Maybe living is nothing more than making pain bearable.
They know a lot about that in Vallecas, a place where makeup is the scars. Where everything is equal. Where you play naked. And Barcelona is here, aspiring to play like a great player when it barely manages to do so like a small one.. Against Rayo, and after displaying his crude indefinition, he was barely able to get a draw in the twilight thanks to an own goal from Lejeune.
There will be those who think that this is football. It’s okay to cry now. For example, by Gavi. That one comes back “stronger” from these things – damned society that believes everything can be healed with the preachers of self-help -, as if breaking one’s knee, one’s mind or one’s heart did not leave consequences, on oneself, but also on those around us. .
So that Barça that was already in trouble even with Gavi healthy, but who will now have to spend the season lame, without the player who best interprets survival on a football field, began to walk in Vallecas. He already did it with Frenkie de Jong back, tied to the stretcher for the last two months, and on whom the entire weight of a team that craves an identity must fall.. But also, absent the injured Ter Stegen, with Iñaki Peña between the sticks, one of those goalkeepers who become so accustomed to his reserve status that one only notices his presence in moments of urgency. With the pressure and regret that this entails on the protagonist, he will be singled out – rightly or not – in the goal that opened the scoring in favor of Rayo.
fictitious comfort
A first act in which Xavi’s team hid a fictitious comfort was already fainting. He had the ball. He emerged from the fierce pressure of the Rayistas thanks to De Jong’s class. He controlled Isi’s attacks. But he didn’t know how to get the ball to the attack, with Lamine Yamal having to risk her life alone as if in every action she had to emulate Garrincha, and with Lewandowski waiting so long that he would have had time to read Don Quixote while waiting in the area.
In those, in an episode that began with a set piece and was continued by a rebound from Iñigo Martínez, Unai López had the opportunity to hit the ball with a hammer. He hit it from very far away. So much so that perhaps Iñaki Peña should have been given time to react. The ball, in any case, passed like lightning past the post. And Barça, who regretted the lack of definition in the positional offsides – there were even three goalkeepers near the goalkeeper –he recalled all his demons, which would have multiplied before the break if Bucket had not scored at goal.
Football always had its twisted side. The week in which this newspaper denounced the working conditions of the Camp Nou workers, Victims of that ultra-capitalist society in which the weakest support a system that humiliates them, Barça visited the workers’ fiefdom of Vallecas. There you can stick your head out – never succeed, because in the neighborhood you never succeed –, being someone normal; and, above all, behaving like someone normal. Like Unai López, like Isi Palazón, like Óscar Valentín. Guys who run and play because duty is confused with excitement, not with business. Or like Trejo, who took off his bracelet because of the outrages of his president.
Disfigured equipment
It is true that Barcelona started as a disfigured team from the starting eleven, with Oriol Romeu as the suspicious head of operations. Given the flurry of international matches and three days before Porto tests the weak European stability in Montjuïc, there was no trace of pieces that were longing for some rest after having been squeezed, such as Koundé and Araujo in the rearguard, Gündogan in the axis , and João Félix on the wing.
Although few things improved in the second half – poor controls and poor mobility were the norm – the changes woke up the team. Raphinha burst in to hit the ball off the post. And, already in the twilight, Balde, the same one who had saved a goal, provided an equalizer that if Lejeune had not scored in his goal, Lewandowski would have caught it. That’s what it should be for.
Espino went to the limit with Raphinha in the area. Without a doubt, he hit him. The referee said nothing, to the anger of Xavi and his team. Everything was left there. Again in nothingness.
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Sergio V. Jodara writer whose ego will never be consumed – he prefers to live by throwing coins in the air -, perhaps found the key to so much frustration.
“We don’t ask football to win, we just forget about everything for a moment.” Xavi’s Barça, on the other hand, does not even allow oblivion.