A Tale of Two

Just as Real Madrid seemed to be mak­ing a surge toward the top of the table, along comes Rac­ing San­tander to upset them 2–1 on Sat­ur­day. The defeat was Real’s first in nine matches and leaves them sit­ting five points behind league lead­ers Barcelona.

The match saw Rac­ing San­tander come from a goal down to win with two con­tro­ver­sial second-half penal­ties. The ref­eree in charge, Javier Turienzo, has appar­ently been receiv­ing threat­en­ing phone calls since the match on Sat­ur­day ended. Turienzo, in addi­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial penal­ties, also sent off two Real Madrid play­ers, Ivan Helguera and Alvaro Mejia, in the 87th and 90th min­utes respectively.

On the first call, the ref­eree had blown play dead for an unin­ten­tional hand­ball by Real Madrid defender Ser­gio Ramos. It appeared to me that he blew his whis­tle to allow Rac­ing to take the free-kick before get­ting him­self into a good posi­tion. I felt he was behind the play and not in a good posi­tion to make a penalty call on a tackle in the box by Diarra. The case for the sec­ond penalty was stronger and Turienzo was in a bet­ter posi­tion to make the call. Fabio Can­navaro appeared to drag down Nico­las Zigic in the area as a cross was com­ing in to him. Defender Eze­quiel Garay con­verted both penalty kicks to give San­tander the win.

In Saturday’s other match, Real Sociedad to inflicted a home defeat on Real Betis. Javier Gar­rido scored the only goal of the game on a well-taken free-kick in the 33rd minute. Despite the win, Sociedad remain threat­ened with rel­e­ga­tion as they only have 24 points and have played one more game than Celta Vigo (27 points) who are just above the bot­tom three in the table.