The Lensois had to win to keep their first place and in the seventeenth minute, Šmicer opened the scoring and therefore allowed Lens to lead one to zero. Receiving the Girondins de Bordeaux in the last four on January 30, this time it was the opponents of the day who opened the scoring quickly, Younousse Sankharé giving the advantage to his team after a quarter of an hour of play, a score that no longer moved. until halftime. Busby after this victory retired from football, it was a former member of the house, Wilf McGuinness, a player for 5 years then became coach of the reserve team, who took over the reins of the club. The club finally wins the Northeast Honor Division, which gives it promotion to the second professional division. The second attempt, which took place in December (second battle on the road to La Coruña), also ended in failure. The idea of ​​this offensive was to attack Madrid from the northeast heading towards the city of Guadalajara and, once this was conquered, to cut the road to Valencia and invade the capital. Since the insurgent forces were not superior to the Republican forces defending Madrid (whose strength included some 23,000 combatants), it was important that the penetration into the capital be rapid and carried out on a very narrow front.

After the frontal attack had failed, the Nationalists resolved to surround Madrid from the north-west and concentrate their forces there in order to occupy the road to La Coruña and then attempt, along this road, to penetrate in Madrid. The attempt to encircle Madrid from the north-west having failed, the insurgent staff now tried to do so from the south-east, moving towards the Jarama river, with the intention of cutting the road to Valencia., an axis of vital importance because it allowed most of its supplies to be transported to Madrid. Finally, a third column would make its way through the district of Los Rosales to reach the Spanish Steps and Calle Princesa. For the 2022/2023 FA Cup third round season, Arsenal will play against Oxford United. The third and final attempt to envelop Madrid was the operation carried out by the Italian CTV, in the form of the Battle of Guadalajara, to which Franco had agreed. However, from then on, they came up against strong resistance from Republican troops, reinforced in the meantime by the arrival of the first International Brigades, units of Soviet T-26 tanks (which had intervened for the first time in the Battle of Seseña) and 132 Russian Polikarpov I-16 and I-15 planes, which would compete for air superiority with the 117 planes of the German Condor Legion.

The insurgents continued their advance, but the Republican forces supported by Soviet tank units led by General "Pablo" (alias General Rodimtsev) and the air supremacy of the Republican aviation obtained thanks to the Polikarpov I-15, forced them to come to a standstill and give up reaching the Arganda-Morata de Tajuña line. On October 8, 1936, the African army reached San Martín de Valdeiglesias, about fifty kilometers west of Madrid, where it joined up with the rebel forces of the North commanded by General Emilio Mola, who had just to close the campaign of Guipúzcoa by the conquest of the cities of Irún on September 5 and of San Sebastián on September 13, by which the Republican North found itself henceforth surrounded by zones held by the nationalists. Even if the Republican forces were now putting up more vigorous resistance thanks to the military reorganization implemented by the Largo Caballero government (with the creation of Mixed Brigades commanded mainly by career soldiers and supervising the militias, a militarization process accompanied by the appearance of the figure of the political commissar), the nationalist forces would tighten the semi-circle around Madrid and reach the southern suburbs of Madrid at the beginning of November, while in Asturias they succeeded on October 17 in breaking the encirclement from Oviedo.

Armed with these air resources, General Franco, commander-in-chief of the insurgent forces of Morocco, was able to organize an airlift linking North Africa to the Peninsula in order to transport the legionnaires and the Regulares, in addition to to gain air superiority over the strait. Yet the complete breach of the blockade of the strait was not to occur until later, when the Republican government decided to transfer most of its warships to the Cantabrian Sea, which, in the opinion of British historian Michael Alpert, constitutes "arguably the greatest mistake of the Civil War". The de-encirclement of the Alcazar also had considerable propaganda value in favor of the cause of the insurgents, as the historian Julio Aróstegui points out, "the Alcazar was later made into a myth by the Francoists, whose main extreme facts – the episode of the dialogues of Moscardó and his captive son of the assailants, p.