First Villarreal friendly still looking for a home

Some difficulties with the friendly being played against West Bromwich Albion next Saturday. The plan was to pay it at a stadium that it turns out is being used for a music festival. With that not on, normally we would simply have used the practice field at our training area, probably—it’s our first friendly and often that’s how we do it—but....

West Brom has a big fanbase, they have lots of people wanting to travel to the Costa Brava and see their team. So standing round a practice field is not going to work either. So Villarreal is working with the Benidorm local council to find a solution. Hopefully one emerges soon.

There are other grounds in the area, certainly—La Nucia is a Tercera team, for instance, but it’s slightly inland and harder to get to. My personal suggestion would be to move the thing to Alicante if it could be done at the Herculés ground; since their coach is an ex-VIllarreal B coach, maybe we would have some pull? And since there are flights directly to Alicante from the UK, that would be ideal for the Baggies fans. But that’s a lot to do at short notice and probably isn’t practical.

Once we know where it will be, we’ll let everyone know. I sincerely doubt there will be any TV or video streaming.