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If Castellon were being given a 20% chance of promotion ahead of the second leg of their play-off semi-final against Almeria, then that was more than enough for local reporter Enrique Ballester.
‘To begin with, I was far less likely to have been conceived,’ wrote Ballester. ‘Less likely to have met the mother of my children. Far less likely that my mum would have thought it a good idea for me to dress up as an artichoke in Year 5. Less likely that I’d be writing this here and now. I wish some of the things I’ve wanted in life had had such a high probability. I wish I’d had a 20% chance with any girl at school. I wish I’d only fancied 20% of the girls at school.’
On paper, everything pointed towards an Almeria victory. Their budget is four times that of Castellon’s. Their substitute striker cost four times as much as Castellon’s record signing. Last summer, Almeria signed Castellon’s right-back Daijiro Chirino for €2m, the joint highest transfer fee the club had ever received. To add to the disparity, Castellon were deprived of midfielders Brian Cipenga and Awer Mabil, who are at the World Cup and have contributed 24 goals and assists between them this season.
But Castellon still had Pablo Hernandez in the dugout, and that was enough for Ballester to keep the faith:
Castellon play very well. It goes without saying, and you quickly get used to hearing it, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The Albinegros play excellent football. Pablo Hernandez has built a team true to a philosophy that competes with ambition, intensity and determination. They haven’t reached the play-offs by chance.
That 20% chance would have felt far greater if only Castellon had capitalised on their opportunities in the first leg at home. Arriving amid a haze of flares as fans lined the streets, the Nou Estadi Castalia was unrecognisable from my visit to the stadium in Pablo’s final season as a player, when the club were still in the third tier. In the opening minutes, Castellon were inexplicably denied a penalty when a player was wrestled to the floor at a corner in a headlock that even Luke O’Nien would have deemed excessive, before missing a number of well-created chances in front of goal (sound familiar?). Defender Fabrizio Brignani eventually opened the scoring shortly before half-time, backheeling the ball over the line after a goalmouth scramble, only for Castellon to be hit by a sucker punch after the break as Almeria crossed low from the right and Sergio Arribas converted their only decent chance of the game.
And so Castellon headed to Almeria, only a short drive from the Tabernas Desert where spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly were filmed by Sergio Leone, for a game that quickly resembled a shootout in a saloon. Having copped an elbow during the first half, Almeria striker Miguel de la Fuente prowled behind the goalline after receiving treatment, chewing a mouthful of tissue and spitting blood onto the floor.
Pablo often has the brooding intensity of a man with an Ennio Morricone soundtrack playing in his head, but after appearing so fresh-faced and buoyed by the atmosphere in the home fixture, as he stared around the sea of red shirts at Almeria’s stadium, the hollowed-out glare of a Vietnam vet having flashbacks returned.
He was confronted by constant reminders of the dark days at Leeds. The advertising hoardings flashed with Macron logos. Even the ref’s kit was emblazoned with the Macron badge. Looking across to the opposite dugout wouldn’t have helped. Almeria’s manager Rubio has worked with a potted history of Leeds United in the Championship, from Fede Bessone to Largie Ramazani, via Alfonso Pedraza and Kiko Casilla, mixed in with a sprinkling of the losers who took us back there — Marc Roca and Joel Robles — following the muscle-aching magic-in-tandem of Pablo and Bielsa. Come to think of it, if only Victor Orta had stuck around a bit longer, Rubio would have almost certainly replaced Javi Gracia as Leeds manager and taken us down instead of Sam Allardyce.
Part of the reason Rubio has encountered so many of the ghosts of Elland Road is because he never stays anywhere for long. At 56 years old, coaching Almeria is the fifteenth job of his managerial career. It’s not even his first time around at Almeria, having first been parachuted in for the final six games of 2021/22 with the side 3rd in the second tier. He guided Almeria to promotion, kept them up in La Liga, then left. He returned upon their relegation in 2024, but having missed out on automatic promotion with what was valued the most expensive squad in the division at the start of the season, there was talk Almeria could pull a Rubio on Rubio himself and hire someone else for the play-offs. While he sternly looked on as his striker gave away a foul in the opening minute, his substitutes sat behind him on the bench laughing and joking.
Once again, Castellon had the better of the chances in the early exchanges. Five minutes in, right winger Alex Calatrava nutmegged a defender and broke from halfway, his cross cut out just before it reached striker Ousmane Camara waiting for a tap in as Pablo puffed his cheeks on the touchline. Camara soon angered Almeria’s Andres Fernandez, trying to block the goalkeeper’s pass with a wild two-footed lunge that narrowly missed his ankle. But within a couple of minutes Camara was getting a hug of appreciation from Fernandez after somehow failing to get a touch on a free-kick that fizzed across the face of goal begging to be put into the back of the net.
