Qatar-owned Malaga secured fourth place in La Liga and a first shot at the Champions League with a 1-0 home win over Sporting de Gijon, who joined Villarreal in being relegated, in a dramatic finale to the season on Sunday.
The last eight matches had three places in Europe and two relegation slots at stake as the games all kicked off at the same time, with fans glued to their radios in grounds around Spain.
Salomon Rondon headed Malaga in front from a corner just after halftime, putting the big-spending club on 58 points, ahead of Atletico Madrid and Levante UD, who finished fifth and sixth, to secure entry to the Europa League.
Photo: Reuters
“The dressing room are delighted. We weren’t content to settle for a Europa League place,” Malaga coach Manuel Pellegrini told a press conference.
Atletico beat Villarreal 1-0 with an 88th-minute header from Radamel Falcao, condemning the team that finished fourth last season to relegation.
Villarreal were hanging by a thread in 17th when news filtered through that Rayo Vallecano de Madrid had grabbed a 90th-minute winner through Raul Tamudo for a 1-0 victory over Granada.
Rayo pushed Villarreal, the Champions League semi-finalists in 2006, down into the second division and a pitch invasion at their tiny stadium saw players being stripped of their kit.
“It’s very tough,” Villarreal’s Angel told Spanish television as he left the pitch.
Real Zaragoza escaped from the bottom three with a 2-0 victory at Getafe, who finished with eight men on the pitch.
Levante UD secured their highest league finish in their 102 years with a 3-0 rout of Athletic Bilbao, qualifying for European competition for the first time.
RCD Espanyol closed their campaign with a 1-1 draw against Sevilla, while already-relegated Real Racing Club de Santander lost 4-2 to CA Osasuna.
Champions Real Madrid signed off with a 4-1 hammering of RCD Mallorca at the Bernabeu to set a new La Liga record of 100 points for a season, beating the previous best of 99 achieved by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona in 2010.
Cristiano Ronaldo headed his 46th league goal of the campaign, Karim Benzema and a double from Mesut Ozil lifted Real to a league scoring record of 121 goals.
Additional reporting by staff writer
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier