Villarreal News: October 15th

Villarreal are not training today, but will resume tomorrow. The good news is the international players return (Hernan Pérez hasn't played for Paraguay in several matches, I suppose he could do so on Tuesday against Peru). Uche scored one of Nigeria's goals in their victory in African nations Cup qualifying. I don't believe they have another game for awhile.

Our opponents aren't in the next round of the Copa del Rey either, as they lost to Mirandés. We know that feeling. But they have four wins in four home matches. Great. And we have Bruno, Mellberg and Oriol all suspended for this one.

Here are a couple of reviews of the match on Saturday. The one in Spanish from AS praises Huesca and is absolutely correct that they played better than we did in the first half. In the second they sat back and played for the draw in the final quarter of the match, but clearly deserved their point. They also make the statement that we switched from a 4-1-4-1 to a 4-4-2 when Toribio entered; I guess I really didn't see that at the time, it seemed like only when Pandiani came on did we really have two up front, or maybe it was just that Bordas was not that effective. It is true that Trigueros was much more in the game in the second half.

The next one is from a fans' blog in Valencian (yay!). It was a "sad match" and even in the second half apart from Cavenaghi's header we hardly had any real chances. The author concludes, "in the end, a home draw that leaves a bad taste, with the feeling the team can offer more than they are offering and things need to improve in many areas if we are to realistically compete for the direct ascent".

And finally, a link to the highlights: Villarreal Huesca Goals And Highlights

Okay, so the plan is to leave this post on the front of the site and keep updating it this week. It will be the featured post, so keep updating it with your comments. (We will have a Segunda review coming later today or tomorrow, but we'll slot it in a smaller space)