The ball was in play for just four seconds during the last 11 minutes of another Madrid derby but that was enough, every emotion packed into eight touches and 100 freeze-frames on a cold Friday night across the motorways to the south of the city. The difference between triumph and disaster was a fine line painted white and a goalkeeper in green. Leganés were suddenly, unexpectedly lifted up and handed a lifeline, only to be knocked down, lifted up, knocked down, lifted up and knocked down again. Rayo Vallecano, meanwhile, were taken on the same journey in the other direction, eventually left standing, celebrating something they couldn’t imagine before and wouldn’t imagine now.
“Very mad,” the Rayo striker Sergio Camello called it. All of it: the fact they, the club who have only played European football once and thanks to fair play, had just won 1-0 and were sixth and the way they got there, how close they had been to having it taken away again, everything unfolding so fast feelings couldn’t catch up. “I can still feel the fright,” the manager Iñigo Pérez said. “You play football for years, watch it, even start coaching, and think you’ve seen it all. But this is something that’s never happened to me.” What had happened shouldn’t have, he said, an epic end his team could have avoided, but it was better this way, Augusto Batalla performing a miraculous rescue by saving a last-second penalty.
