Diego Alonso directs his first training session with Sevilla in his debut in Europe

Seville, Oct 10 (EFE).- The new coach of Sevilla, the Uruguayan Diego Alonso, led his first work session on Tuesday afternoon as head of the Andalusian team, which he has arrived to replace the dismissed José Luis Mendilibar. last Sunday, with a contract until the end of this season in his debut as a coach in Europe.

The former Uruguay coach, between December 2021 and the beginning of this year, met his new players in a training session held at the Jesús Navas Stadium in Sevilla's Ciudad Deportiva, held under bearable heat (about 30 degrees Celsius) and amid of great expectation, with a large presence of cameras and photographers.

In his first contact with the Sevilla squad, Diego Alonso, 48 years old and with experience in Spain during his time as a player having played for Valencia, Atlético de Madrid, Rácing de Santander, Málaga and Murcia, spoke about the grass with members of the Sevilla club's coaching staff under the gaze of the supporters of their signing: the Sevilla president, José Castro; its first vice president, José María del Nido Carrasco; and its sports director, Víctor Orta.

After beginning the training with the usual races and physical exercises, Alonso supervised the evolution of his players already with the ball in a small field of the Sevilla Sports City stadium that bears the name of one of his new pupils, the veteran Right back Jesús Navas, absent while concentrating with the Spanish team.

In this first session, the Montevideo coach counted on two central defenders who have just recovered from injuries and are in the final stretch of their preparation: the Brazilian Marcao Teixeira and the Frenchman Tanguy Nianzou, as well as the Serbian goalkeeper Marko Dmitrovic, who was sidelined last Saturday against Rayo Vallecano due to knee discomfort.

He also met heavyweights from the Sevilla dressing room such as the Croatian midfielder Ivan Rakitic and the Spanish international center back Sergio Ramos, among others, although he will have to wait until next week to have his first contact with the nine players who are absent during this LaLiga break. for the commitments with their teams.

These are the cases of the Norwegian goalkeeper Orjan Nyland, the Spaniards Jesús Navas and Juanlu Sánchez (under-21), the Serbian Nemanja Gudelj, the Argentines Marcos Acuña and Lucas Ocampos, the Swiss Djibril Sow, the Belgian Dodi Lukébakio and the Moroccan Youssef En- Nesyri.

Sevilla returned to work on Sunday, still with Mendilibar at the helm, after drawing 2-2 on Saturday night at the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán stadium against Rayo on the ninth day of LaLiga, although hours later it was already communicated to the Basque coach who was no longer the coach of the Nervión neighborhood team.

Before this movement on their bench, the Sevilla club reported that the squad was going to rest on Monday and exercise on Tuesday - finally with a change in schedule by moving training from the morning to the afternoon due to this change of coach - on Wednesday. and Thursday, to have Friday, Saturday and Sunday as days off.

After the LaLiga EA Sports break, Sevilla will return to the competition with a demanding schedule, since Real Madrid will visit the Sánchez-Pizjuán on Saturday, October 21 in the tenth league matchday and three days later, on Tuesday the 24th, they will host the same scenario to the English Arsenal on the third day of the group stage of the Champions League.

Seville, Oct 10 (EFE).- Uruguayan Diego Alonso, former coach of his country's national team, is the new coach of Sevilla, whom he will direct until the end of this season, replacing José Luis Mendilibar, dismissed last Sunday. the Andalusian club announced this Tuesday.

Diego Alonso, 48 years old and with experience in Spain during his time as a player because he played for Valencia, Atlético de Madrid, Racing Santander, Málaga and Murcia, will lead his first training session with the Sevilla team this Tuesday afternoon, starting at 7:00 p.m. at the José Ramón Cisneros Palacios Sports City.

Sevilla reported in a statement the agreement reached with Alonso (Montevideo, April 16, 1975) for him to occupy the bench of the team from the Nervión neighborhood until the end of the current campaign, which he arrives after his stage of just one year in the Uruguay team that ended after being eliminated from the Celeste in the group stage of the Qatar 2022 World Cup.

His career as a coach began in 2011 at Club Atlético Bella Vista in his country, where he directed 25 games with 9 victories achieved, after which he moved to Club Guaraní of the Paraguayan league, where he accumulated almost fifty games between the Clausura and Apertura tournaments of 2012 and 2013, with 25 wins and 11 losses.

These good numbers, Sevilla highlights in its writing, helped him return to his country the following two seasons, in which he was between Peñarol and Olimpia, with six games on the bench of the first club and 30 in the second, where he practically reached 50 percent of victories, with fourteen.

In the following four seasons, Diego Alonso tried his luck abroad by going to Mexico and directing Pachuca, from the 2015 to 2018 campaigns, a club with which he achieved the best numbers of his career as a coach.

