Manuel Pellegrini’s team of misfits beat Sevilla in the league for the first time in seven years and celebrated in style
This weekend, 46,731 people came to see Betis and Sevilla but the derby wasn’t until the following night – so 33 hours later they came and did it all over again, even better. Saturday’s second-biggest attendance in Spain had watched the country’s most passionate rivals train. Sunday’s biggest crowd saw them play, a record 58,538 fans still inside and still singing late into a night they’ll never forget. The Benito Villamarín was bouncing, smoke rising round the home fans as they belted out the club’s anthem – here we are, squashed together like cannon balls – as the players started a lap of honour. Somewhere in all the madness and the noise, Antony, stripped to the waist and sitting on the goalkeeper Adrián’s shoulders, heaved a giant flag through the air. “This is incredible,” he said, and it was.
This was Antony’s first Seville derby and he’d not seen anything like it for years: never mind Ajax or Old Trafford, this took him back to Brazil. But it wasn’t just him, a debutant in a fixture that hits hard; nor had anyone else, the place going wild, something extra in the celebrations this time, Betis players still there half an hour after the end, parading round the pitch before bounding down corridors, singing and hammering at doors, cracking open the beers. You’d think they had won the Champions League. The one man there who has – five times – said that when it came to “feeling, vibrations, this is without doubt the most special game there is,” so Isco and his teammates celebrated something that, right there in the moment, felt even better: they had beaten rivals Sevilla 2-1.
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