Diego Martínez arrived at Espanyol with the reputation of being a studious and winning coach, who was looking for an ambitious project with which to give free rein to his knowledge. But reality was stubborn and a year later the parakeet team is sailing through the Second Division, with the course somewhat askew, while the coach was dismissed yesterday, again, by the Greek Olympiacos, where he arrived last June with the aim of be champion
The Vigo coach, who rose to fame for taking modest Granada to Europe, once again experiences the bitter side of football. In Barcelona he managed to be the great parakeet hope for half a year. Above the players and the club, the fans placed their trust in the passion that the Vigo player showed every second. A man of firm convictions, with the courage to take a sabbatical year while many First Division teams were pining for him and as soon as he arrived at the club, he dispensed with Raúl de Tomás, the team's top scorer.
In Cornellà things did not go as expected, but months later an old friend of his with whom he met at Granada, Antonio Cordón, recruited him to revive the project of the largest club in Greece, Olympiacos. Martínez thus followed, although with obvious differences, in the footsteps of Ernesto Valverde, who in 2010 resigned from continuing on the Espanyol bench to join the Piraeus entity. Two titles in two years crowned Txingurri, who returned to Spain to continue shining first on the Athletic bench and then on the Barça bench.
Martínez's time in the Greek team has been much shorter. After a great start in which they won six of their first seven games in the Super League and qualified for the group stage of the Europa League, everything began to go wrong after losing the duel against Panathinaikos due to the explosion of a firecracker next to a player. Two weeks later, PAOK beat Georgios Karaiskakis and Olympiacos lost the lead permanently.
But the real reason for his dismissal, and that of sports director Antonio Cordón, was his poor performance in Europe. The team was eliminated last week in the group stage after being beaten by West Ham and Freiburg. On the penultimate matchday, with one more left to play, the Germans scored 0-5 in Piraeus that was too much for Evangelos Marinakis, president of the club, who decided to dismiss him and hire the Portuguese Carlos Carvalhal, formerly of Celta de Vigo.
