A sweet and sour end to the season

Barça

As men­tioned above, it is Barça’s women that take all the plau­dits com­ing into the end of the 2020-21 sea­son, hav­ing sealed a glo­ri­ous League, Cup and Cham­pi­ons League tre­ble, brush­ing aside the likes of PSG (3-2 agg.) and Chelsea (4-0) in the Eu­ro­pean com­pe­ti­tion, and see­ing off Real Madrid (4-0) and Lev­ante (4-2) to win the do­mes­tic cup. This col­umn nor­mally fo­cuses on the men’s game, but we couldn’t start with­out a men­tion of that his­toric feat by the team coached by Lluís Cortés.

As for Ronald Koe­man’s side, their run of pick­ing up 60 from 72 league points from mid-De­cem­ber to early April, in­clud­ing nine away wins on the spin, put them in prime po­si­tion to snatch the crown from Diego Simeon’s pace-set­ting Atlético, only to lose their way just when they had the chance to claim top spot. Twice Barça had the op­por­tu­nity to climb to the sum­mit in the final weeks of the sea­son, but both times they fell away meekly: first there was the dev­as­tat­ing and in­ex­plic­a­ble 2-1 home de­feat to Granada on April 29, and then they threw away away a 3-1 lead at Lev­ante to draw 3-3 on May 11. Sand­wiched in be­tween was a lack­lus­tre 0-0 draw at home to lead­ers Atlético, be­fore a 2-1 de­feat at home to lowly Celta left the title dreams in tat­ters, just five points being taken from fif­teen be­fore win­ning the last mean­ing­less game of the sea­son 1-0 at Eibar. It could all have been so dif­fer­ent, but it now looks as if, de­spite Cup glory, and in epic cir­cum­stances at that (a 4-0 trounc­ing of Ath­letic in the final fol­low­ing on from dra­matic come­backs against Granada and Sevilla), Koe­man’s time in charge of Barça may have come to a swift end.

Es­panyol

Barcelona’s other big club, Es­panyol, en­joyed a suc­cess­ful end to a win­ning sea­son by seal­ing the Sec­ond Di­vi­sion title on the final day. They had al­ready guar­an­teed au­to­matic pro­mo­tion back to the top flight at the first time of ask­ing some weeks ear­lier, but the head to head bat­tle with Mal­lorca to ac­tu­ally top the di­vi­sion was only con­firmed on May 30 when, de­spite Vi­cente Moreno’s side los­ing at Al­corcón, the news fil­tered through that Mal­lorca had let a 2-1 lead slip against 10-man Pon­fer­rad­ina and there­fore only man­aged a draw, leav­ing the Balearic is­landers level on points with Es­panyol but be­hind on the head to head (0-0 at the RCDE Sta­dium and 2-1 to Es­panyol at Son Moix). Wel­come back to the big time Periq­ui­tos!

Girona

Per­haps the biggest sur­prise in a sea­son full of them was Girona’s blitzkrieg end to the sea­son. Seven straight wins from mid-April to late May blasted Fran­cisco’s side, un­ex­pect­edly to most, firmly into the play-off places, mean­ing they did not even need to win their final game of the sea­son at Carta­gena. The 1-1 draw in that game meant they fin­ished 5th on 71 points and will face Alme­ria in the play-off semi-fi­nals on June 2 at Mon­tilivi and June 6 in An­dalu­sia. The play-offs have not been kind to Girona over the years, and fans will be hop­ing their side can over­come a run that has seen them lose out to Elche last sea­son, Os­asuna in 2016, Zaragoza in 2015 and the same team they face this time, Alme­ria, in 2013.