Camara was guilty of missing some of Castellon’s best chances in the first leg, too, albeit his ascent to such occasions is even more remarkable than his team’s. Trying to escape the poverty of Guinea, as a child he travelled to Mali, then Niger, where he was trafficked to Libya, imprisoned and beaten. Other migrants were killed in front of him. Eventually he reached the relative safety of a refugee camp on the Mediterranean Coast, where he earned meals through his talent as a footballer, before almost drowning on a boat to Italy. “We wondered what was going to happen,” he said in 2019. “Everyone was crying. We thought, that’s it, we’re going to die here. But it’s all about courage.” Upon arriving in Italy, he travelled the length of the country by train to reach France, where his career as a professional finally began at Auxerre. This season, only Calatrava has bettered Camara’s twelve goals for Castellon.
Camara’s misses are trivial in comparison to his journey to this point, but as the tension between the two teams took on a spiteful edge, Almeria’s crowd ramped up the atmosphere and their players finally rose to the occasion. Castellon were now struggling to keep hold of the ball, looking frenzied, and were punished after losing possession, Almeria attacking the space left behind right-back Pablo Santiago as Adrian Embarba cut in from the flank and hit a fierce drive that kissed the crossbar on its way into the top corner just before half-time.
Only fifteen seconds after the break, Camara turned provider, sprinting to intercept a backpass and crossing low from the right as striker Adam Jakobsen — Castellon’s record signing, wearing Pablo’s old number 19 shirt — almost equalised with a backheel. The chance marked the restoration of the previous flow of the tie, Castellon back to controlling the ball and forcing attacks. Calatrava once again attacked down the right, dribbling on his own past two defenders to the byline and firing a pass into the penalty area looking for Camara, only to catch out ‘keeper Fernandez as the ball kept low and went behind him into the goal, sparking the 450 Castellon fans at that end of the ground into a Poznan celebration.
With twenty minutes remaining, the away end was sent into delirium as a deep free-kick was whipped in and left-back Agustin Sienra stretched out his toe to divert the ball into the net and put Castellon 2-1 up on the night, 3-2 up on aggregate. Suddenly that 20% chance of promotion felt much bigger.
Alas, you probably know what happened by now. And if you don’t, you can probably guess. As the commentators were shouting about “la remontada” — the comeback — from Castellon, they were warned not to get too far ahead of themselves by Almeria striking the joint of the post and crossbar. A minute later, Almeria took a throw-in while a Castellon defender was down in his own penalty area. A cross came in while he was getting back to his feet, and as the rest of the defence desperately tried to reorganise itself, the ball was flicked on at the near post and volleyed in at the far post by Alex Munoz. In the fourth minute of stoppage time, Stefan Dzodic escaped his marker at a corner and headed into his top corner as Almeria snatched the cruellest of winners.
The good news is Pablo has got Castellon playing like Bielsa’s Leeds. The bad news is they’ve just recreated the play-off semi-final against Derby.
— Rob Conlon (@robconlon.bsky.social) 9 June 2026 at 22:05
The madness still wasn’t over. As Castellon’s players rushed forward from the restart, they lost the ball, but Almeria somehow conspired to miss the chance to kill off the tie once and for all. Shortly afterwards, Castellon won a corner and the ‘keeper joined the attack. All that was missing was a cameo from Izzy Brown. It ended with Castellon’s captain heading over. And that was it.
In the end, Ballester’s article ahead of the game was proven right:
Sometimes, in fact, the fact that something might still happen is better than finding out the true outcome of that something. It applies to a World Cup or a promotion play-off. Anticipation is a state of mind that lends itself to daydreaming. Nothing is impossible in the run-up, especially without the facts. That was enough to make me happy too, boundless, in the white lie of ‘just in case’.
In the run-up, everything is idealised. What the welcome for the coach will be like. How the stadium stands will look. What the memorable moments will be like. How and who will score the goal we’ll watch for decades on YouTube, night after night and year after year, in the best-case scenario.
As a fan, the right to daydream is a fundamental part of the deal. That pre-match buzz is one of the essential fuels of loyalty. That’s why the risk of disappointment makes you think that sometimes it’s better if the moment never comes, because reality is likely to fall short of what you’d imagined.
And so, at the full-time whistle Pablo Hernandez walked over to the away end staring at the ground — his bottom lip sticking out, his players in tears — and was greeted by 450 Castellon fans holding shirts and scarves aloft, singing loud and proud, already daydreaming about the promise of what they could be celebrating this time next year. ⬢
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