Diego MartÃnez’s spell at Espanyol, just ten months after his sacking yesterday, is a story of great expectations, more or less convincing speeches and in the end a huge sporting disappointment, with the team sinking in a fight for salvation with eleven days remaining that almost no one sensed at the start of the season. Luis GarcÃa, confirmed yesterday as the new coach, will be in charge of leading a white-and-blue team with a worrying drift in results, defeated in the last four games. The final minutes as a parakeet for the Galician coach were in the Juan Segura Palomares Auditorium, where he articulated with “sadness” a meaningful, elegant and “without reproach” speech, with which he intoned the mea culpa, assuming his part of responsibility, but he recalled that previously the objectives had to be “resized” downwards.
“I can’t look at them because I get excited”, said the one from Vigo, referring to the presence in the first rows of the bulk of the squad, including the captains Darder, Sergi Gómez, Joselu and Cabrera, who sat next to him of the CEO, Mao Ye, and the sports director, Domingo Catoira. The management of the latter has also been in doubt all season. “I’m leaving a project that filled me from the beginning. I am sad to leave it without having traveled the path to the goal. I arrived with a backpack full of excitement and ambition. We couldn’t carry out the project we wanted and I’m sorry”, the 42-year-old coach, who at the beginning of his short career on the bench had always tasted success, began his monologue. Until his arrival in Cornellà , in which he admitted to having made “more mistakes than successes”, although he attributed part of the blame to the idiosyncrasy of the king’s sport. “In football there are times when things don’t work. I think the team could have four, five or six more points by doing the same. I remember specific moments throughout the year. But that sounds like something I don’t want. If I am here, it is to assume my responsibility naturally”. He also assured that he “never” hid in the face of adversity and acknowledged that he was “convinced until the end of being able to move forward” with the team’s delicate situation.
MartÃnez, who had one more year left on his contract, did not influence either the controversial planning of the squad or the previous decisions of the club because in his opinion “it was not relevant”, but he let it go that the goals of the team, closer to Europe than to permanence when he arrived, they did not conform to reality. “We said that we had to scale back the objectives of the project. I had to start from another point and more gradually given the circumstances. Even so, we are aware that Espanyol’s situation is not what it should be”, indicated a MartÃnez who removed his coaching staff and his players from the equation, whom he called “fantastic in the personal and professional ground” and fully capable of “achieving the goal” of salvation. “With the wind in our favor, these players would look better. It would have helped to bring out the best version (…). If the footballers have shown anything, it is that the star has been the team”, he remarked.
Despite not having expanded his CV of sporting merits, the Galician remains with the “work” of all the club’s departments and the “support” of a fan who “has never let go of his hand”, which is define as “an emotional victory that does not reflect any classification”. “Being part of Espanyol is a gift for which I can only say thank you. An honor (…). I arrived as a resident of Granada and I leave with the force of a pericous feeling that has made an impact at the bottom of my heart”, concluded the coach, excited.
