In the great barbecue of football this first friendly game was the burnt neglected sauasge rather than prime steak but it’s very early days and so good to have CD Tenerife back in action. Granadilla looked the marginally better of the teams and ran out 2-1 winners, they had the advantage of having familiar team mates from a side that just missed out on promotion in the Tercera division play offs. Tenerife’s new siginings and B team youngsters made for a strange line up and with no team sheet and last years shirts we were struggling to work out who was who.
Meeting up pre match with the Frente at the barbecue area on the edge of town we were able to lubricate our voices and enjoy a master class from The General and Andy in fire lighting, I don’t think either were in the scouts although Andy claims to have had experience with the girl guides. It was a cloudy evening and quite cool compared with the south but nice to see old friends again so with some lightly warmed food in our stomachs we headed up to the ground. The CDT President worked a reduction for a large gang of us and we got in for 4 euros rather than 10, well that’s the least he owes us after the past 2 seasons.
Granadilla is a nice compact ground with an artificial pitch, some of our group headed for the bar but some of us had smuggled beer in and took our place on the far corner of the terracing.A few flares burst into life spreading a red haze across the stadium before the players ran out, it was spot the known face for us. Dani Mederos (above) from the B team was in goal, Luna was captain and in the heart of defence but apart from that it was guess work. Granadilla started strongly and caught the CDT defence cold, Peraza gave the home side the lead after 10 minutes and some failed clearances from our rear guard. A joke goal 5 minutes later made it 2-0, Carlitos scored when clearly way offside, the General raced around the pitch to impart some constructive criticism to the linesman but was told he was Croatian and understood little Spanish.
The second half saw wholesale changes, returning forward Kiko Raton gave Granadilla problems with his size and will be a great target man this season, Josmar came on and did some of his trickery but his passing let him down. The floodlights were poor and some areas of the pitch were like no go areas, another flare failed to dispel the gloom. Tenerife played better and started to put some moves together, Juan Ramos was fouled in the box and new boy Victor Bravo (without his friends Charlie Tango and Pappa Lima) converted the penalty. At times the game got so dull that we were distracted by the parking display going on behind the bank of terracing. the granadilla bar ran out of beer, a common theme at our friendlies, and a few resorted to wine, well they had also run out of meths. Difficult to read anything into this first run out at least the new coach will have got a few ideas of how to gell the squad into a winning unit.