The new manager of Unión Deportiva de Las Palmas is on holiday and won’t be back until the new year. He wasn’t on the bench at the Estadio Gran Canaria on Sunday and won’t be on the bench at the Coliseum on Wednesday either, while the man who will be there in Getafe knows he’ll be gone by the end of the game: he won’t make it to Christmas – which wouldn’t be that unusual except he only started work at the end of November – and the man replacing him won’t make it until after Christmas. He’s been 9,000km away and wants to spend it with his family first. Then, when it’s over, he’ll begin. And when he begins, they’ll begin all over again. Unless something else happens, and it might be an idea not to rule that out. After all, they’ve got form. Poor form, mostly.

Confused? Not half as confused as they must be.

On Sunday night Las Palmas’s fans turned to the presidential box and chanted for the president to “go now!” but he, like the new manager, wasn’t there. This week, though, he will announce that Paco Jémez is the new coach. Quique Setién walked in June having long felt himself pushed, the relationship with the board broken, tools all but downed, his team slipping from top in week two, third in week four and the edge of Europe at halfway to a final 10-game run that read: won none, drawn one, lost nine. Since then, they’ve dropped to the bottom and will have had four more managers in under five months – and that’s just the ones they’ve actually had. Now maybe they’ll finally get one they really wanted, even if it is on the rebound and a little late.

First there was Manolo Márquez. Next came Pako, then Paquito and now Paco, which pretty much suggests they’re working their way through their address book, but that would at least be a method of sorts.

Cristiano Ronaldo free-kick fires Real Madrid to Club World Cup glory Read more

Las Palmas had an agreement with Roberto de Zerbi to take over in the summer. They couldn’t officially announce him because he was involved in a legal dispute with Palermo, but they said it didn’t matter: they had an unnamed manager who was already signed up and was preparing for the season; his identity would be revealed when a judgement was made at the end of June. The problem was that De Zerbi lost and appealed, the case far from closed, and Las Palmas gave up waiting and promoted Márquez from the B team, who he had taken from the third division to Second Division B. In the meantime, Roque Mesa left for Swansea. Kevin-Prince Boateng returned to Germany but Jonathan Viera wasn’t allowed to follow them out , and Vitolo came on a six-month loan.

It was Las Palmas’s determination to make the Vitolo deal happen, even more than Atlético’s, that forced it through when he had announced he was staying at Sevilla. Six months on, he left Las Palmas without anyone really noticing, the player who had declared that he was going home getting injured and hurriedly heading off to Atlético and a happier place. Perhaps it had been inevitable, right from the start. Perhaps there was something in his signing, a presidential promise, that signalled the path.

“It’s all been a bit hasty,” Márquez admitted when he took over. He had publicly said he would be staying with the B team and the club had no intention of promoting him, but here he was, on the eve of pre-season training, with players identified without him, with others having left, faced by injuries, with planning precipitate and interference unavoidable. Six weeks into the season, his team had won two and lost four and he walked. That, at least, was the way they wanted it to look: this was a sacking disguised as a resignation – a constructive dismissal at best. “It’s me,” he said, but it wasn’t. He won two in six; without him, Las Palmas have won one in 10.

There was talk of Fernando Hierro and Aitor Karanka; instead, the former Valencia coach Pako Ayesterán arrived. He lost every game until eventually they got a draw – and, having held on in the absence of a clear candidate to take over, that was when patience ran out. In came Paquito Ortiz, the matchday delegate, appointed on 30 November. Las Palmas kept looking. Paco Jémez, born in the Canary Islands, but raised in Córdoba, manager there from 2010-11, recently returned from Cruz Azul in Mexico and a friend of the club’s president Miguel Ángel Ramírez, turned it down: he loves Las Palmas and would always be there for them, he said as he returned to Spain and to Spain’s media, just not now and, they thought, not ever.

