Betis celebrate end of derby drought as Antony and Isco finally feel at home | Real Betis

This weekend, 46,731 people came to see Betis and Sevilla but the derby wasn’t until the following night – so 33 hours later they came back and did it all over again, even better. Saturday’s second-biggest attendance in Spain had watched the country’s most passionate rivals train. Sunday’s very biggest crowd saw them play, a record 58,538 fans still inside and still singing late into a night they’ll never forget. The Benito Villamarín was bouncing, smoke rising round the home fans as they belted out the club’s anthem – here we are, squashed together like cannon balls – as the players started a lap of honour. Somewhere in all the madness and the noise, Antony dos Santos, stripped to the waist and sitting on the goalkeeper Adrián San Miguel’s shoulders, heaved a giant flag through the air. “This is incredible,” he said, and it was.

This was Antony’s first Seville derby and he’d not seen anything like it for years: never mind Ajax or Old Trafford, this took him back to Brazil. But it wasn’t just him, a debutant in a fixture that hits hard; nor had anyone else, the place going wild, something extra in the celebrations this time, Betis players still there half an hour after the end, parading round the pitch before bounding down corridors, singing and hammering at doors, cracking open the beers. You’d think they had won the Champions League. The one man there who has – five times – said that when it came to “feeling, vibrations, this is without doubt the most special game there is,” so Isco Alarcón and his teammates celebrated something that, right there in the moment, felt even better: they had beaten rivals Sevilla 2-1.

A goal down after Rubén Vargas’s opener on 17 minutes, Johnny Cardoso’s superb volley and Cucho Hernández’s sharp finish before half-time gave Betis a deserved victory, Diario de Sevilla concluding: “the best team wins the derby and that’s Betis.” Which, put like that, doesn’t sound dramatic or like all that much, but inside the Villamarín it sounded like everything, the pitch flooded at full time, people running everywhere and nowhere, leaping into each other’s arms. Marca described it as “total ecstasy ”, Diario de Sevilla called it “euphoria in green and white”, ABC went for “passion dyed green” and they were all right. “Amazing,” Isco called it. “I’ve been at big clubs with incredible fans but never seen this,” Adrián insisted. “This is what this lovely sport gives us.”

They had waited a long time for this. The last time Betis had won a derby in La Liga was almost seven years ago. That day, Joaquín Sánchez scored the only goal, aged 37. Afterwards he had declared “I can leave football a happy man now”. In fact, it took him another four years to go. Now here he was, the player who reacted to one derby win by declaring there would be fines for any footballers who didn’t stay out until 5am and the director now sitting in the box in a suit and tie before heading down to hug them too, another party about to start.

This derby is always a bit different, at least off the pitch – on it, in truth, it’s very often not very good, which was another reason why Sunday night’s clash was so good, so celebrated. Nowhere lives local rivalry quite like Seville, which has a population of 687,488 and two football clubs with over 90,000 members – third and fifth in Spain respectively – and 206 supporters’ clubs within the city. On Saturday 31,500 were at the Villamarín and 15,231 the Sánchez Pizjuán, three miles north, just to see them train.

This, said quite possibly the most ABC cover ever, was “a derby like God wills it.” Looking out from the front page, holding scarves, were Begona Navia-Osorio, 84, and Isabel Maria Rus-Velaquez, 80: two nuns, one supported each side. It was Laetere Sunday, when lent is let go a little bit, and derby day, when the city lets go a lot. On Avenida de la Palmera, heading out of the centre of the city, from the banks of the Guadalquivir and towards Heliopolis, the church doors were open at the Parroquia Corpus Christi, sermons heard from the street, football shirts in the back row. Rejoice, Isaiah 66.10 says, and so they would.

A couple of hundred metres further along, the stadium gates were opening too, kids on shoulders, waving flares as the bus edged its way the short distance to the Villamarín from the Al-Andalus hotel. On board, phones were held up to blacked-out windows. “I recorded people crying with emotion,” Isco admitted. Inside the ground, every seat had a green Betis flag laid upon it. Well, almost every seat: in the Sevilla end, fans who had been walked there past the hospital, where they applauded patients watching from the windows, held Betis flags too but these were white, the badge crossed out. And in the main stand, a couple of early arrivers – yes, you – filled their bags before everyone else took their seats.

