La Liga Preview: Racing - Osasuna

For Real Madrid and FC Barcelona the league season may be over and talk of summer rebuilding plans dominate the headlines, but for Racing Santander and Osasuna things are far from settled.

With just one game to go the meeting in El Sardinero on Sunday sees the host team looking to cement themselves into a UEFA Cup spot, while their visitors are desperate to stay up.

The curious thing is that at the start of the season many would have predicted that their positions would have been the other way around, given their form in recent seasons.

Racing ended last season in tenth, which was their highest position since the 1993-94 campaign, the year after they returned to the Spanish top flight after a long absence.

Since then, the majority of years has seen the Cantabrian club battling against the drop, a struggle that they lost in 2000-01, before bouncing straight back up a season later.

Things changed last summer when Marcelino was brought in, somewhat surprisingly, after he had resigned following a relatively successful spell with Recreativo.

There were few indicators about what was to come and many predicted that Racing would once again jostle to stay up and almost as many said that they would not even achieve that.

Euro Dream

Far from just achieving that, however, Racing have been in the top ten nearly all season and in the European places for the past few weeks, with a Champions League spot even an outside possibility at one stage.

They currently lie in sixth place and are just one point ahead of Mallorca, who take on another relegation struggler in the shape of Real Zaragoza at rthe ONO Estadi.

After all that the team have been through they would, and rightly so, consider their season to be a failure if they do not now book their place in Europe for next term.

Their guests on Sunday reach the UEFA Cup semi finals last season could have built on that in order to try and push themselves back into the competition for next term.

Instead, their impressive home record has not been so impressive and while things have not improved on the road, Osasuna now go into the final match needing a win, or Zaragoza to lose, in order to stay up.

Last term the club finished 14th, but that was only 12 months after they had pinched fourth place and qualified for the Champions League qualifiers, which they ultimately lost.

That defeat did not serve them badly as they went on to enjoy a good run in the UEFA Cup, but with few strong signings last summer and some key players leaving, the team has struggled this season in the league.

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