The Mérida picks up cruising speed

Just as before he chained defeats, now he links victories: almost by inertia. Mérida has won again, and has done well, calmly, without frights. Hitting again. With a constant and uniform speed that hardly suffers disturbance. Yesterday he got rid of the San Fernando without forcing the machine, easily overcoming any setbacks that came his way (which were very few, because he already controls the stage like no one else). Juanma Barrero’s team has become a kind of dispenser of good news: he quickly corrects his own mistakes, adds several very remarkable individual performances every day and does not stop in 2022 drawing smiles to his stands.

Now the team, for example, is on top of Lolo Pla’s hump. Everything that happened up to 1-0 was signed by the striker from Mérida: in the 5th minute he turned around at the penalty spot to shoot close to the post, in the 8th minute a Vaseline escaped in the one-on-one with Samu Pérez by a few millimeters and in minute 36 a cannon shot was invented from the edge of the area that the Canarian goalkeeper had to divert to a corner. Precisely from that corner came a foul and in the play of that foul the first goal of the morning would come, the work of Mario Robles, who picked up a rebound at the edge of the area to put it, by force and placement, in an impossible place for no one.

Without continuity in the attack and without the point of intensity of other commitments, Mérida was already leading the scoreboard. And that the variation this time was to place Diego López on the right so that he tended to the center and left the entire band to Felipe Alfonso and the good moment of Álvaro Ramón on the left to create superiorities with the additions of Héctor Camps. But as the local team was having a hard time getting into the game, San Fernando took advantage of an error in the mark precisely by Héctor Camps to equalize before the break in his only shot on goal until now: Ruiman did it by joining the far post after getting away from the Méritense side, on the serve of a lateral foul.

turned up the intensity

But it was coming off the break and, in the first nanoseconds of the resumption, it was already sensed that Mérida would take little time to solve his teammate’s mistake. After three minutes, the great protagonist of the match called attention again. Lolo Pla asked Álvaro Ramón for a ball that he had previously hit the post and took out, a few centimeters from Samu Pérez, a bicycle that disconcerted the San Fernando goalkeeper. He was defeated on one side, Lolo came out on the other and shot almost at an empty door.

That timid ‘failure to assist’ by Álvaro Ramón at 2-1 was, precisely, the least important thing that the Mérida winger did in the entire match. The best thing was his constant sprints breaking lines and gaining meters on the left flank creating superiority and danger over and over again. For this reason, after Lolo Pla’s goal, Mérida continued to like it. Because San Fernando had to open up more and because there is nothing that this team likes more than running into space and going on the counterattack.

The most dangerous thing in the second half of the Canarian team was a shot by Ruiman from midfield, which was dangerous because Javi Montoya stumbled when he turned around and left the door empty, and a header from Aitor Brito hit the post that forced be used to the goalkeeper of emeritense. But the scoring chances and dangerous attacks continued to fall on the Merida side, which cost him more than he deserved to close the game.

The emeritenses had to wait ten minutes to go, when the successes of Bonaque and Aitor Pons rounded off the scoring. First, the scoring center-back, who picked up a loose ball in a small area to finish off at the half-turn and score his fifth goal. And then when Aitor Pons closed the scoring, with the pointer, in a forced heads-up, taking advantage of another good assist from the left by Álvaro Ramón.

They call it autopilot… or also cruising speed.