When the end came, Espanyol’s captain pulled his shirt over his face and sobbed, a member of staff taking him gently by the arm and guiding him off the Mestalla pitch and out of the first division. “We didn’t deserve it to end like this,” Sergi Darder had said, which was just about all he had been able to say; three men needed to compose him and carry him towards the camera where, exposed, his voice cracked and his eyes stung. That and “sorry”, plus a promise to be back he knew was as hard to hear as to express. Then he raised an apologetic hand and, head covered, departed.
“When we were closest, it was gone: it was cruel,” said his coach, Luis García. In the 93rd minute of the 37th week of the longest and tightest relegation battle anyone had seen, when someone’s grip finally failed, survival torn from their fingers, it was theirs. “We had fought so hard to have our final at our home with our people,” Darder said, but Espanyol will not be in the fight for survival next Sunday. Six other teams, separated by two points, will: Valladolid, Celta Vigo, Almería, Valencia, Cádiz and Getafe, each with their fate in their hands and hearts in their mouths.
