Leading the “Reto” this Christmas

The Christmas break has already come for some youth academy teams. The women’s reserve team picked up their first defeat of the season at Lezama against SD Eibar (0-2), but that result will not prevent Iraia Iturregi’s squad to sit on top of the Reto Iberdrola Norte at Christmas. This category, created for the current 2019/20 season, is divided into two groups, where the main reserve teams of the main sides in the Primera Iberdrola compete together with the two teams promoted at the end of the previous campaign: Fundación Albacete y Málaga CF. The first position in the table of the Southern group in the same category is occupied by these latter ones.

Athletic Club B and Fundación Albacete add 30 and 33 points respectively, although they ended 2019 in a different mood, given that “Alba” thrashed Tacuense 7-0 and has clinched a total of 10 wins, one more than Iraia Iturregi’s side. The first months of the competition are being very positive for our reserve team. The coach from Loiu, who got to play in more than 400 fixtures with the red-and-white shirt, is the best example for the young girls who dream of breaking into the first team. Some of them already made it, players such as Nerea Nevado, last year, and Amaiur -top scorer in the Reto Iberdrola Norte with 10 goals- this year. Oihane, Azkona and Valdezate have played at least one game with the B team this season, but they have settled in the first team and Ángel Villacampa relies on them.

Iraia Iturregi, in her debut as a manager, is in charge of a competitive squad, where several of her footballers have played nearly all the fixtures in this first half of the competition, with only one remaining match to go. Mariana Cerro and Naroa Uriarte, who worked throughout all of pre-season with the first team squad, are the only players who have started every single one of the fourteen fixtures played so far, getting more than 1,000 minutes each. That barrier has also been broken by Nerea Nevado, Oguiza and the young 16-year-old Ane Elexpuru.

Athletic Club’s reserve team can now raise a toast to the new year defending the top position in the standings alone. The competition is to be resumed on January 4, where they will travel to Valladolid to face Parquesol.