No, that is not a typo. Five goals. And a clean sheet. If you didn’t get to watch the match, you might need to hold onto something until you recover from the shock so you do not fall out of your chair.

Now, I won’t say this was a dominant win. Tenerife frequently looked stronger, and held way too much possession. Villarreal were often pinned into their own half. But in the end, it is hard to criticize anything from this match for too long.

From the first minute of the match, Villarreal were threatening, and it was only a matter of time until Joseba Llorente broke through with a top-notch move following a brilliant 30-yard pass from Marcano. Unfortunately, Villarreal could not keep up pressure after that time, and reverted to a bit of a counterattacking mindset. Tenerife actually had 60 percent of the possession in the first half and created a number of very good chances. Villarreal were quite lucky that islanders do not have the best strikers.

It was at the beginning of the second half that Villarreal finally came out of its shell, shocking Tenerife with a three-goal barrage in the first 7 1/2 minutes. Robert Pires continued his goalscoring form in the 47th minute. Things started to really feel comfortable when long-struggling Giuseppe Rossi beat the keeper to score a third for the Yellows in the 51st. Hardly a minute later, Llorente took a long, bouncing pass, touched it over the keeper, and headed it home into an open net.

From there, Villarreal fell into a celebration mode. Jony Pereira came on for Llorente, David Fuster for Rossi, and Escudero for Pires over the next 25 minutes.

As the match wound down, a sharp pass into the box for Capdevila combined a couple of quick lateral moves from the leftback allowed him to cross the ball across a gaping net for Cani to drill it home from his favorite spot on the pitch (think back to his goal in the Barcelona match last year).

The rout was complete. A fantastic 5-nil victory for a struggling team – what more could you ask for? But the best part of the match was still to come: watching the players smile as they left the field to a cheering crowd.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 14:07 and is filed under Giuseppe Rossi, Joseba Llorente, Results, Robert Pirès, Rubén Cani. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.