One Foot Already In Second Division?

I was exchang­ing mes­sages with Elisa the other day as she thought that I was a tad hard on Ath­letic Bil­bao.  She thought that I was putting them in sec­ond divi­sion, which is far from the truth.THIS is how I sound when I tap a team to sec­ond division.After four weeks in the La Liga sea­son, it is safe to say… Sport­ing Gijón… Thank You For Par­tic­i­pat­ing.  After four weeks into the sea­son, they have proven to every­one why they are this season’s Mur­cia.  I usu­ally do not make these pre­dic­tions so early in the sea­son, but after see­ing Sport­ing play the past few days, the team looked very frag­ile and lacked a great deal of depth. Their return to first divi­sion after a decade long absence lasted about two matches. Two hard-fought losses against Getafe and Sevilla showed a fight­ing spirit that Coach Manuel Pre­ci­ado asked for. As a mat­ter of fact this is all that Pre­ci­ado can get from his team.If there is one sil­ver lin­ing in this dark cloud was that of Mate Bilic, who scored three of the six goals that the Roji­blan­cos have scored in their first four matches in first divi­sion. Their start is his­toric, (no that´s not a good thing) and it seems like their climb is now of Everest-like pro­por­tions. You would have to go back to the 1958–59 sea­son when Las Pal­mas received the same amount of goals in four matches. Las Pal­mas would even­tu­ally allow 65 goals in 30 matches that sea­son. Oh, by the way they were relegated.If there is one pos­i­tive out of all of this is that they have not reached the level of defen­sive inep­ti­tude that the 1941–42 Oviedo side and the 1951–52 Zaragoza allowed 21 scores after four matches. His­toric starts like these vir­tu­ally not just con­demn a team to the sec­ond divi­sion, they punch their ticket.Things do not look any bet­ter as they host a hot Vil­lar­real side this com­ing weekend.Their last two matches could have sealed their fate as they face Real Madrid with a revamped side that saw play­ers like Bilic come off the bench because of injury while defend­ers Jorge and Sas­tre were left back in Gijón. Over­all, the Gijón back­line looked weaker than Wall Street so far this sea­son. The prover­bial ele­va­tor to  sec­ond divi­sion could not go any slower in their case and if this past week´s 13-goal deba­cle was not enough I can give you other exam­ples. These two losses against Barcelona (1–6) and Real Madrid (7–1) were the sec­ond worst losses in the his­tory of the club both at home and on the road respec­tively. Sport­ing are on pace to being the worst defense in the his­tory of Span­ish first divi­sion. I can­not give you an answer as to whether they will come in 19th or 20th because the bot­tom two teams have oppo­site dilem­mas. Málaga can´t score and Sport­ing can´t stop any­one, and for that rea­son La Liga has become a 19-team race.

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