Liga sides look for pick-me-up

The European hangover can work both ways. Under normal circumstances, a team that has played a midweek fixture — especially if a lengthy journey was involved — is ripe for the picking the following weekend. The rule of thumb transcends leagues, with the big guns across Europe falling foul of fixture congestion and fatigue.

Sometimes the phenomenon works in reverse. Last September, Real Madrid was slated to play Levante the weekend before its opening Champions League fixture of the season against Dynamo Zagreb in the Stadio Maksimir. With an eye on the Croatian fixture, José Mourinho rested Cristiano Ronaldo and Mesut Özil. Real took its eye off the ball and Levante carved out a famous 1-0 win.

The two teams face off again this Sunday at the Cuitat de Valencia, in slightly different circumstances. Levante built upon that victory and finished the season fifth, qualifying for European competition for the first time in its history. It was a big leap for The Frogs, who played a Europa League game on Thursday night against FC Twente that ended 0-0, sending it through to the knock-out stages. Real hosted Borussia Dortmund a full two days earlier. However, despite the thin nature of Levante's squad it is the fat cat that faces a personnel issue ahead of the game; both of Real's senior strikers, Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuaín, will miss the game through injury, leaving Mourinho with a choice of playing Cristiano Ronaldo in the striker's role or offering a first start of the season to youth team forward Álvaro Morata.

It is not an ideal situation when Real is trying to make up an eight-point gap on Barcelona while Levante, despite its commitments this season, is again challenging at the top of the table with a quarter of the season played.

Barça, meanwhile, had the worst morning-after of Spain's Champions League competitors after being beaten 2-1 by an inspired Celtic midweek. In the league, Tito Vilanova's team is still unbeaten and although staffing issues at the back persist — Javier Mascherano is the only defender at the club not to have succumbed to an injury of some sort this season — the problem for Barça's domestic opponents is not how many it may concede but the number it is capable of whacking in at the other end.

Deportivo bore painful witness to this a couple of weeks ago. Normally, if a team scores four in a single match it would expect to earn three points. But in that game, Barça scored five to crush Galician spirits. In its last three Liga outings it has bagged 13. Mallorca at the Ono Estadi is a far from foregone conclusion, though, and wily campaigner Joaquín Caparrós' team will make life as uncomfortable as possible for Lionel Messi and co.

Athletic is suffering from the mother of all hangovers after the champagne football it produced last season in reaching domestic and continental finals. Its opponent in the Europa League showpiece was Atlético, which hosts the Basques this weekend. Diego Simeone's side will wheel out its full armory for the visit of Marcelo Bielsa's Athletic, which lost in the Europa League to Lyon on Thursday, complicating its progression from the group stage in what has already been a trying season for The Lions. Atlético was joint leader until it lost 2-0 at Valencia last weekend and will be keen to get back on track with Real breathing down its neck in third.