‘It was cruel’: Espanyol crumble but leave six still in La Liga danger zone

W hen the end came, Espanyol’s captain pulled his shirt over his face and sobbed, a member of staff taking him gently by the arm and guiding him off the Mestalla pitch and out of the first division. “We didn’t deserve it to end like this,” Sergi Darder had said, which was just about all he had been able to say; three men needed to compose him and carry him towards the camera where, exposed, his voice cracked and his eyes stung. That and “sorry”, plus a promise to be back that he knew was as hard to hear as to express. Then he raised an apologetic hand and, head covered, departed.

“When we were closest, it was gone: it was cruel,” said his coach, Luis García. In the 93rd minute of the 37th week of the longest and tightest relegation battle anyone had ever seen, when someone’s grip finally failed, survival torn from their fingers, it was theirs. “We had fought so hard to have our final at our home with our people,” Darder said, but Espanyol will not be in the fight for survival next Sunday. Six other teams, separated by two points, will be: Valladolid, Celta Vigo, Almería, Valencia, Cádiz and Getafe, each with their fate in their hands and hearts in their mouths.

There were so nearly seven of them, more than a third of the whole division. If Espanyol have been the most likely to go for a long time, survival always just out of reach, this has been Spain’s Sarlacc pit, a place where no one, except Sevilla, was able to pull clear; where no one let go, either, except Elche, who disappeared weeks ago. Every time it seemed done, it wasn’t, every combination compressing it more, like it was scripted. Only who would script this, a story where in the last seven days alone, Valladolid beat Barcelona, Valencia beat Madrid, Getafe