Going down: Vinnie Samways and islanders Las Palmas (FiroFoto/Allsport)

On the final Saturday of the Spanish season, although the Second Division still has a couple of games left, only one game of the ten in the top flight was 'sin trascendencia' (of no importance) - and that was the game between Valencia and Betis. The former were already crowned champions and the latter assured of a place in next season's UEFA Cup.

All the rest had some bearing on something, and down in the nether regions of the table, Tenerife and Las Palmas lived up to expectations and joined Zaragoza in tumbling out of the First Division.

Apart from illustrating McMenemy's adage, Zaragoza and Las Palmas also embody that wonderful Spanish idiom 'A perro flaco todo es pulga' (On the skinny dog, everything turns into fleas').

With the club in debt up to their eyeballs and with half their squad already pledged to other teams for next year, the last thing they needed was relegation. Old Vinnie Samways looks to be the only person staying, and he battled away gamely on Saturday to try and save the day, but Mallorca's win at home to Valladolid meant that whatever they did at Real Sociedad (1-1) was irrelevant.

Up to losing 7-0 in the Bernabéu in February, they had the best defence in the league. But a disastrous second half to the campaign saw them slowly sink with a steady inevitability. The loss of TV and advertising revenue will hit them particularly hard, given the expense of flying to 21 venues next season, where much reduced crowds will await them.

Their island cousins, Tenerife, are not so badly off, but were also relegated in curious circumstances. Needing to beat Athletic Bilbao at home whilst their fans stuck needles into dolls of Mallorca players, they were 2-1 up at half-time and relatively happy, Valladolid being 0-1 up in Mallorca.

The voodoo seemed to be working, but the floodlights failed and the game put on ice for an hour until the fuse was mended, by which time the whole point of playing the games at the same time was negated. Mallorca had won and Tenerife came out to play the second half as if attending their own funerals.

The deathly scene got worse when Urzaiz, in his last game for Bilbao, headed an equaliser, to be followed by a winning header for the Basques from that fallen sex-symbol of the nineties, Julen Guerrero. As a further twist - and Spain's soil is fertile ground for these tortured circumstances - Javier Clemente was on the bench for Tenerife, brought in six weeks ago to try to repair the sinking ship.

	Acuna: 'Kicked arse' (NunoCorreia/Allsport)

That the final game of the season was against his beloved Athletic Bilbao, the team he grew up with and managed to two league titles, was an irony to which he is maybe becoming accustomed, but it must have been painful nevertheless. At the end it was unclear what he was frowning about - the fact that Tenerife were down or the knowledge that his real babies had missed out on a UEFA place, by virtue of Alaves' win at Osasuna.

Now this is where matters really get complicated. There are four Basque teams in the top division now, and although they're not so keen on each other as folks on the outside think, they have a reputation for mutual back-scratching when the chips are down, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors.

Last season Real Sociedad let Osasuna beat them away on the final day, condemning Oviedo to the drop, and on Saturday Osasuna's guarantee of top-flight football next season (just) was enough to raise suspicions as to how hard they would try against fellow-Basques Alavés, in Pamplona. The fact that both sides have had running battles on and off the pitch with Bilbao this season all added up to a '2' on the 'quiniela' (pools), and thus it proved. So back-scratching with a bit of stabbing thrown in.

Talking of skinny dogs and fleas, Real Madrid have been indulging in a bit of back-scratching as well, but of the more itchy variety. The Spanish Federation allowed them to play their game at Deportivo on Friday night (they would probably have refused anyone else) so as to have more time to prepare for Wednesday's final centenary showdown in Glasgow. But in time-honoured fashion the team with 'other things on their mind' managed to get themselves thrashed 3-0 and consequently lose out to their hosts as regards automatic entry to next season's Champions League, assuming that they blow it on Wednesday of course.

Their opponents in Glasgow, Bayer Leverkusen, seemed to be suffering from the same syndrome when they lost in the German Cup final to Schalke 04, but on the Saturday mind you. Real Madrid have sneaked in an extra day's rest to try and salvage something from a centenary year that everyone at the club may want to forget.

For most clubs, third place in the league and two cup final appearances would be the stuff of fantasy, but as manager Del Bosque reminded the press at the end of the second leg semi-final against Barcelona, 'We only celebrate winning trophies'.

One of the most surprising aspects of the final First Division table, to the foreign eye at least, must be the presence of Zaragoza propping up the rest. Spain's fifth-largest city will ill-become a Second Division existence, and as Oviedo know only too well, it's no easy task getting back.

Although it took them until 1939 to appear in the First Division, they have been a significant side ever since, appearing in nine cup finals and winning five of them. They won the old Fairs Cup in 1964 and beat Arsenal as recently as 1995 in Paris in the Cup-Winners Cup with that astonishing lob from Nayim.

Last week they were relegated at Villareal, and all hell let loose at the end, with players and supporters fighting pitched battles. The sight of the Paraguayan Acuña, racing round the pitch kicking a supporter's arse, was widely reported, but was very much the tip of the iceberg.

There was much wailing and gnashing of government teeth last week in an attempt to tough out one of the most violent weeks in Spanish football memory. The new fashion among certain supporters of certain relegated clubs is to turn on the players in sort of re-enactment of a medieval public lynching - as if by seeking out and punishing the perpetrators the 'pueblo' is cleansed of its shame.

This is one of the explanations of the origins of bullfighting, in that the torture of the dumb beast is supposed to 'liberate' the killer. Complicated stuff, but the sociologists have been having a field day with the phenomenon, and at Spanish Federacion level there has been the inevitable talk of bringing back the fences. As with the press, it would seem that self-regulation with the supporters has not been a success.

	Champions: Valencia fans celebrate (FiroFoto/Allsport)

And so all that remains is Glasgow and the issue of who joins Atlético Madrid in promotion from the Second 'A'. Jesus Gil, in Buenos Aires last week, announced to the press the signings of Gaizka Mendieta and Cladio Lopez from Italy, soon to be joined, it would seem, by Ismael Urzaiz from Bilbao.

If Mendieta in particular really turns out for Atlético next season, things could become very interesting for the promoted club. Racing de Santander look certain to go back up, to be joined by either Recreativo de Huelva or Schuster's Xerex.

Either way, the romantics get their satisfaction since the former are Spain's oldest club and the latter have come from nowhere to prominence in less than five years.

And then it's off to Korea to purge 70 years of non-achievement in World Cup tournaments. Could this be Spain's year? Will Julio Iglesias contemplate monogamy? Will Jesus Gil retire to a monastery? All will be revealed in the coming weeks.