In the Aztec club he coached 173 games, with 74 wins -more than 50%-, 46 draws and 53 losses, and led Pachuca to win two titles: the Clausura national championship in 2016 and the CONCACAF Champions League in 2017 , the highest continental title in the Football Confederation of North, Central America and the Caribbean.

His extensive and outstanding Mexican adventure continued two more years, at Monterrey, where he directed 72 games between 2018 and 2019 and in which he managed to emerge victorious in 38 of them, with a 59% win rate, in addition to achieving his second CONCACAF Champions League title, in 2019.

The Montevideo coach left for the United States in 2020 when he signed for Inter Miami, where he played only 24 games, and was later hired as the national coach of Uruguay and managed to qualify the Celeste for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar by winning all four matches remaining in the South American group.

Those twelve points added were vital for the Uruguayan team's access to the World Cup, in which, however, they were eliminated in the group stage tied with 4 points with South Korea, after a draw (0-0 against the South Koreans), a defeat (2-0 against Portugal) and a victory (0-2 against Ghana).

Diego Alonso coached twelve games in total in his short period with Uruguay, with a record of eight wins, two draws and two losses.

Seville, Oct 10 (EFE).- The Uruguayan Diego Alonso, 'El Tornado', will take the alternative on a European bench in that of Seville, to which he arrives to replace the dismissed José Luis Mendilibar after a long career in American lands and with the football references of his compatriot Enzo Francescoli and Luis Aragonés.

Alonso, who this Tuesday afternoon will put on his tracksuit to meet his new pupils in the Sevilla sports city, arrives at Sevilla after his time in the Uruguay national team, which he took over in December 2021 to replace Óscar Washington Tabárez and which he left at the beginning of this year, after the elimination of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, to be relieved last May by the Argentine Marcelo Bielsa.

The new Sevilla coach, 48 years old, considers himself a coach since he started as a footballer at 17 and, since then, first at Bella Vista in his country and then at Gimnasia y Esgrima de la Plata in Argentina, he had, almost all Uruguayan fans and footballers, the reference of Enzo Francescoli's 'Prince'.

Former player of Bella Vista, Nacional and Peñarol in his country, of the Argentine Gimnasia y Esgrima de La Plata, of the Mexican Pumas of the UNAM, of the Spanish Valencia, Atlético de Madrid, Rácing de Santander, Málaga and Murcia -38 goals in 118 games -, and from the Chinese Shanghai Greenland Shenhua, Alonso arrived at the Celeste after more than a decade as a coach.

In those ten years, the now Sevilla coach was on the benches of the Uruguayan teams Bella Vista and Peñarol, Guaraní and Olimpia of Paraguay, the Mexicans Pachuca and Monterrey and Inter Miami in the United States, from where he had the difficult challenge of replacing a legend in a country where football is religion.

In 2019, Diego Alonso became the first coach of American Inter Miami, Englishman David Beckham's team; and although he did not manage to have a great campaign, he did do so in North American soccer, guiding Monterrey and Pachuca to the conquest of the Concacaf Champions League.

And in all those years, he learned from many, in addition to the permanent mirror of Francescoli, and of all of them he has highlighted Luis Aragonés, whom he described as a "special person" for him after he trained him during "a spectacular year" in Atlético de Madrid.

It was in the 2001-2002 season, when the Colchoneros were promoted from the Second Division to the First Division after two years in 'hell', and in it Diego Alonso became the top scorer with 39 goals in 22 games.

He confesses that he has learned "from the majority" of coaches he has had, "not to say from all of them, but there are four or five who have marked things" in him, such as Julio Ribas, who was his coach at Bella Vista, his first professional team and with which he won his first title in the First Division, the 1998 Pre-Libertadores Liguilla.

Furthermore, the former Uruguayan striker and coach speaks wonders of Rafa Benítez, whom he met as Valencia coach on his return after the loan to Atlético de Madrid and whom he describes as "methodologically brilliant."

The now Sevilla coach is the nephew of Daniel Ricardo Alonso, a forward who had a brief stint with Sevilla in the mid-70s of the last century, and cousin of Iván Alonso, son of the former and who reached the final of the Cup with Alavés. former UEFA Cup in the 2000-2001 season, the same year in which Diego Alonso's Valencia reached the final of the Champions League, in which they lost to Bayern Munich.

Diego Alonso, considered a great motivator of his squad from the bench, has had Atlético de Madrid's physical trainer, Óscar 'El Profe' Ortega, at his side during his time at the helm of Uruguay, and in that responsibility he has trained players who will now have to face such as the Madrid player Fede Valverde, the Atlético player José María Giménez or the Barcelona player Ronald Araújo.