Brimming with confidence having finally broken his league duck against Real Madrid last week, the visitors’ Raúl de Tomás tried his luck from the halfway line after 10 minutes, but Paulo Gazzaniga dealt with the effort comfortably, in an opening quarter where both teams struggled to create in testing conditions.
The hosts’ first two shots of the match arrived in the 36th and 39th minutes, both courtesy of Yangel Herrera. First, he sent a header goalwards from a corner, but his weak effort did not trouble Stole Dimitrievski, before meeting Yan Couto’s cutback inside the box, but this time Aridane Hernández provided a vital block for Los Franjirrojos.
Míchel stated this week that his side were “going to fight for the Champions League”, and they came out for the second half looking like a team up for the challenge. Five minutes after HT, Sávio burst through the defence and teed up Viktor Tsygankov, who forced Dimitrievski into a good save.
With the intensity still high two minutes later, Miguel Gutiérrez beat the offside trap and pulled the ball back to Tsygankov, who steered his sixth of the season into the bottom corner.
Only Artem Dovbyk blazing over from eight yards and the ball going out of play moments before Portu headed home stopped the lead being doubled before the hour mark.
Having been fortunate to enter the final 20 minutes only one behind, Rayo came close to equalising through their top scorer Álvaro García, who could not quite poke the ball past Gazzaniga having latched onto Miguel Crespo’s defence-splitting through ball.
Their task became significantly harder soon after, as two fouls within 50 seconds of each other saw Pep Chavarria receive two yellow cards, just 12 minutes after coming on as a substitute.
Dimitrievski remarkably denied Cristhian Stuani late on, but he could not keep out Sávio in injury time, who cut inside past a tired defence and slotted home the second, before repeating the trick and placing the ball past the goalkeeper from a tight angle with seconds remaining.
The goals were welcome, but Girona will be pleased to keep a clean sheet having conceded seven in their previous two. Meanwhile, struggling Rayo remain winless since the first week of January.
