Phil Ball in Spain

With friends like that, who needs enemies? This may well have been the phrase most resonant in Juanma Lillo's head at full-time on Saturday night, when his Almeria team had just equalled the worst home defeat of all time in the history of La Liga. Pep Guardiola, sitting glumly on the bench as the eighth Barcelona goal went in, realised that he had condemned his friend and erstwhile teacher to the dole queue, just as Lillo had settled down nicely in his little house in the tiny fishing hamlet of La Fabriquilla, in Cabo de Gata, one of the hippest places still standing in the far south of Spain.