At the Pati Llimona civic center, in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, journalist Adrià Soldevila presented the book yesterday The longest match (Ara Llibres), a long-running journalistic chronicle that narrates with surgical precision how one of the most difficult days of the meeting led by Josep Maria Bartomeu took place in the bowels of the Camp Nou: the match between Barça and Las Palmas of October 1, 2017. Joan Maria Pou, director of Barça plays RAC1, was in charge of moderating the presentation of a book that he defined as “the addictive minute-by-minute story of everything that happened at the Barça board when the police began to take to the streets”.
At the same time that Pou was giving the first pills in Soldevila’s book, journalist Ramon Besa wrote down on a piece of paper, an unequivocal gesture of a lifelong chronicler, at what points he would articulate his speech on The longest match and everything that surrounds the book. “It is a book with great journalistic value and has three essential ingredients to do the job well: sources, fieldwork and documentation,” said Besa.
One of the key elements that endows Soldevila’s work is that the journalist had access to the WhatsApp group of board members and from there built his story. “After many conversations in off [conservant l’anonimat de l’interlocutor], I had an idea of how to make the book, but I was overjoyed when I got access to these messages, because they allowed me to make a precise chronological reconstruction of the meetings and episodes of that day.
Barça ended up playing behind closed doors, a difficult solution -Bartomeu received a lot of pressure on October 1- that almost no one ended up liking and that marked a before and an after in the board. Bartomeu and the delegate committee had agreed to suspend the match, but the president, after meeting with the locker room – only two players were opposed to playing, Piqué and Sergi Roberto – pulled to the right. Bartomeu, resigning himself to what he had agreed with the directors with whom he had met – among them Carles Villarrubí, who resigned that day, like Jordi Monés -, in the end opted for the proposal to play behind closed doors. Just when there was a statement from the club prepared in which it was said that the match was postponed.
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