After a week when equality in sport took a step nearer – as a female Chelsea footballer threw up in a taxi, broke a window and racially abused a police officer! – Real Mallorca have had a disastrous return to competition in 2025, 450 minutes (if we include the Cup and Super Cup) without scoring and without being able to keep a clean sheet. All that means the team have slipped down the La Liga table and now lie joint ninth with Osasuna (our next opponents on Monday night (on 30 points). We’ve gone from being one of the revelation sides in La Liga to the worst in the New Year. This situation is nothing new for Basque coach Jagoba Arrasate who experienced a similar scenario with Osasuna last year when they suffered four consecutive defeats between match days 31 and 34.
The start of the season saw Mallorca score 10 goals picking up 17 points from 10 games. Fortunately our 30 points tally in the league so far is a cushion which just keeps us in the top half of the division. Real Sociedad, Getafe and Valladolid are the only teams that have scored fewer goals than us. There were what looked like a few green shoots of recovery in the second half against Atletico last Saturday but they only lasted a few short minutes. It’s now clear that up front our striking partnership of Muriqi and Larin is not working, they don’t seem able to play together. Too often they get the ball in midfield with their backs to the goal, leaving the team with a distinct lack of creativity in attack. Muriqi and Larin (plus Sergi Darder) are the biggest investments the club’s made in its history and at the moment their input is not what we expected. Muriqi especially seems to have lost that element of surprise in the penalty area but he is still an integral part of the team and has to start every game. Perhaps it’s time to bring on fans’ favourite Abdon Prats from the start as his “get stuck in” approach is something we’ve been missing.
We now have two crucial back-to-back home games against Osasuna on Monday night at 9pm and Las Palmas on Sunday the 16th at 6.30pm. Two wins would give us some more “wiggle room” and six points would be a real shot in the arm as we aim to reach the so-called safety number of 40 points. Let’s turn the Son Moix into a fortress again – a coliseum of confrontation!
Monday night’s visitors Osasuna have a lot of similarities with Mallorca. Their strips are almost identical colours and their fan base is around 20,000. Our coach Arrasate was in charge of them for six years and he was idolised by the “El Sadar” faithful. Taking Arrasate’s place was Vicente Moreno who, although he left Mallorca under a cloud in 2020 (after a leaked report in April said he was leaving these shores at the end of the season, after signing a new contract, to coach Espanyol), he did however achieve two consecutive promotions in two years, culminating in a never to be forgotten play off game against Deportivo in the Son Moix on June 23, 2019.
Another player involved in that epic was Croatian striker Ante Budimir. He forced a move to Osasuna in 2021 after going on strike, something that didn’t go down well with Mallorca fans. There’s no doubt Budimir is a goalscorer, he netted 13 goals with us and has presently scored 12 goals in Pamplona.
It’s always rewarding to see local guys getting into the Mallorca first team squad. Last Saturday youngster Jan Salas came on near the end against Atletico in front of a 60,000 plus crowd and was given a real baptism of fire introduction to top flight Spanish football. A horrendous studs-up, potential leg-breaker tackle from Conor Gallagher (which unbelievably went unpunished with a mere yellow card, for which the referee and VAR operator were later put on ice for several games) nearly saw the 20-year-old Binissalemer in hospital. Unperturbed, a few hours later he was a starter for our B team in Valencia. One for the future, Salas turned down a lucrative offer from Saudi Arabia recently to stay on the island.
David Lopez.
Another youngster who’s now a part of the squad is 21-year-old David Lopez from Alaro who’s already had two loan moves to Elche and Burgos. That brings the total of Balearic islanders at Real Mallorca to seven, Salas, Lopez, Leo Roman (Ibiza), Mateu Jaume (Petra), Sergi Darder/Abdon Prats (Arta) and Llabres (Binissalem).
What a hullabaloo there’s quite rightly been about shocking refereeing last weekend in Spain. In the Premier League every weekend there’s a refereeing controversy but if you think referees are bad in England, they’re far worse in Spain where there were two serious incidents, one involving the aforementioned Jan Salas and the other, Espanyol’s Carlos Romero assault on Kylian Mbappe, both of which should have seen the red card. Both sets of officials on the pitch and in the VAR room have been reprimanded by the technical committee of referees. In what were two erroneous decisions the “arbitros” will not now be in charge of games for several weeks. Real Madrid went ballistic about the leniency shown by the officials at Espanyol. Both challenges warranted sendings off with Madrid asking for the officials to be sacked. The referees are not happy with the criticism and are threatening strike action!
AND FINALLY, a friend of mine went to the movies on Tuesday. He was surprised to find a woman with a big Alsatian sitting in front of him. Even more amazing, the dog always laughed in the right places during the comedy. Afterwards he said to the woman “I think it’s fantastic that your dog enjoyed the movie so much.” The woman replied “I’m surprised, too, he hated the book.”
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