Betis had not conceded all season and Levante had not scored, and it finished 5-2

Real Betis had not conceded a goal all season. Levante had not scored one. Both of those things stopped being true on Saturday night at the Ciutat de Valencia, where Levante won 5-2 and Manuel Pellegrini’s team lost for the first time this year.

Betis arrived on the back of two 1-0 wins, at home to Real Sociedad on 21 August and away at Valencia four days later. Neither was pretty and neither needed to be. Three points, clean sheet, next. Levante had lost 3-0 at Espanyol on the opening weekend and drawn 0-0 at Osasuna, which left them with a point and an empty column where their goals should have been.

Four goals before the interval

Adrian de la Fuente put Levante ahead in the 24th minute. Marc Bartra levelled ten minutes later. Then came stoppage time at the end of the first half, which produced two more: Enzo Bardeli for Levante a minute into it, Rodrigo Riquelme for Betis three minutes after that.

Two apiece at the break, and on the evidence of the opening 45 the second half was going to be a coin toss.

Brugue settled it in fourteen minutes

It was not a coin toss. Roger Brugue scored in the 56th minute and again in the 70th, and Betis had no answer to either. Jon Ander Olasagasti added a fifth deep into stoppage time, by which point the game had stopped being competitive and started being a statement.

The shot counts are the strange part. Levante had nine attempts to Betis’s seven. On any normal night that is a tight game. Levante made theirs count far more often than Betis did, five goals from nine shots against two from seven. Finishing like that does not repeat itself often, which is worth remembering before anyone declares a new order in Spanish football.

What it costs Betis

Pellegrini has built Betis sides on exactly the sort of control they had shown in their first two games, so conceding five in one evening is more embarrassing than it is damaging. It is one result in August. The unbeaten run is gone and the goal difference has taken a hit, and that is roughly the extent of it.

Levante get more out of it. A team that had not scored in 180 minutes of football just put five past a side that had not been breached at all, and they did it at home in front of their own crowd. Whatever the finishing rate says about repeatability, the confidence is real and the three points are permanent.

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