With Pako gone and Paco not coming, Paquito stayed a little longer. Las Palmas thought they had a deal for Lanús coach Jorge Almirón, but with the Spanish Federation refusing authorisation, demanding endless paperwork, they eventually gave up. “The only thing they didn’t ask him for was his blood group,” Almirón’s agent complained. Las Palmas went back to Jémez and this time he said yes but he wanted changes made, players signed and sold, and anyway nothing was getting in the way of his family Christmas, not even desperation, a place at the bottom of the table, a solitary win in 12 weeks, or survival slipping further away. “You have an open wound but instead of stemming the bleeding, you sit and wait a couple of weeks before going to hospital,” complained one local paper.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paco Jémez, right, is set to take over after Christmas. Photograph: Sergio Perez/Reuters

Paquito will wait with them. Whatever happens next, the man who’d won one and drawn one until Sunday night will take charge of his final game at Getafe and was in charge of his final game at home. Still, at least it was a good one, quite a way to go. Well, almost.

With 80 minutes gone, Las Palmas were 2-0 down to Espanyol. They’d had the ball – which they often do – but not done much with it and it hadn’t taken their opponents too much to defeat them, on course for their first away win of the season. Flat, bottom of the table and five points from safety, some started making their way to the exits. “It’s like we’ve forgotten how to play football,” Viera said afterwards. Others turned to the presidential box and began to raise their voices: “Ramírez, go now!” Resignation took hold; relegation soon would. Which is when Loïc Rémy scored. And then, Espanyol manager Quique Sánchez Flores said: “Another game started, with 10 unexpected minutes.”

Milan misery intensifies amid defeats, finance questions and 'moral violence' | Paolo Bandini Read more

Unexpected is one word for them. Surreal is another. Suddenly, it was all happening. There was noise, a reaction, a moment’s belief; suddenly, everything else was forgotten. There were 10 minutes to go, a game, a goal disallowed at one end, and an equaliser at the other. The cameras couldn’t keep up – which isn’t saying much here, admittedly, but this time with good reason – and nor could anyone else. Jonathan Calleri leapt to make it 2-2, and this wasn’t over yet. Rémy dived for a penalty and didn’t get it; he was pulled back for another and he didn’t get that either. The ball thudded back off the bar. And then in the 94th minute, Jurado made the challenge and the referee pointed to the spot.

Two down with 10 minutes to go, suddenly given a lifeline, Viera stood over the penalty spot. Twelve yards away, Pau López looked at him. A minute passed. This was the last kick of the final game of 2017 in Las Palmas, where 15 points had already escaped them: a chance for the team on their fourth and final manager of the year to make sure it was not, a chance for the side who set off in January dreaming of Europe and who depart December scared of segunda, to move to within a win of safety – a glimmer of hope, something to grab hold of in a new year with a new manager. Eventually, into the 95th minute now, Viera began his run-up.

He missed.

López dived and saved it. Viera sat, a lost look on his face. “How do you feel?” he was asked afterwards, standing there, that look still on his face. “Pfff,” he scoffed. “You can imagine … that’s life, that’s football: all sorts of things go around in your head. It’s such a pity not to have won because I missed.” Fans stood in silence; it was there and then it was gone. When eventually they got their voices back, they had not forgotten. They turned to the directors’ box once more, but their president was not there. Nor was their new manager. Down on the touchline, the caretaker was still in charge. “Football’s a sod like that,” he said.

Talking points

• José Bordalás and Pablo Machín have been about a long time – more than 30 years in football between them, albeit that’s more the former than the latter – but they had never been in primera before. And yet here they were, Girona and Getafe, the first team to beat Valencia against one of only two to beat Madrid, facing each other at Montilivi with quite the prize to play for. Sixteen weeks into their first season in the top flight, Machín and Bordalás knew that if they could win they would take their team into a European place – at least for a few hours until Villarreal played Celta.

