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Barça poured out like an enthusiastic, clumsy, hasty adolescent; Madrid waited patiently behind. Barça were in a hurry to lose balls and Madrid did not mind taking time to impose their superiority. Xavi‘s youth were noticeable and Ancelotti‘s had experience. More emotional tension than football. The innocence of the Catalans had something touching and Madrid was settling in the field. Barça could not do more than what little it gave and Madrid was dosing itself, waiting for its options without taking risks. Vinicius’ goal was neither a surprise nor an isolated nor a coincidence. It was what everyone knew was going to happen.
My dear don Juan told me when I was very young, and I had fallen in love with a waitress, and was angry because my grandmother had banished her to Marbella, the time her son at my age at that time told him that he had found the woman definitive.
He knew it was not, and tried to explain why, but at filial insistence, he invited the couple on a cruise during Easter. The young man was drinking a dry martini on deck when a secretary approached him to say that his father wanted to see him immediately in the dressing room. Upon entering, he found him naked with his girlfriend in bed and said: “Do you see, Juanito, how was this not?” Barça was yesterday the boy in love with the waitress, and with all the wrong girls in the world, and Madrid took him ahead every time he tried something, always with more drive than intelligence. The same thing always happened: Barça’s sterile sleeplessness faded into their own impotence, and when Madrid recovered the ball they ran with all the danger. But a stroke of luck on the edge of halftime, and luck is more important than merit in football, brought the game back into balance, and Luuk de Jong on the rebound managed to tie on the scoreboard what any Barcelona player would consider lost on the pitch .
The innocence of Barça, with a midfield that weighed neither in attack nor in defense, contrasted with the resurgence of Luuk de Jong, who has left us who had accused him of being a player unworthy of playing for Barça so quiet . What I have come to write about him, and the bad temper with which he had done it, pales in the last games in which he has been decisive. I continue to think that he is not a player for a champion Barcelona, but given the evolutions, I will have to moderate the destructive enthusiasm. It would be inaccurate to say that such a thing is the first time it has happened to me.
Pedri, who got into the game very well, and Abde, entered through Frenkie de Jong -mal- and the newcomer Ferran Torres, unprecedented. Madrid returned from the break without knowing very well what they wanted to do with the game, without calling their son to the dressing room. Barça continued with its pressure and enthusiasm, as if it wanted to redeem itself from its innocence and grow up right away. Despite a certain disappearance of the rival, the feeling that Madrid does not need to be very present to solve the matches did not stop at any time from flying over the King Fahd stadium, much more crowded than expected by the restrictions of the pandemic. Ansu Fati, who had not yet been able to play with Xavi on the bench, came in for Luuk de Jong. Madrid matched the superiority that Barcelona had had since the restart. Three times Benzema warned: the first, to the stick; the second, from a parabolic shot, well repelled by Ter Stegen, and the third was the goal that overtook the team and that had been sensed for a long time. And when Barça seemed most defeated, Ansu, whose returns are always explosive, returned his team headlong to the game and forced extra time.
But the courage that must be recognized in Xavi for risking his football ideas with what are ultimately nothing more than children, ran into again the naked and stark reality of Valverde’s goal. Barcelona called back to the dressing room again: they cannot be blamed for a lack of desire, or an incipient talent, or a love, although still very innocent, for a beautiful idea of football; but no one can say either that what happened yesterday was not a well-known story.
This is Madrid. Always win. This is your father when he meticulously explains that this girl does not suit you.
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