Will Levante’s be Cinderella story?
Blackpool did it last year. Hull City two years before that. And Newcastle are doing it this year. But that’s in a very competitive Premier League where QPR beats Chelsea one weekend and yet there is a bigger story that week (1-6 case in point). La Liga a.k.a the annual two horse race rarely gets a team that has spent longer than Mr Bean in mediocrity suddenly topping the countries Premier Division but Levante has done just that with a series of stand out performances.
Managed by Juan Ignacio Martínez, the Frogs come from the city Valencia where they have always been in the shadows of Valencia CF. The team was formed earlier than Valencia and have won just the one “Copa de la España Libre” or Free Spain Cup which was played during the Spanish Civil War of 1937 where they defeated their derby rivals Valencia in the finals.
74 years later a new season has just begun and Levante is bigger news than Real Madrid and Barcelona for the first time since the summer of ‘37. In the last 5 years, no team other than Sevilla has managed to break the duopoly. And to do so with a modest budget just goes to show what feat Levante has achieved.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s transfer fee could pay the salaries of the entire Levante team for a few years to come. Yet, it was this very team that defeated Ronaldo and his Galacticos en route a 7-game winning streak at the start of La Liga. They have played a counter-attacking 4-2-3-1 this year and are a mix of journeyman veterans and players out on loan from bigger clubs. Sergio Ballesteros and Arouna Kone are prime examples of that mix and players like Juanlu are now reaping the benefits and scoring at will.
Last year’s 14th place Levante UD are a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stereotypical league where the divide in the Top 2 and the rest of the league is larger than Pamela Anderson’s unmentionables. But whether they, like most men having seen aforementioned unmentionables, have prematurely arrived or are enroute writing a Cinderella story, time will tell.
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