From game on to game over? Sevilla rue what might have been in La Liga

Ivan Rakitic had the ball in his hands and Sevilla’s fate in them too, or at least that’s how it felt. On moments like this titles turn, so it goes. They had spent the last two months hanging in there, the team still standing even as players were falling, clinging on for a chance like this. But time was running out on the first day of the rest of their season, the opportunity they had waited for untaken and slipping away again. Until suddenly, almost out of nothing, it was given back. All they now had to do was score a last-minute penalty and they really would be in the race for La Liga.

Yeah, all. And no, they didn’t.

On Saturday night Rakitic’s injury-time spot kick was saved by the Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera to see out a 0-0 draw and 24 hours later Real Madrid defeated Granada 1-0, the finest of margins bringing the greatest of changes and, all over Spain, the most definitive of judgments: from a point behind and Game On to six points off and Game Over. Sevilla left Pamplona with a feeling of what might have been. “We’re sad,” coach Julen Lopetegui said. This, after all, had been the moment that might decide how far his side could go. Yet there are still 15 weeks left and that they had come this far said something, reason enough to believe it could still be.

Defeated just twice all season, Sevilla are unbeaten in nine since a 2-1 loss at the Bernabéu in November: a game they led, dominated for 70 minutes and lost in the 88th, one that had felt oddly inevitable somehow, a missed opportunity that was sort of predictable, another almost but not quite. But they had followed it by beating Villarreal, Athletic and Atlético in a row, a last-minute Lucas Ocampos goal finally seeing off Diego Simeone’s team, before