Deportivo La Coruña Vs. Sevilla: 3-3 Full Time, Russell Crowe Says “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?”

Lassad Nouioui scored a stunner in the 15th minute of Deportivo La Coruña’s match against Sevilla, and that would be it for the action in the first half. To be honest, it was dire. There wasn’t much good football or entertainment value in the first half, period. It looked like boring, boring Depor were going to live up to their nickname and subject us to another 90 minutes of rubbish.

Oh, how wrong we would all turn out to be.

The second half was filled with insane ups and downs for both teams, with a few moments of absolute madness sprinkled in for good effect. The first major event of the game since the Lassad golazo occurred in the 57th minute, when Sevilla goalkeeper Andres Palop was sent off for handling the ball outside the box. That incredible lapse of judgment would not only take his team down to ten men for the remainder of this match, but get him suspended for the semifinals of Copa Del Rey.

It took just four minutes after the red card for Depor to double their lead, and for Lassad to find his brace. His first goal was a stunner, but this one was a tap-in. Adrian provided the cross, and Lassad just had to touch it into the back of the net. At that moment, it appeared to be all done and dusted. Four more goals were still to come.

One minute later, Sevilla were back into the game. This goal came by way of Alvaro Negredo, who was lucky to have a header Luis Fabiano knew nothing about fall into his path. He tapped the ball into the back of the net, and suddenly the game was interesting again. It would get more interesting in the 74th minute, thanks to some poor goalkeeping by Depor’s Daniel Aranzubia. Fabiano hit a free kick that was mishandled by the keeper, and Frenchman Julien Escuede tapped hope the rebound.

In the 79th minute, Negredo completed the comeback with a sublime piece of skill, netting himself a brace. After chesting down a ball from Didier Zokora, he struck the ball low with an incredible amount of power, beating Aranzubia to the far post at an incredibly narrow angle. Sevilla had scored three unanswered goals with 10 men, and somehow had a 3-2 lead after 79 minutes.

Depor would find their equalizer, and it would cause an uproar. Laure was the man who scored it, netting a clean right-footed strike in the 90th minute. The linesman had flagged Laure for offsides, but the head official overruled him, and correctly so. With the match level at 3-3, it looked like both teams were going to get a deserved point.

The referee’s ruling wasn’t good enough for Sevilla, though, who felt the need to crowd the head official and the linesman after the goal, protesting loudly and sticking fingers in their faces. When the official told the Sevilla players to back off so that he could speak to his linesman, they instead persisted with their protests. Honestly, it was one of the most disrespectful and unsportsmanlike things I’ve ever seen in sports, and Miguel Ángel Ayza Gámez would have been well within his rights to send off all of the players who were disrupting the discussion. No Sevilla players were shown red, and the match eventually continued.

That wasn’t enough drama for this match, though. No, there were five minutes of stoppage time thanks to the delay after the Palop red card, coupled with the delay caused by Sevilla players protesting the equalizer. In the fifth and final minute of stoppage time, Sevilla’s backup goalkeeper Javi Veras made a stunning save on Laure, the man who scored the equalizer, to preserve the result. It was literally the last kick of the ball, as the referee immediately blew his whistle after the save.

After a terrible first half of football, Sevilla and Depor put on a show in the second half, playing one of the craziest halves off football in recent memory. The 3-3 result is certainly a fitting one, and Laure’s dramatics have probably prevented Miguel Angel Lotina from getting sacked in the morning.