Anyone remotely interested in Spanish football will know who our white stick award goes to this week. Pérez Burrull goes into the Guinness Book of Records for the longest refereeing decision in history after it took him well over five minutes to make up his mind whether Fabio Aurelio's goal for Valencia against Málaga was offside or not. His first decision was that it was, and his second decision was the same after consulting for an age with his linesman. Only after a further extended chat with the Valencia players and more talks with his assistant did he change his mind and award the goal, and then he had another minute or two explaining to the disgruntled home players why he had made the decision. True it was an important call to make - Valencia won the game and as a result the league title - but if we had known it was going to take so long we could have spent the time usefully doing something else, like rid the world of all known diseases or something like that. Pérez goes top of the pack and with Megía Davila not officiating next weekend he is favourite now to win our annual award.

Other than that there was not too much controversy in a difficult and tense weekend. Betis must have felt that Rodríguez Santiago had it in for them though when he allowed Diego Tristán's offside goal to count, turned down a fairly valid penalty appeal (booking Denilson for diving into the bargain) and sending off Cañas for a hard but not life threatening tackle, and Mallorca could have beaten Real Madrid and moved away from the danger zone if Fernández Marín had not pulled Eto'o up for a non existent offside. Rayo Vallecano overcame Pino Zamorano's attempt to hand Alavés the last UEFA cup spot, winning the game 0-1 despite having two penalties given against them and playing 89 minutes and 42 seconds with ten men. That was one more man though than Espanyol, who had two sent off against Barcelona by Ansuategui Roca and a third given a yellow card which will leave them three short for a game they really have to win to be in Europe's Intertoto cup next season. (06.05.02)