I went to La Rosaleda last Saturday night to see Malaga v Bilbao, it's a beautiful and quintessentially Spanish football ground. Bought the tickets online, 20 Euros each for me and my son, (less than to see Bradford v Accrington), then printed them off for barcode entry. There was a great atmosphere with 27000 turning up, pretty good considering Malaga were expected to lose with a new(ish) and young team and it was on TV as the opening La Liga game. I was sat right alongside 500 Bilbao fans who mostly got on my tits the whole game, they kept singing something about the Basque country, this made the Malaga fans retort with a perfect (in English) rendition of Sylvia's "Viva Espana".
There was no real segregation and no undercurrent of potential violence despite there being Bilbao shirts dotted all over the stadium.
It was the most bizarre game of footie I have ever seen in my life
and there has been manic media coverage in Spain ever since with the Basques particularly indignant. The first half was turgid only a penalty (deserved) for Malaga broke the 45 mins of boredom. I was surprised when the ref blew at 45.00 bang on. Second half was even worse, I spent most of it trying to work out if the animated benched Malaga reserve goalie was the superb Guillermo Ochoa (Mexico) from the WC, it was............I also noted that Santa Cruz was as handsome as ever..........with about 3 mins to go, Iker Muniain (Bilbao) was fouled, Duda (Malaga) who had done absolutley nothing in his entire time of the pitch, promptly went mental.
This woke the crowd up and they started to get nervous as Bilbao laid siege to the Malaga goal, at 90 mins the they went crackers as 6 mins of injury time was displayed, where the ref got 6 mins from, I have no idea. 2 mins into injury time the ref sent off another Malaga player, Vitorino Antunes, for a fairly innoculous "normal" foul, that was it! Down to 9 men the stadium erupted with the ref being the entire focus of it's rage and he just wanted the game over so he could get off the pitch pronto, he wasn't lucky, Bilbao got a last minute corner and thew their goalkeeper into the Malaga box. My lad said the keeper will score, he was right, what a header, it was probably the last thing the ref wanted to happen and he did not deal with it well, cue incredible scenes all over the stadium.