Experience and Hope in a Promotion Built from the Depths

In 2009, the historic Real Oviedo and Mirandés were languishing in the Third Division, then the fourth tier of Spanish football. Now, 16 years later, one of the two will complete the long journey from the depths of obscurity to the glory of the First Division, that golden category which the Asturian team last enjoyed a quarter of a century ago and which the Anduva team, a giant-killer in the cup competitions of this century, has never experienced firsthand.

Football, as capricious as it is sometimes fair to those who persevere, offers the reborn Oviedo the ultimate redemption. A sporting relegation and an administrative one, back-to-back, saw the club fall to the Asturian Third Division in 2003. The city's institutions turned their backs to the point of proposing the replacement of the entity with Astur, another club from Oviedo, but its social mass refused outright and kept alive a sports project that has taken 25 long years to regain its lost status.

The Oviedo fans await the return of the veteran and acclaimed Santi Cazorla, absent in the first leg due to physical problems. A double European Championship winner who insisted on recovering from an almost impossible injury with the dream of returning his Oviedo to the elite, exemplifying the ambition of a club buoyed by Mexican investment in recent years. They almost achieved promotion last season, when they fell at the final hurdle in the playoff against Espanyol, and a year later they return to the same point with the backing of experience and the stronghold of the Tartiere to overturn the 1-0 from Anduva. They also have a solid squad, in which the warrior Paunovic has managed to find the right key since his urgent arrival in March.

Opposite them, a true miracle. It may sound cliché, but there is no other way to describe what this modest club is doing, which in the summer had to cancel a friendly against Mallorca due to a lack of players and started the competition with just enough players to field a team. They have one of the tightest budgets in the second tier and excel at building squads through loans from First Division teams. In this context, Alessio Lisci has emerged as the perfect alchemist to work with youth and boldness.

Alberto Reina's goal at the start of the match in Anduva and Raúl Fernández's save against the penalty taken by the solid Santiago Colombatto allow the jabato team to dream. They will have to contend with the atmosphere of the Tartiere, a pressure cooker dyed blue. Any victory will suffice for Oviedo given their third place in the regular league, a condition that is, however, poisoned, as the best-ranked team has only achieved promotion in the playoffs once since 2013, with Getafe in 2017. Conversely, in the last two seasons, the eventual winner was the fourth-placed team - Espanyol and Alavés - precisely the position from which Mirandés entered this promotion.