When Carlos Castro hit the easiest chance of his life against the crossbar, it looked like Sporting Gijón’s season was over … but then came an unlikely redemption

“I did it to make things more exciting, more emotional,” Carlos Castro said, and he had too. From suicide in Mieres to resurrection in the Molinón in 160 seconds, unable to believe what had happened the first time and unable to believe what had happened the second time either. No one expected redemption and certainly not this quickly. One moment the Sporting Gijón forward stood alone and lost, the next he lay buried under a pile of bodies while 24,861 supporters erupted in celebration around him. On the touchline his manager thumped furiously at his heart with his fist. Abelardo Fernández was celebrating, but he could just as well have been trying to get the bloody thing going again. It had been that kind of day.

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That kind of season, in fact. And it was as if it all came together on Saturday afternoon, concentrated in both a few minutes and one man. Down in the relegation zone at the weekend’s start, level with bottom-placed Levante, three points from safety, without a win in eight, beaten four times running, Sporting Gijón had managed to get a 79th-minute equaliser against Atlético Madrid. Seven minutes later, it happened. Arnaldo Sanabria chased a ball up the left, reaching it just before it went out of play. As he got there, Atlético’s Uruguayan central defender José María Giménez pulled up alongside him, grabbing the hamstring that he had torn on route, and so, suddenly, Sanabria was clear. This was it.

Sanabria raced into the area and as Jan Oblak came towards him he played a pass across to Castro. Six yards out, no one in the way, just him and the net and all those cheering supporters, all he had to do was nudge the ball. Which he did … up and back off the bar.

“I wanted to die,” Castro said afterwards, and no wonder. It was the worst miss of the season; not just because of how incredibly bad it was – and he admitted that although the ball bounced up a bit, it was “easy” to score – but because of what it meant. And what it meant was everything: for Sporting, in crisis off the pitch, prevented from making signings because of their debts, in desperate need of the money that primera generates, survival really might mean survival.

“If we hadn’t got promoted last season we could be playing at Las Callejas [home of CD Lealtad in the regional Second Division B], rather than the Bernabéu,” Abelardo had said. When he went on a long rant a fortnight ago, talking about the club’s 111-year history and the “Guajes” [Asturian for kids] destroyed and crying in the dressing room, he insisted: “We’re playing for our lives, for our existence.” Rescuing the team means rescuing the club, so the chance was huge; it was also the kind of chance you might get once if you were lucky but you don’t get again. Atlético, after all, have the league’s best away record, had lost from a winning position only once and had conceded more then one on just two occasions in the league – each time against Barcelona, the club that was alone responsible for a third of the goals Atlético had conceded all year.

Yep, Castro had wasted the kind of chance that doesn’t come back, alright. Not against this lot; not when you’re down at the bottom; not when there are only four minutes left. But then, amazingly, it did. Another attack, Jony Rodríguez providing the pass this time, and there he was in exactly the same place: right-of-centre, six yards out, an open goal. The clock had shown 85.56 when the ball hit the bar; when it hit the net, the clock showed 88.36. Castro and his team were resurrected. Up in the stands, they went wild; under the bodies Castro looked blank, eyes a little glazed, as if he was still in shock. Over on the touchline, Abelardo looked like he was going to cry.

“When he missed the first one I thought to myself: ‘Poor thing, if we don’t get the second …’,” Abelardo said afterwards. “If we hadn’t won, he might have gone back to Ujo [his birthplace in Mieres] and turned to suicide.”

Castro had much the same idea. “If I hadn’t scored the second, I would have turned to suicide” he said. By then, he could afford to say that; he could afford to laugh, too. As could Pichu Cuéllar, the Sporting goalkeeper: “We knew that Castro would sort it out; he’s not the kind of person to do things by halves,” he said. He is the kind of person, though, to tweet: “Relax, Sportinguistas, I did it to make things more exciting, more emotional.”

