Alavés revel in beautiful madness and pile pressure on Lopetegui’s Madrid | Sid Lowe

“I was crapping myself,” admitted Alavés coach Abelardo Fernández. A few metres to his right, so was Real Madrid manager Julen Lopetegui. When the board went up, a red five glistening in the rain, he shot wild, pained looks, head swivelling from side to side, performed that classic Italian fingertips-to-the-face gesture that says “what the …?!”, some baffling injustice served – artichoke hand, it’s called – and pleaded for more. “Five?!” he shouted, “por favor! por favor!” It was 0-0, Mendizorroza was bouncing, holding on for an historic draw and Lopetegui’s team were approaching seven hours without scoring. He was under pressure, desperate for one last shot at salvation, and five more minutes didn’t feel like long to get a goal.

As it turned out, it was just long enough.

With the stadium clock stopped at 90 – because why should fans know which minute we’re in? – and the referee’s watch on 94.33, there was a corner. Only this was actually for Alavés. There were 27 seconds left and over on the touchline Lopetegui started shouting, as if suddenly aware that this could actually get worse. “Baja! Baja! Baja!” he barked: Get back! Get back! Get back! Alongside him, Abelardo felt much the same way. A draw against Madrid would be big: don’t risk it, don’t ruin it, don’t regret it. “I was like: ‘don’t both centre-backs go,’” he admitted. “I told Javi Cabello [the assistant coach] I was crapping myself but he said: ‘Nah, send both of them up.’ It was the last play: you have to make the most of it. It came off; this is the dream victory.”

The ball was delivered to the far post. Rubén Soriano headed goalwards, it hit Thibaut Courtois’s hand and looped into the air, a few yards from the line. Alavés had advertised the game with a poster showing Manu García and Sergio Ramos, the captains, face to face; now, 94 minutes and 36 seconds in, it had come to exactly that, both men throwing themselves at it. García got there first and headed into the net, scoring the only goal. Screaming, he pulled at his shirt, slid on his knees and disappeared under a pile of players. From the Alavés bench, they ran on the pitch. On the Madrid bench, Lopetegui sat in silence. It was over – and he knew “it” could be everything.

Amid the noise, beneath all the bodies, García didn’t hear the final whistle; he was starting to think about the kick-off, protecting this. Then he realised that some of Madrid’s players had already begun to walk away. In the stands, no one had: they stayed to celebrate, players lining up before them, bounding about, climbing on each other’s backs, song eventually accompanying them off. Alavés had beaten Madrid at home for the first time in the league since 1931, back before the Second Republic. On the scoreboard, they put up the league table: Alavés were top.

“Sometimes football gives moments like this,” García said afterwards. A small pack of journalists had gathered in front of him when he started talking but they abandoned him as soon as Ramos appeared, crowding into the corner to hear from the night’s other captain instead.

That was natural enough: Madrid had just lost their third game in four games, defeated in Seville, Moscow and Vitoria, drawing the other. They hadn’t scored since the 1-0 win over Espanyol. In total, they’d gone six hours and 49 minutes without a goal – already long enough to watch Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – but, include the minutes added on, and it was well over seven hours. It’s the worst goalless run for 33 years, and five more of those minutes, one last chance, had defeated them at Mendizorroza, 87 years later. “This is not normal,” Lopetegui said. He complained of injury, misfortune and said bad luck was stacking up, but it didn’t entirely convince, not least because nor does his team. “In the worst-case scenario, we’re only three points off the top,” he added, but while that was true – in fact, in the end it’s only two – it didn’t help. “We’ll get back on the path of victories,” he vowed, but that was no comfort either.

Already under pressure, Lopetegui knew what this might mean and so did everyone else. He’d been asked about his future even before this game. “It’s October,” he noted, and it’s less than three weeks since that display against Roma. But, it’s also Real Madrid. Some on the board want to act and do it now, some don’t, and some don’t know or don’t dare say. The inclination is to give Lopetegui until the clásico in three weeks’ time, but volatility is a reality, suggestibility too: Florentino Pérez can be emotional and he can be persuaded. Suddenly, on Saturday night sacking Lopetegui didn’t seem so impossible. At Mendizorroza, people wondered the same thing: they wouldn’t, would they?! “It’s not a decision for the players,” Ramos replied, “but sacking him would be madness.”

