Deportivo Alavés v Getafe

Goalless at half time, and for a long time it looked like staying that way. The game turned on a Getafe red card just before the interval — Kiko Femenía went in the 42nd minute, and Getafe played the entire second half a man down. Alavés still needed until the 73rd minute to break through, when Nahuel Tenaglia scored. After that it came apart quickly: Mariano Díaz added a second in the first minute of stoppage time with a right-footed shot from outside the box on the counter, and Mikel Rodríguez made it three in the fourth, assisted by Mariano. Eight minutes of added time had been signalled; Alavés used them better than Getafe survived them.

Mariano Díaz — a goal and an assist inside four stoppage-time minutes, and a yellow card for excessive celebration in between, which tells you what the goal meant to him. Nahuel Tenaglia broke a deadlock that had lasted 73 minutes. Alavés finished with 15 shots to Getafe's 4.

Getafe's discipline decided this. A red card two minutes before half time in the opening fixture of a season is the kind of error that costs a result before the tactical questions are even asked, and conceding twice in stoppage time turned a narrow defeat into a goal difference of -3 on day one.

BRYME did not publish a pre-match preview or score prediction for this fixture, so there is nothing to hold this result against. It is written up after the fact, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend to a forecast we never made.

The scoreline says 3-0 and the match says something closer to 1-0. Alavés were the better side and deserved to win, but two of the three goals arrived after the game was already decided and against ten men who had been chasing it for fifty minutes. What is genuinely notable is the timing: 73', 90+1', 90+4'. Alavés kept going at a tiring opponent rather than settling for the lead, and on the opening weekend that is worth more than the two extra goals.