Relax? Hardly. But this was a huge moment and a huge win. It was also a deserved one. “We’ve won for once so I am going to say it is not about their flaws but our merit. We hit the post twice against a team that has only conceded 12 all season and one of the best teams in Europe didn’t get past the halfway line,” Abelardo insisted. He would say that, of course, but others said similar things, even if there was no escaping the part played by Atlético’s fatigue after 120 Champions League minutes on Tuesday night. “There are no excuses; Sporting dominated us,” Saúl admitted. “Sporting played well,” Simeone added. “We couldn’t escape the pressure they put on us.”

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Atlético had opened the scoring with a superb Antoine Griezmann free-kick on the half-hour, at a time when literally nothing had happened, and when that happens against Atlético it tends to be the end of it. But the home side responded. Abelardo particularly. On went Castro, on went Carlos Carmona and into a deeper midfield position went Nacho Cases, who had started for the first time in 10 games.

Or, as Patricia Cazón put it in AS, beating the metaphor into submission: “Abelardo had spent the whole week locked in his lab, wearing an alchemist’s coat, looking for the formula to give his team oxygen. He knew what the principles were: high pressure would be mercury, quick transitions would be sulphur, and the left wing, Jony and Isma, would be salt. In the first 25 minutes, the mix worked until an unexpected element appeared: Griezmann … he thought about what he had on the bench to change the formula … He put in Castro, he put in Carmona and voila, the formula worked at last. The game went from lead to gold.”

Sporting were the better side in the second half but mostly their metal base turned to gold in the final frantic 15 minutes when everything seemed to come in twos: when players turned to the fans and gestured for them to shout and fans shouted back, when the volume rose until it exploded. One free-kick hit the post; two minutes later another from a very similar position flew into the net to make it 1-1, scored by Sanabria. Then that chance for Castro hit the bar and two minutes after that, another one from exactly the same position went in, the relief releasing them all, a huge victory proving the start of an almost perfect weekend.

Las Palmas’s superb form continued as they won again to climb to a league position that suggests they will survive, perhaps even comfortably, but results mean that Sporting have gained two points on Getafe, Rayo and Granada, and gone three past Levante. With eight games to go, Levante are bottom, four points from salvation. Above them, there are four teams within a point of each other – Sporting (27), Getafe (28), Granada (28) and Rayo (28) – with a gap to Las Palmas (33), Valencia (34) and Betis (34). Sporting are not safe, but nor are they sunk. And before this weekend, without a win in eight, having endured four defeats in a row, they felt like they were.

Sporting have always known that survival would be hard, that even being here is overachieving, but recently the talk has been of a team who were just not good enough and that pessimism had permeated the players. Some had even come to feel uneasy at the way the discourse from their manager, which had been born of what he saw as injustice and an attempt to apply pressure and make a “Bombonera” of the Molinón, served almost to dismiss them. There were hints of fault lines opening and signs that belief might ebb away; already was, in fact. On Saturday, it returned. But not before that miss seemed to have taken it from them for good.

“Their heart beats strongly!” ran the headline in La Nueva España, its match report opening thus: “The great news is that Sporting are very much alive.” The points mattered; so, too, did the way in which they won them, the performance and the impact that this result could have, the seemingly inevitable slide into segunda stopped, or at least slowed. “The morale boost is vital,” Jony said. “I don’t know what other jobs are like but when you win, football player is the loveliest job around,” Isma López smiled. “We needed a result like this,” Cuéllar admitted. Asked if fortune had smiled on them, he replied: “No, hard work has.”

The supporters responded too, the noise deafening. “We had to get the fans on our side,” Abelardo insisted. “And the Molinón rocked like never before.” Even the 1,000 or so Atlético fans joined in, singing: “Sporting belong in primera!”

“Yes, we can!” chanted the Sporting fans.

They believe they can, too. “We’re still in the relegation zone but we’re closer to our target now; we’re in the fight,” Abelardo said. It won’t be easy and the next game, at Levante, is huge, while they also have to go away to Las Palmas and Getafe. But nor is it impossible any more. Not when they have done this, not when Simeone says: “they’re on the right path”, not when they can pass up a never‑to‑be‑repeated opportunity one minute only for it to be repeated two and a half minutes later. “We won’t know who survives and who doesn’t until the very end,” Sanabria said and he was right. But one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be emotional.

