Deportivo Alavés returned to competitive action at Mendizorroza after six weeks of preseason, and the first home test came against Getafe with Antonio Blanco still in the squad and one year left on his contract. The restart matters because the team had gone almost three months without playing in front of its supporters, and this was the first real answer to a summer built more on continuity than on change.
That continuity showed in the numbers. Alavés had come through four friendly matches without defeat, but the calm warm-up did not erase the questions around the start of the campaign. There were no concrete offers for Blanco, Toni Martínez or Lucas Boyé, and the club moved into the competitive phase with all its players already registered. Diarra was among those registered and had options to leave, while Adrián Rodríguez and Owono were also available for the first stage of the season.
Getafe arrived as a complicated opponent, and Quique Sánchez Flores expected to lean on a base 5-3-2 that could shift into a more traditional 4-4-2 in different phases of the match. Both sides were expected to defend well and look for speed from their attackers on the break, which gave the game a familiar shape but a narrow margin for error. For Alavés, that made the opening stretch at Mendizorroza less about rhythm and more about how quickly the team could turn a stable preseason into points.
The problem was that the squad did not enter with a full deck. Lucas Boyé was a serious doubt after leaving the last friendly with muscle discomfort, while Garcés was ruled out until November because of a FIFA sanction and Nicolás Valentini was also unavailable because of a sanction from Italy. Those absences left Alavés without two defensive pieces at the start, and they pushed Quique Sánchez Flores toward emergency solutions such as converted full-backs Tenaglia and Jonny, or the youth player Xanet Olaiz.
That is where the story sharpens: Alavés began its competitive phase at home with fewer summer upheavals than usual, but the first test still asked the squad to absorb pressure without two defenders and possibly without Boyé. Xanet Olaiz and the winger Izei Hernández were set to stay in first-team dynamics for the entire season, which gives the coach another layer of depth, but the immediate question is simpler. Whether Boyé could actually be used against Getafe would shape the tone of a match that marked the real start of Alavés' season in front of its own crowd.
