My second game of this trip to Seville was a similar distance away from where we were staying as the first game, only this time it was on the other side of the river. There looked to be some motorway walking in the route suggested and so I tried taking a bus to the Tomares district instead.
I wasn’t very successful. A combination of a reduced public holiday service and me misunderstanding which part of the bus station it would depart from meant that I had to resort to taking a taxi to get there in time for kick-off.
A better form of transport would have been the VW Beetle that we’d seen waiting outside a church for the bride and groom to emerge. It was similar to the one that was my first car, forty-three years ago, with a 1300cc engine and the squarish ‘Europa’ bumpers. This one was a cabriolet, which wouldn’t really have worked too well in Teesside.
The Beetle was accompanied by a bloke with bagpipes and, as with most churches in Spain, there was someone down on their luck asking for money sat on one side of the doors and a lottery seller on the other. A lot of churchgoers seemed to hand over some cash to the person in need, before then buying a lottery ticket. Buena Suerte!
It was ten euros to get into the Campo De Futbol Municipal San Sebastian for a second successive fixture in the fifth-tier Tercera division. Both sides has something to play for with Tomares still within reach of a play-off spot and La Palma four points adrift of safety but still not without hope of avoiding relegation.
There were around four hundred people inside, many of them already sipping at their tiny beers and with a definite public holiday weekend vibe.
I was happy to get a Coke Zero and save my partying for later in the day. If I’d wanted some food a café was selling enormous sausage rolls and there was a three-foot-long empanada that I couldn’t work out if it was going to be sliced up for sale or raffled off whole.
There was also a sign barring people from eating sunflower seeds in the main stand. I’d recently read about a la liga club doing this on the basis of the mess that it causes. Perhaps all they need to do is sell them with an extra bag for collecting the husks.
As I had no illicit snacks I took a seat in the right side of the main stand, only to move a few minutes later when I realised that I was surrounded by home fans using the occasion as a chance to fill each other in on what they’d been up to since the previous match. I moved to the other side where the away fans around me didn’t always feel the need to incessantly yap away.
La Palma went ahead within three minutes when, after a neat reverse pass, the resulting shot was tucked just inside the near post. The teams were level at the break though after a Tomares equaliser from a glancing header.
Tomares gradually gained control and then took the lead on fifty-five minutes when an attempt to play offside at a freekick left four home players stood by themselves, just a few yards out. As the visiting defenders waved their arms and frantically appealed from a distance, the home strikers managed not to mess it up and went two-one ahead.
It was one-way traffic for the rest of the game. The La Palma keeper pulled off a couple of decent saves and Tomares hit the underside of the bar. With twenty minutes to go they added a third to keep their play-off hopes alive.
I got luckier with the buses on the way out and, despite a reduced service, found myself back at the bus station in half the time that it would have taken me to walk it.
Trail of the Lion King 
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