joaquín. "Valencia," ran the cover of the city's edition of AS, "are a total write-off", while Super Deporte asked: "Can they sink any lower?".
The answer, many in Valencia fear, is yes. What made Saturday night worse was that it wasn't a major surprise - Valencia have been beaten five times at home this season, conceding 18 goals. And what made it even worse still was that things are getting worse just when they're supposed to be getting better. When portly president Juan Soler sacked Quique Sánchez Flores, he replaced him with Ronald Koeman, the man Spaniards call Tintin. He might as well have gone for Captain Haddock. Hell, even Captain Sensible would have been better.
Koeman has changed the training, changed the rules, changed the formation, changed players' positions, and changed results - for the worse. When Quique was sacked, Valencia were four points off the top and still alive in the Champions League. Today, they are 13 points off the top and not just out of the Champions League but out of the Uefa cup too, having turned in the second worst Spanish performance ever in the tournament.
The day Koeman arrived he ripped everything up and started again, embarking on a kind of pre-season - even though the real season was a quarter gone. He was supposed to bring an attractive, attacking style to Mestalla but Valencia have only scored in one of eight matches under him and have now gone longer without a goal than at any other time in their entire history. Worse still, with Koeman complaining about the squad and leaving the club's record signings out in the cold, the sporting director complaining about Koeman, the players complaining about everyone and everything, and the real architect of the chaos still squirming in his presidential chair, there's little sign of things getting better in a hurry.
No wonder Baraja thought Valencia's fans were ready to burn down Mestalla. But, as the rain teemed down, their response was even more telling. Far from throwing in a gallon of gasoline and a couple of matches, they threw in the towel.
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