Talking points

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gary Neville was booed by Valencia fans as his side were beaten 2-0 by Celta Vigo. Photograph: Maria Jose Segovia/Cordon Press/Corbis

• “Neville, go now!” sang Valencia fans after his team were defeated 2-0 by Celta thanks to two absolutely superb goals. And he probably will, too. Just not yet. [More to come on this later …]

• Speaking of tasty goals, Giuseppe Rossi’s for Levante was lovely. His team were unable to get a win, or even a point. An 85th-minute own goal from goalkeeper Mariño, the ball rebounding in off his back, gave Deportivo a 2-1 victory – their first win this year.

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• “It’s easier to score for Athletic [like Aritz Aduriz] than it is for Eibar [like Borja Bastón], but we’re a small, little team and people don’t talk about us,” José Luis Mendilíbar said after Bastón joined Aduriz as the league’s top-scoring Spaniard with a classy backheel in the rain at Getafe on Friday night.

• “If we play like this we can do great things,” Zinedine Zidane said. The Champions League, in other words. Real Madrid were certainly impressive at times as they defeated Sevilla 4-0, with Karim Benzema returning to make sense of those around him. Madrid will be concerned by how many chances they are allowing – Keylor Navas was superb in goal for them again – but there were reasons for them to be cheerful. “Madrid win credibility,” said AS. There was a goal each for the BBC, including the strike that made Gareth Bale the all-time top-scoring Briton in La Liga. Not that he knew, until a friend texted to tell him.

Bale scored the third of the night to take him beyond Gary Lineker’s record of 42 goals for Barcelona between 1986 and 1989. The Welshman has 15 league goals in 18 games this season and 43 in total since his world-record transfer to Real Madrid in the summer of 2013. He has racked up the goals even quicker than Lineker, having taken 76 games to reach 43, compared to the former England striker’s 42 in 103, but there was no special celebration.

“I only just found out: my friend texted me,” Bale said afterwards. “It’s obviously nice to break records but as long as the team are winning and improving, that is the main thing.”

“Well played, Gareth Bale, really pleased for you,” Lineker tweeted. Bale had already overtaken the 33 league goals scored by John Aldridge in two years at Real Sociedad earlier in the season. He has also surpassed Steve Archibald, who scored 24 in 55 for Barcelona; Laurie Cunningham (16 in 74 for Real Madrid); and Alan Campbell who scored 15 in 63 games for Racing Santander. Michael Owen scored 13 in his solitary season at Madrid, while David Beckham got the same figure in 116 games.

• Barcelona were 2-0 up when Villarreal’s secret weapon entered the fray: Jérémy Mathieu. It finished 2-2 at the Madrigal in a game that was as enjoyable as they usually are between these two teams. Albeit one that was also marked by some bizarre referring from a man who seemed to be on a bet to see how many decisions he could get wrong. (Presumably with the referee who then took charge at the Bernabéu a few hours later.) People aren’t really talking about Villarreal much, but they should be. Fourth place is almost certainly theirs now and in the Europa League, where Dortmund v Liverpool and Sevilla v Athletic are getting all the attention, they are genuine contenders. “We deserved to win clearly,” Marcelino said afterwards. “What these players have done deserves a lot of credit.” As for Barcelona, El Mundo Deportivo’s cover declared them “more leaders”, which they sort of are, despite dropping two points on Madrid, because they gained one on Atlético and they’re one game closer to the end. “A point more, a match less,” Luis Enrique says.

Results: Getafe 1-1 Eibar, Sporting 2-1 Atlético, Real Sociedad 0-1 Las Palmas, Granada 2-2 Rayo, Deportivo 2-1 Levante, Betis 0-1 Málaga, Espanyol 2-1 Athletic, Villarreal 2-2 Barcelona, Valencia 0-2 Celta, Real Madrid 4-0 Sevilla.