Villarreal's 4-1 victory over Valencia is summarized in a number of publications--Lizarraga in EPM focused on the differences between the teams. For him, Villarreal was light, quick and well-organized; Valencia was too slow, some of their players overweight, and lacked any sense of direction or tactics. Villarreal is a team (and their coaches are a team), Valencia a collection of players, and their coaches aren't unified either.
As always, grabbing a couple of early goals at home puts pressure on the away side and often demoralizes them, so perhaps Valencia are not as poor as they showed yesterday. Coach Djukic had better hope not.
Sidarth will post a recap with his thoughts on the match here later today; we were a bit shorthanded covering this one.
As you probably know, two of our Villarreal USA group, Ravi and Sarah, were over in Vila-real to see the match; they should be at the Getafe one as well, so we hope their presence will lead to another victory. Our photo is the two of them with Ernesto (Celtic Submari penya president) and Robin Harris (orient1)--they were treated to paella, which may or may not have been vegetarian (we'll have to find out if Ravi actually ate any of it!!).
Marcos Senna news: Arch Bell interviewed him for Marca. He is having excellent success with the NY Cosmos, and says things are going pretty much as he expected, though he has been surprised at how big soccer is in America. He continues to follow Villarreal, says the 'door is open' for him to return in some capacity, but he's not interested in coaching.
When asked what he misses about Villarreal, he says pretty much everything (the family nature of the club, the weather, the fans....)
Some very sad news now--stuff like this doesn't happen often in Vila-real, so it's a real shock. A 52-year old man, who worked at Porcelanosa (another Vila-real ceramics firm, not the one owned by Sr. Roig) killed his wife and young son, then jumped from the balcony of his apartment and killed himself. The 10-year old boy, Jorge, was a member of one of Villarreal's youth teams. There will be a moment of silence before our match against Getafe on Thursday to honor him.
As last week, this post is going to sit on the left side of the main page to collect comments about whatever you want to comment about.