Sporting lives the most tense week of the season. The poor image of the team in the visit to Sanse led to a defeat that has left the team in seventeenth place, six points from relegation, setting off all the alarms. The club admits some concern about the dynamics in which the Gijón team lives, but it closes ranks around the team. There is confidence that the squad will put the brakes on Sunday, against Tenerife, on a run of results that can be summed up in fourteen of the last sixty points at stake. A sharp drop that does not admit debate regarding the objective: permanence.
Sporting repeats the words of Javier Fernández at the last shareholders’ meeting. There is a squad to be much higher in the classification and confidence that there is time to change the course shown in recent days. It has not been achieved with the arrival of José Luis Martí on the bench. At least for the moment. The Balearic, who counts his two games for defeats, landed as a necessary revulsive that has not managed to re-enlist the rojiblancos neither in the good game, nor in the results. The feeling is that the team is finding it difficult to capture the work done by the Spaniard during the week on match days.
The image of the locker room after the visit to the Sanse was that of the worried faces of a large part of the squad, with the exception of seeing a member of the expedition take a photo with the rival coach, Xabi Alonso. Sporting took a slap in the face of reality similar to the one experienced the previous day at home, against Zaragoza. He ended up losing both games in injury time, and both, against two teams that were second in the table, focused on avoiding the mess of relegation. A mess that the team from Gijón has fallen into, which has a particularly demanding schedule ahead of it.
Sporting’s first duel will be this Sunday, at 4:00 p.m., at El Molinón, against Tenerife. The canaries are going through one of their best moments since their return to the Second Division. They are fourth in the table, with 52 points, and their regular career has had the exception of seeing them go down at home last day. It was against another of the strong teams, Valladolid, who endorsed them 1-4 to establish themselves in third position in the category. If the scoring rhythm indicates that something less than 50 points will be needed for salvation, Sporting, which has 35 points, would be missing at least four victories in the remaining twelve rounds of the championship. A more than feasible figure, although the dynamics and the game offer reasonable doubts.
After this Sunday’s duel against Tenerife, Sporting will have to visit another of the theoretically strong teams, Leganés, although the pepineros are thirteenth and only have five points more than the Gijonese. They are two teams that José Luis Martí knows well, who was on the bench for both. The rojiblanco calendar will continue with another one that is flirting in the play-off, Cartagena, visiting El Molinón. The albinegros are seventh. The following will be two consecutive exits. First to Burgos, whose goal is to maintain the category, and then against a hopeless Alcorcón, bottom with fourteen points.
The first match of the month of April at El Molinón will already be the Asturian derby, a moment in which the rojiblancos will be measured with the double requirement of qualifying and that of the results of the last duels against Oviedo, with blue protagonism . The reaction is, in addition to a necessity, an urgency.