On the pitch, it kicked off before it even kicked off, the first confrontation sparked when someone from Sevilla’s coaching staff pushed over a ballboy gathering up the balls after the warm up. A giant banner covered the south stand: two angels crowning the Betis badge from 1919-22, a line borrowed from Antonio Rodriguez-Buzón’s poem to the Macarena. And then, as it fell, they played. This was a game for hot hearts and cool heads, Betis coach Manuel Pellegrini had said. Betis are the better side, a team with better players and on a better run, winning five matches in a row while Sevilla had won two in eight. But, well, it’s a derby and Betis had not won any of the last 12. If there was one thing Pellegrini was concerned about it was the desperation to end that run.

When Sevilla opened the scoring on 17 minutes, Dodi Lukebakio setting up a superb goal for Vargas, that fear might have felt even more real: Betis had not come back from a goal down to win a derby at home since 1940. “Nah, it was all under control,” Adrián said afterwards. He was joking, but he was also right, Betis breaking that run in a way that seemed almost easy, taking control and the lead before half-time.

Pablo Fornals and Cardoso dominated the middle. Sevilla couldn’t handle Hernández, the striker whose record since joining reads: played six, won six. Jesús Rodríguez, 19 years old, a hint of Joaquín about him, flew up the left. Despite slipping often and changing his boots twice – “I’m going to have to speak to Puma” – Antony was always an outlet on the other side, a player who says “I have found myself here” and who Isco insisted “has changed us”. So much so that Isco reckoned he would “have to do one of those crowdfunding things to see if we can keep him for another year at least.”

As for Isco: the man who described Betis as “my light in the darkness”, revived and rescued from six months out of football which had felt permanent, his assist for Hernández’s to score Betis’ second goal just before half-time was gorgeous: a touch so soft he could have been playing in slippers, and a perfect portrait of his play. “He’s a superstar,” Anthony said, gazing at him like a smitten teenager.

When that goal went in, substitutes came sprinting on from the bench; at the end, they did too, joined it seemed by the entire staff of the club, the pitch suddenly full of people. Antony, who had just performed a rainbow flick down in the corner, was racing up the line, leading one last attack when he realised they had done it. He tore off his shirt and roared, pointed at the pitch: this is my place now. Isco and Gio Lo Celso embraced Pellegrini. Marc Bartra gestured to the badge. Someone whacked on Freed from Desire, loud. Cucho climbed into the crowd, Chimy Ávila running after him. They paraded a green cuddly toy like a child of their own. Adrián lifted Anthony on to his shoulders, and off they went.

For much of Sunday night there had only been one team on the pitch, now, past 11 o’clock, there really was. Sevilla had disappeared up the tunnel defeated, “swallowing poison” in their captain’s words and leaving 600 supporters waiting high in the north stand, where they refused to simply stand silent. Betis stayed, holding on to this, their fans loving every moment, stands shaking. The anthem went on. Freed from Desire got an encore. Beyond finals, it is genuinely hard to recall a post-match celebration like it. A long time later, they were still tooting out on Avenida de la Palmera.

This was a first derby win in the league under Pellegrini and although he was justifiably swift to note that his Betis side had beaten Sevilla in the cup – “and without that we wouldn’t have won the trophy” – he admitted they owed a debt to their fans. “Winning the derby can never be the sole objective,” he said, insisting that what really mattered was three more points towards a Champions League place. Isco too talked about “getting those little stars on our sleeves”, calling this “a win that allows us to dream of big things”. Their sixth in a row, it leaves them level with Villarreal in fifth place.

But in that moment, boy, did it feel like more, on the last derby night before Betis have to abandon their Villamarín home for a couple of years, as building work gets under way. “It’s going to be a long night: I hope there’s a celebration befitting this,” Rodríguez said. “It’s a night for wine or champagne or whatever,” Adrián reckoned; he had shed a tear or two, and he knew he wasn’t alone. “I feel very emotional: what I have lived in Seville this week I have never lived anywhere else,” Hernández said. “Tonight we will celebrate because we deserve it.” As the place finally emptied, Isco and Antony shared a beer, their work here done for now. “Making people happy is what this sport is for,” Isco said.