Valencia CF travels to Vigo, Galicia to play at the Estadio de Balaídos against Celta Vigo the 14th ranked club on the table and direct rival to Valencia CF for those mid table positions. Valencia CF have a chance tonight to leap forward in the table and come within a striking distance against the European league positions, but with the drawish play Valencia CF have been featuring lately it is going to be a feat if they manage to win.
As you know we drew the last three games against Atletico Madrid, Real Sociedad and Rayo Vallecano, two of which were positive results mind you, but we desperately needed a win against Rayo Vallecano and barely managed a draw, so this puts even more onus on this match and winning tonight.
You could argue that Rayo Vallecano are playing well and kind of higher quality opposition than Valencia CF, but I think that is just a defeatist language, we should be able to defeat Rayo Vallecano easily in any season. Real Sociedad have been playing really good football for the past several seasons, so the are not a one season wonders or anything, they have a good and stable team, so they are a solid and tough opponent, but Rayo Vallecano should have been an easy opposition.
Anyways we are facing a team lower in the league table than us this time, and Valencia CF should be able to win this match comfortable if we are to be considered a good team, a European competition type of team and not just a middle of the table minnow that is fodder for the 'big' clubs. Our biggest issue this season has been our defense, we started off well in that department, but after a few key injuries all hell broke loose and Valencia CF has been conceding goals left and right. I know we don't score too much either, but we score enough where if we are able to prevent easy goals we would definitely be winning. Only Real Madrid have a significant goal difference from us and everyone else, all the rest of the clubs are very similar in goals scored with the second highest scoring team Atletico Madrid(surprisingly) have only score five goals more than Valencia CF. So if Valencia CF were to concede less goals we would have certainly won more matches and been in a better position.
And this time Diakhaby isn't the main culprit either, the other defenders have failed us more, including Jose Luis Gaya who has been really leaky on that left wing, Foulquier has been out of position numerous times and our midfield cover for defense has also been lacking.
I think due to our leaky defense Jose Bordalas turned his focus on defending and for the past few games, and while it has somewhat worked, we've also sacrificed everything else for it, we don't have ball possession, we don't have control of the match, we don't have initiative, we don't have an attack, we barely manage to scrape few counter attacks and that's it. Even more worrisome is that this has not produced a solid, impenetrable defense, we are still as likely to concede goals and then we have trouble equalizing. This was evident in our last match where Rayo Vallecano were outplaying us in every department and Valencia CF looked lost for most of the match.
We need a balance between attack and defense, we need the ball to be recycled back and not just shot forward every time in the miniscule hopes of magically landing to our sole attacker's legs and him scoring a goal. No we need to move the ball around, pass back when there is no good forward option and the recycle the ball forward. We can't just be giving away so many balls.
Our midweek match in the Copa doesn't tell us anything, it was mostly unfeatured players that featured and Valencia CF won 3-0, but not a convincing play even against a regional league minnow. You'd think we'd be able to win 5-0 easily and completely dominate play, but even that seems like a high order for this Valencia CF.
So who knows what Valencia CF will show up tonight, I'm hoping we see the strong and secure Valencia CF from the start of the season, where we had a good balance in our play and were quite exciting to watch as well.