Real Madrid CF 2-0 Real Oviedo: Primera Division Match Report

The gap between these two was forty-eight points and the margin on the night was two. Real Madrid CF 2-0 Real Oviedo was a controlled home win over the division's bottom club, achieved without fuss and without the scoreline ever running away. Madrid went in second on 77 points from 35 games with a +37 goal difference. Oviedo were 20th on 29 points with -28, comfortably the worst record in the league and already beyond mathematical rescue with three rounds left to play.

Two goals and a clean sheet is a modest return against a side in that condition, and it is also exactly what a fixture of this shape tends to produce late in a season. Madrid had nothing to chase — the title was gone and second place was untouchable — and Oviedo had nothing left to defend. What emerged was a professional evening rather than a rout, and for a team whose +37 had been built at both ends of the pitch, the shutout was arguably the more characteristic half of the result.

For Real Madrid, three points changed nothing structural. Barcelona held a lead of eleven points at the top with only three rounds and nine points remaining, which had already put the championship out of reach, and Villarreal in third were eleven points back in the other direction. Second place was theirs regardless of what the closing fixtures produced. The value in a win like this is confined to goal difference and to not limping over the line at the end of a campaign that had promised more.

For Oviedo, the defeat was one in a series of formalities. Ten points behind 17th with only nine still available, their relegation had been sealed by arithmetic before the fixture was played, and a goal difference of -28 explains without further comment how it got to that point. Losing 2-0 at the Bernabéu is close to the least embarrassing way a club in their position can spend an evening, but the season's verdict had been delivered elsewhere and some time earlier.

Our pre-match call was Double Chance 1X (Real Madrid CF or Draw). This was the safest selection available anywhere in the round, and the price was, if anything, a generous price for it: the second-placed side at home to a bottom club already relegated, with forty-eight points between them in the table. No plausible version of the fixture produced an Oviedo win, and the insurance built into the double chance never came close to being needed. Madrid won by two with a clean sheet. Collecting short prices without incident is the entire business of a pick like this one. Verdict: won