For Alavés Saturday was madness too, beautiful madness. If it was natural that almost everyone turned to Ramos, to Madrid, there was reason too to turn to Alavés, making good their nickname El Glorioso. They’ve never won anything – a banner on Saturday declared: “It’s not trophies that make a club great, it’s its people” – and yet there they were, victorious over Madrid and league leaders too. By Sunday night they’d slipped to sixth with Atlético and Sevilla climbing above them. It had been brief but that didn’t make it insignificant: they’d briefly led the league for only the third time ever – they’d been top in 1930 and for two weeks in 2001 – and, anyway, there was something more lasting too.

Forget the title, the Champions League, or even the Europa League, “our league is the Survival League,” Abelardo insisted. If so, with 14 points, they’re already 11 points better off than at the same stage last season and a third of the way to safety. In the 33 games since he took over last season and rescued them from the bottom, only Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético have better records. This is their best start since 2001, the year they reached the Uefa Cup final – immortalised on the wall of Mendizorroza.

That night, Alavés’s shirt was embossed with the names of all their members. Among them, down on the left side, it says Manuel Alejandro García: Manu García, the captain. Of all the people, when the ball sat up, the opportunity to beat Madrid for the first time, it had to be him.

Born in Vitoria, an Alavés season ticket holder, García says he was never good enough to play for his team until, broke and in crisis, they dropped to his level. He signed in 2012 in the Second Division B – Spain’s theoretically amateur third tier, split into four regionalised divisions – and together they went on a journey: Second Division B, Second Division, First Division. He scored the goal that took them back and, upon their return, his debut in the top flight, scored their first primera goal in a decade, a 95th-minute equaliser way after midnight at Atlético. He then led them to their first ever Copa del Rey final. Now this.

If all that was unlikely, this didn’t seem plausible either: García reached the final month of last season, the final month of his contract, looking like it was the end, aged 32. And although he was eventually offered a new deal – “this is one of the happiest days of my life; I was never going to feel anywhere else what I feel here,” he said – he was no longer a regular starter. Against Madrid, García sat on the bench until with 17 minutes left – plus another five – he was sent on to a huge roar.

Standing a few metres away, increasingly fraught, was his coach the only time he ever played for Spain, 15 years ago, when they had both barely begun.

Just after his 17th birthday, García got a late, surprise call-up to the Spain U17 team that finished runners up at the Euros. Lopetegui was in his first job having retired after five years in goal at Rayo Vallecano, working as assistant to Juan Santisteban. García played a few minutes as a sub and never went back, and they didn’t meet again until five years later when García was in the team at tiny Real Unión when they trained at Madrid’s Valdebebas headquarters the day after knocking Madrid out of the cup and Lopetegui was there too, in charge of international scouting. Ten years on, García was heading back from the Mendizorroza office where he left tickets for friends, when he saw Lopetegui again, Madrid’s manager and Alavés’s captain crossing paths in the corridor, a brief re-encounter at the start of a night that would turn out bigger than either imagined.

“Football,” they agreed, standing there under the stand, momentarily brought together again years later, “takes many turns.”

Talking points

• “This league is lovely,” Guillermo Amor said and he’s not wrong. Barcelona, Madrid and Alavés were joint top on Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon, Atlético were top. By Sunday evening, it was Sevilla. Barça got a 1-1 draw at Valencia where they completed almost a thousand passes but, looking tired and the changes coming very late and with little real sense of a plan, couldn’t complete the comeback.

• Endless injuries, potential starters on the bench and nine youth teamers on the pitch, playing away at San Mamés, and with doubts still surrounding the team … but Real Sociedad defeated Athletic in the Basque derby.