Riquelme and Bartra Strike Late as Betis Win at Elche and Go Fourth

Patience won this one. Real Betis dominated Sunday's game at the Estadio Martínez Valero for long stretches without scoring, watched Elche's goalkeeper Matías Dituro turn away everything, and then won it 2–0 in the last ten minutes with two goals made by their substitutes.

The pattern was set early. Betis finished the night with 18 shots and nine on target; Elche managed one shot on target in the entire match. Dituro made seven saves, and for 80 minutes it looked like that might be the story — a relegation-threatened side digging out a point against a team chasing the Champions League places, in front of 26,884 at the Martínez Valero.

The shapes were clear from the team sheets. Betis went 4-2-3-1 — Álvaro Valles behind Bellerín, Bartra, Natan and Fran García; Marc Roca and Pablo Fornals as the double pivot; Antony, captain Isco and Abde Ezzalzouli behind Troy Parrott. Elche answered 4-3-3 with Dituro in goal and a front line of Cepeda, Fer Niño and Valera asked to feed on scraps. Elche's night got harder before half-time even arrived: Ali Houary went off injured in the 45th minute, Grady Diangana replacing him, and the home side's midfield lost its most natural ball-carrier before the siege had even peaked.

Dituro's night is the reason this stayed a contest for as long as it did, and it deserves to be told properly. He was busy inside 20 minutes — Fornals's shot held in the centre of the goal on 17 — and he never got a rest after it. Fran García forced him low to his left on 47 minutes. Antony did the same on 51. On 67 minutes he made two saves in the same passage, first from Isco outside the box, then from Abde at the right side of the six-yard box, and five minutes later he was at full stretch again to turn another Isco effort away from the top corner. Even at the end, beaten twice, he was still saving — Ruibal's shot pushed away from the top right on 88 minutes, a minute before the corner that produced the second goal. Seven saves is the official count; the unofficial one is that Elche were still level on 80 minutes because of him.

The changes broke the game open. Dani Ceballos came on in the 69th minute and bent the match toward Elche's box. Rodrigo Riquelme arrived on 78 minutes, and three minutes later he had the opener: Ceballos crossed, José Antonio Morante headed against the right post, and Riquelme — on the pitch for barely three minutes — reacted quickest to the rebound and finished from very close range.

Elche had to open up, and the second goal came from the pressure: a Ceballos corner on 89 minutes, and Marc Bartra rose in the centre of the box to head into the bottom left corner. Same supplier, same story — both Betis goals ran through Ceballos after he came off the bench, even though only the second goes down as his assist.

The discipline went before the defence did. Elche collected four yellow cards, all of them the price of stopping Betis attacks: Federico Redondo on 59 minutes, Diangana on 68, Martim Neto on 82 and Javi Morcillo on 84. Betis, who had brought on Aitor Ruibal for Antony in the same 69th-minute window as Ceballos, kept turning the screw — and when Elche tried to change the picture themselves, Morente and Osorio on 69 minutes, Buonanotte on 70 and Pedro Bigas on 77, the changes only thinned the wall further. Nelson Deossa replaced Isco on 83 minutes with the game already tilting, and Betis saw the last minutes out like a side that expects to be playing European football again.

Elche were not only defending, and that is part of their frustration. Fer Niño headed just too high from a Chust cross in the first half, Redondo did the same from very close range in stoppage time before the break, and on 56 minutes Diangana produced their one shot on target, a right-footed effort from outside the box that Álvaro Valles saved high to his left. It was the closest the home side came to changing the game's terms. After that the chances dried up and the bookings piled up, and a team that had spent three weeks building toward a result like this — a point against a Champions League-chasing side, in front of their own crowd — watched it dissolve in nine minutes. The Martínez Valero applauded them anyway. They knew what they had watched: a side that gave everything it had, against a side that simply had more.

The win sends Betis into the international break fourth on 26 points from 12 rounds — and their own club report calls it what it is: the best league start in Betis's history. Elche stay 18th on 10 points, inside the relegation zone, with a performance full of resistance and a result that gives them nothing. Resistance only pays when it lasts 90 minutes. Follow every kick in the Game Center.