Athletic Clubvs
AlavésSome nights the scoreline lies. This one told the truth.
Athletic Club had 69 percent of the ball, launched 24 shots, and hit the target six times. Alavés had two shots, none on target, and made six saves. The math is lopsided enough to be embarrassing — and yet both teams walked out of San Mamés with a point apiece in front of 47,254 increasingly frustrated supporters.
Our pre-match read had Athletic as 59% favorites, and over 90 minutes they gave every reason to justify that number. What they couldn't do was beat a goalkeeper who seemed determined to make this his personal highlight reel.
All Push, No Punch
Athletic moved the ball with purpose from the jump — 619 passes at 90% accuracy against Alavés's 279 — and the visitors made no secret of their intentions. They sat deep, they fouled (13 times), they chased shadows in their own half, and they trusted their keeper to do the rest. For long stretches it felt less like a football match and more like an extended shooting drill that kept producing the wrong answer.
The clearest sign of Athletic's frustration came in the 71st minute, when Iñigo Ruiz de Galarreta picked up a yellow card — the kind of booking that happens when a team has been pressing without reward long enough for nerves to fray. Jesús Areso added another in stoppage time, cabal, the punctuation mark on a night that never quite found its sentence.
Alavés, to their credit, were organized and disciplined. They won three offsides, they defended their box with numbers, and they never panicked even as Athletic peppered the goal from every angle. Five corners for the hosts, one for the visitors. The shape of the game could not have been clearer.
The Wall Holds
Qué noche para el portero de Alavés — six saves to earn a clean sheet when the rest of his team barely touched the ball. That kind of performance is the only reason this story ends in a draw rather than a comfortable home win.
Athletic's form coming in read DDWWL, and this extends their run of draws at the front of that sequence. Alavés arrived on DLLWW and keep their momentum going in the table, which will feel like a win in the dressing room tonight.
The question now is whether Athletic can find a clinical edge when possession and pressure aren't enough. Twenty-four shots, six on target, zero goals is a pattern worth watching. A team that controls games this thoroughly shouldn't be walking away empty-handed — but until they fix the finishing, nights like this will keep happening.
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