Until this Sunday, no team in the League had ever managed to win a game after three penalties were awarded against them.
The Dutch striker was in charge, like a good Barça supporting actor, of showing that history can be changed.
On the night of the three penalties appeared Luuk de Jong to counteract something as rare and as strange as Barça being given not one, not two, but three maximum penalties, especially in a season in which Marc-André ter Stegen he hadn’t faced the loneliness of coming face to face with an opponent from eleven meters.
He stopped one and could do nothing to avoid a goal that seemed to condemn Barça to return to the Catalan capital with a single point from Valencia. But as if it were the script of a movie, and Xavi Hernandez the director, Barça needed a good supporting actor last night, which is not the same as secondary. Good movies are often made better by the minimal role of a great performer.
In the area, to mark
To see him, it is worth overcoming scenes that may not provide everything that was desired when sitting in a chair or sofa. And that supporting actor was called Luuk de Jong. He plays little. He had, for example, four league games without intervening. And he knew how to be there, in the area, at the right time with a well-studied role to give Barcelona the three points and win, among others, the applause of his coach, of Xavi. “We have a winning mentality and Luuk with his qualities he is an example for all”.
If I am pic.twitter.com/xaFEXumMAd
— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona_es) April 10, 2022
Because Luuk He was the architect of a historical fact, that supporting actor who wins the Oscar and turns a mediocre film into a box office success. In the entire history of the League, never, a team that was awarded three penalties against ended up winning the match. never happened and DeJong was chosen to show that “without playing excellent games but knowing the way forward”, as he defended Xavihistory can be changed so that no one ever again says that if you are called for three penalties against it, it is impossible to score the three points.
And because, furthermore, Barça had an extra problem against a team “that doesn’t deserve to be down there”, again in the words of Xavi. And that problem had a first and last name:Jose Luis Morales. “It has been like a toothache,” he justified Xavi. A pain that would have turned into a dental extraction without anesthesia in the event that the striker from Madrid had scored a goal in the 25th minute of the first half, dribbling past all the opponents who crossed his path, which he would have signed Leo Messi in its brightest time.
Players with discomfort
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“They beat us in the duels but everything changed in the second half because finishing with that 2-2 would have weighed us down a lot”, commented the Barça coach, who praised the behavior of his players because many of them are playing with discomfort, “doing a very great effort”, due to the punishment that suppose tmany meetings in a row.
It was the match of the three penalties, of the interpretive success with the goal of Luuk de Jong and four magical minutes, with the children in power, Pedri and Gavi, to give the first turn to the tortilla that was getting very hooked in the pan of the Levante stadium. In a Barça, too, in which he was once again a vital piece aubameyang. “Dembele he knows me very well. That’s why I know that when he runs down the right I always have to be prepared.” And to score.