The first to leave was a kitman carrying a bag of equipment and a haunted look. At the top of the stairs, Sevilla’s dressing room to the right, Atlético’s to the left, a familiar face from better times was waiting to give him a hug. There were a few quiet words but no comfort. One by one the rest followed: Sevilla’s players entered the tunnel alone, lost in dark thoughts, each more broken than the last. The coach moved faster than any of them, just wanting out. Directors appeared who could do nothing. The captain’s jaw clenched so hard teeth could have crumbled. There were internal monologues, external ones too, but mostly silence, tape unravelled and thrown to the floor.
“I have no words to explain what we feel,” Lucas Ocampos said, when at last he was able to say something. “It hurts, a lot.” The day before, Jorge Sampaoli, the Sevilla coach, had insisted his side needed to “escape the desperation”, but there was no way out. Instead, the desperation deepened. Sevilla had just been hammered 6-1 by Atlético Madrid. “This goes beyond the limits,” Marcos Acuña said. When Sampaoli appeared in the press conference, he was barely intelligible. “Negativity” had surrounded his team, he said. And now? Somewhere in the words that fell almost at random was an “impotence”, a “tremendously complicated”, and an admission: Osasuna had been a blow and this was even bigger.
