Blowing the League and Blowing Chunks

There's nothing the Spanish enjoy more than reversing into traffic without looking and a good old row, so it's often quite hard to get people to agree on anything.

If the moderator of Monday night's election debate - two grown men calling each other liars for an hour and a half - had stuck a picture of a sheep in front of the cantankerous candidates, one of them would have insisted it was a chicken.

But everyone seems to be agreed that Real Madrid are in a bit of a sticky situation having lost four out of their last five matches. Then again, the slightly infantile press in Spain are quite bewildered when any of the big teams fail to win a game of football, in the same way a toddler is when confronted with a breach in the space time continuum.

Days after claiming that the league was in the bag, Marca have shot their bolt by publishing a full-on, ten page, "White House in Crisis" special. And, remarkably, it's ten pages of rehashed naff-all. Not one made up story about Cesc coming to Real. Or how Raul should play for Spain. La Liga Loca wants its euro back.

There is still a lot of Al Pacino style woo-hah over Getafe's brilliantly executed counter-attack goal from Sunday night, with AS grabbing Guti for his recollection of the evening's events. "We made the mistake of celebrating the goal before seeing that it was ok", admitted the midfielder before shuffling off with that peculiar Liam Gallagher strut, he is currently trying out.

And possibly muttering, "for the last time, she was my sister!" under his breath. Possibly.

Forty-five year old Getafe captain, David Belenguer, is certainly the talk of the town having started the move which lead to Uche's somersaulting stunner. "The only ones in their place were Raul and Ruud and alongside me, Heinze and Guti", recalled the centre back".

"When I looked up, I saw the goal was cancelled and that we had three players up front. So I took (the free-kick)".

Marca report that one of their tremendously scientific and very useful polls advises that 75% of 'internautas' - a great word - reckon that the title will be residing in Barcelona, at the end of the season.

Over in Barcelona and Sport, unsurprisingly, are very excited indeed about Barça's revival, with a party hat-wearing Lluís Mascaró whipping Javier Aguirre's "there are fourteen finals left" record by declaring that "there are 22 finals left and Barcelona are in prime condition for taking on the league, the Copa del Rey and the Champions League".

Rumours were rumbling in Spain on Monday that Juan Bautista Soler, was set to step down as president of Valencia, having grown bored of his plaything and wanting to blast it into space, Emperor Ming style.

An emergency board meeting was held on Monday night - another excuse for a free dinner - and it ended with Soler still in charge of the Mestalla mess.

"Juan, are you going to resign in the end, or not?", asked one minion, according to AS, before being been vapourised by Soler's pin-sat death ray.

And finally, a story to bring a smile to the face of all Betico's. Evil overlord Darth Manuel Ruiz de Lopera was on the fast train to Madrid, on Monday morning, along with the Betis board and some of the players. The reason for their big day out was to meet the King of Spain and celebrate Betis' centenary.

And the trip was all going very well until de Lopera starting barfing his guts out both on the train and before getting into a taxi. The Betis big-wig was forced to retire to his Madrid maisonette whilst everyone else got to drink tea with the pretending-to- give a flying one royal family.

However, Rafael Sobis reported that both he and David Odonkor had a spot of bother getting into the event with a baffled security guard struggling to comprehend that a Brazilian could be white and German could be black.

Meanwhile, chucking up into a bucket was de Lopera, looking quite green.