Good sensations continue with win over Augsburg; Anguissa is official

Villarreal continued their good preseason form with a 6-2 victory over Bundesliga side Augsburg yesterday. The Germans’ Achilles heel was their defense last year, which gave up over two goals a game, and from the looks of this display not much has changed.

The Submarine were 3-0 up inside 25 minutes, with two goals from Dani Raba and one from Vicente Iborra, all set up by passes over the top of a static Augsburg defense. The German side pulled a goal back before the break, Mario allowing a break inside and Barbosa being beaten from a tight angle, but Villarreal added three tallies after the halftime interval—Alberto Moreno, Carlos Bacca and Fer Niño scoring, the latter a simple play to deflect the goalkeeper’s clearance, almost embarassingly, into the goal.

Speaking of embarassing, we may not have Alvaro Gonzalez to scythe down opposing forwards in meaningless friendlies, but we do have Roberto Funes Mori, who tried to tackle an Augsburg attacker in the area and ended up conceding a penalty, which was duly converted. Funes Mori can alternate good play with bad, and it was disappointing to see Bad FM on evidence here.

Our next friendly is against FC Köln, newly promoted to the Bundesliga after being relegated the year before (they are sort of Germany’s equivalent of Betis—a yo-yo side), then we follow that up with a match on Friday against Schalke.

Meanwhile, Zambo Anguissa’s transfer is official, and he has joined the team in Austria. With the arrival of Samu Chukwueze, who had time off after the Africa Cup of Nations, Villarreal have a squad of 30, 31 if you count Ontiveros, whose transfer from Malaga is expected. That number includes players like Raba and Santy Caseres who could go out on loan, as well as some B-teamers getting experience. (It includes Bruno Soriano, too, who isn’t going to be playing anytime soon as he recovers from his latest surgery).