Silence and cheers: Mallorca back from brink after ‘inexplicable magic’

“There are times when you doubt your heart can hold up; you get the feeling they’re trying to scare you to death,” Javier Aguirre said, and he didn’t even know the half of it. It was wild enough just where he was: “inexplicable,” “liberation,” “magic,” in the words of the man who had made it happen. The bench emptied on to the pitch, fans tumbled down the stands, arms were everywhere. Over 91 minutes had gone in the penultimate game of the season when the ball dropped to Abdón Prats and he scored the goal that pulled Real Mallorca from the relegation zone, their destiny back in their own hands at the last.

“That’s the good news,” Aguirre said; it was the only news the Mallorca manager had wanted to hear all day, at least until it was over. On a weekend when nine games were played at the same time, fates decided on faraway fields, a series of interconnected stories unfolding together and each more powerful because of the others, in which his team were one of a handful who could still go down, he decided that he didn’t want his players to know what was going on elsewhere. He didn’t want to know himself, either. “It’s a bloody mess,” he claimed. “You can’t manage your own issues, let alone everything else that’s happening.”

Everything else that’s happening was, he would later find out, a lot – although not quite like what went down at Son Moix, survival suddenly possible at the point when hope seemed to have slipped the net. At the end of Mallorca’s 2-1 injury-time win over Rayo Vallecano, Aguirre dashed straight down the tunnel. He had been busting for a pee, he admitted – “I am 63” – and by the time he did his first post-game interview, he still didn’t know all the other scores, asking the reporter: “Are Granada still in