In the end, it was Girona that got there, leaving one local paper splashing a “European dream!” across its cover. “It might have been only a few hours, but what a few hours,” the report ran. At Girona their only target is survival. In fact, they don’t even think it would be a disaster if they go down. Which they won’t. “Happy is not the half of it,” said Bernardo Espinosa after a Cristhian Stuani goal gave them a 1-0 win and took them momentarily into sixth, and then seventh. No first division debutant club has ever been better placed as this stage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Girona players celebrate the goal scored by Cristhian Stuani. Photograph: Robin Townsend/EPA

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont watches the Girona v Getafe match at a bar in Brussels. Photograph: Eric Vidal/Reuters

“I congratulate him for bring this team up to the first division; he’s doing a great job,” Bordalás said. But that was as nice as it got. It wasn’t always pretty – and they were busy blaming each other after the game with the highest foul count this season: 20-25. “The game got stopped constantly, especially in the second half,” Bordalás complained. “Girona’s players spent a lot of time on the floor and there was hardly any football played. In the second half, there was practically none.” If you think that sounds like a spot of pot-and-kettlery, Machín would agree with you. “What do they want?” he replied. “They’re hitting us and hitting us. Faked it? Portu had blood on his lips and his mouth. Did he do that himself? Bloody hell, if you play one way, I have to drop to your level, don’t I? The game was the kind of game they want; we tried to play but we couldn’t do more because they wouldn’t let us do more.”

The Getafe defender Cala wasn’t denying it, although he was sharing the responsibility. “We’re a bit tired of people saying we’re a team that wastes time and commits fouls,” he said. “Today we’ve seen that other teams do it too, not just Getafe. It’s easy to point the finger at us.”

• Atlético atlético’d again. They collected a 1-0 win over Alavés with Fernando Torres scoring from a gorgeous ball by Sime Vrsaljko. Unbeaten all season, they’re second now. And the countdown to Costa has begun.

• Muñequera negra!

• By the end, everyone was falling about laughing, wondering if they might actually be doing this deliberately. Barcelona beat Deportivo 4-0 with two from Luis Suárez, the second of them an astonishingly good goal when you watch the whole move back, and two from Paulinho which is good but instead of four it could have been 40. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration but it really, really could have been 15. Deportivo goalkeeper Rubén and marvellously named defender Sidnei were both superb. And if Suárez got two and Paulinho got two, on a night when Andrés Iniesta glided, Lionel Messi got a hat-trick … of posts/bars. He also missed a penalty and flashed a couple of shots just wide. Oh, and Suárez had a rabona – are we actually calling it that in English now too? – not given, even though it went over the line before Rubén saved it and then thumped the post himself. Five times Barcelona found the woodwork (25 off the posts this season, 14 from Messi alone) and four times they found the net. Most of all, though, they found it funny. Well, Messi didn’t. Suárez was smiling, though, giggling gently post game.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joy for Barcelona during their dominant win over Depor. Photograph: Javier Soriano/AFP/Getty Images

After the game, incidentally, Barcelona’s director of institutional relations, Guillermo Amor, pretty well confirmed there had been meetings with Antoine Griezmann. Which might have caused more of a stir if Griezmann wasn’t busy causing an even bigger one with that picture.

• In an emirate far, far away, Real Madrid became world champions for a fifth time. Ronaldo did it again.

• Raúl García sat still as they stapled his head. Which, alas, was about the best of the action from Saturday’s Basque derby. He didn’t even flinch.

• The best news of the weekend came from the Sánchez Pizjuán, where Toto Berizzo was back on the bench.

Results: Sevilla 0–0 Levante, Athletic 0–0 Real Sociedad, Eibar 2–1 Valencia, Atlético 1–0 Alavés, Girona 1–0 Getafe, Celta 0-1 Villarreal, Las Palmas 2–2 Espanyol, Barcelona 4–0 Deportivo. Monday: Málaga-Betis. 21-22 February: Leganés-Madrid.