Positive events attract positive feelings. Real Madrid and Barça are coming off a tremendous week and promise an intense classic. Also in the box, where the two clubs will continue to look at each other with their historical mistrust. Social morbidity also makes the show. And the taste for exaggeration that characterizes football and that puts us before games, like this Saturday’s, that seem definitive, even though there is a century left until the end of the League. We are facing the end of the world every year.
Madrid once again found refuge in its typical product against Dortmund: “the comeback”, an event that, by repetition, has already been patented. It was a game in which it seemed impossible to play worse until a goal inaugurated a moment in which it seemed impossible to play better. No one wins a match through a spell, so we have to resort to formal reasons. The first is that impatient and spirited competitiveness that turns the team into a steamroller.
Also the talent, this time represented in a big way by Vinicius, that man who does not look to the sides. He didn’t do it when he didn’t hit the goal and he doesn’t do it now, when he behaves like the best player in the world standing next to the best player in the world. That speaks of an unusual personality. There are players, and they are the majority, who cower at the proximity of a star, and others, like Vinicius, who grow bigger. It could be because he felt challenged by the proximity of a competitor. But that does not apply to the Brazilian. He simply doesn’t look to the sides. He kills his rivals for the Ballon d’Or, near or far, with indifference at a football level that grows every season. On this occasion, “the comeback” largely belonged to him.
Tonight Ancelotti will put a lot of muscle in the middle of the field and will dream of making Mbappé’s pride go away. The greats never fold their arms when challenged.
As for Barça, they found themselves facing Bayern Munich, the painful unit of measurement in recent years. In a spectacular investment exercise, he passed the test leaving a trail of euphoria that will impact your confidence. He arrives at the Bernabéu as a threat. This is a team that plays at full speed without seeming to struggle. Remember that phrase from Truman Capote: “extreme concentration does not know what effort is.” Applied to Raphinha, the phrase could not be more accurate.
Flick found the formula for good functioning in record time, but it has an added merit, opening wide the doors to the quarry. Further proof that the most important man in a quarry is the first team coach. Evolution is not achieved in a while, but at this point it already seems true that in the players who grow up at La Masia there is genetic information that identifies them and that, when they reach the first team, gives them a unique football personality. There are players, like Casadó, to whom it seemed risky to give command of the team and who, now, what seems risky is to take it away. Rarely has “making a virtue out of necessity” made so much sense. And effect. Barça is playing a great game, but Flick is not one of those who get upset. The team searches for the opponent’s goal with constant accelerations. Another characteristic is the suffocating pressure and the very advanced defense that leaves estates behind. Will it work against Vinicius and Mbappé?
This is one of the many questions that the classic will have to answer, that “definitive” event that arrives in the middle of the season.
