Sevilla seize their chance in derby to keep unlikely title hopes alive

“I was sitting on the bench thinking: ‘Bloody hell, I’m enjoying this,’” Munir El Haddadi said, and it would only get better. He had been inside the bus as it moved slowly through the smoke on the short trip to the Sánchez Pizjuán Stadium; now he was alongside the pitch, unable to sit still as his Sevilla teammates made their way through Real Betis quite a lot quicker. With the noise rising round them this was a moment to be part of and, sooner than expected, he was sprinting off in the sunshine, laughing as the substitutes he had just left behind ran towards him.

El Haddadi had been on the pitch for only 10 minutes, a first-half substitute replacing Papu Gómez after half an hour. Now the Moroccan had had put Sevilla 2-0 up and the place went wild. Better still, with Betis not scoring until Sergio Canales’s superb free-kick in the 94th minute, he had put them on course for a 2-1 victory they would celebrate as if it was something much, much more than a match. Not least because it was.

The Seville derby is always special, this time maybe even more so, plenty of reasons why their manager slipped to his knees at the final whistle, why the players threw their shirts into the crowd and set off on a lap of honour, why their sporting director was almost in tears. It had been so loud, intense and competitive, so much fun, the anthem sung at the start and the end, silence never falling, that Ivan Rakitic said: “Experiencing this, seeing the supporters, anyone who wasn’t a Sevilla fan became one.” Their league results under Julen Lopetegui – no defeats in six – might have suggested the same, but Betis would have a word or 32 to say about that, which is the way it should be.

Second against third, Sevilla and Betis hadn’t come into