Barça de Champions: chronicle, result and goals

That’s life. Destroying has always been easier than building. It takes decades to build a cathedral that can fall in a few hours, and it takes a lot of ball touches to knock down defensive walls. Xavi’s new Barça revived sensations from the past in Milan, from those duels against Mourinho’s Inter. The same Terrassen had found himself more than once as a player caught in a spider’s web, unable to find gaps through which to attack entrenched rivals. Now it was his turn to live it in the band. Inter is a specialist in the art of trickery, of making you lose your papers. One of those teams that looks dominated, surrounded, but actually waits for its moment, patiently. One of those scripts seen a thousand times, wow. Barça, frustrated because they couldn’t convert so much possession into shots, turned to their most chaotic player, Dembélé. bad sign Inter, ready as a ferret, bit the counter every time they could.

Football is so naughty that the name of Simone Inzaghi, the local coach, was whistled by most of the fans when the game started. Minutes later, they were applauding him. Barça, elegant now that they are leaders in the League, had been thinking about this match for days, aware of its importance, but between injuries and a lack of ideas, they ended up being caught by the net of an Inter that he was about to go ahead on the scoreboard when Eric Garcia committed a handball penalty bigger than Milan’s Duomo. Fortunately, the VAR detected a previous offside which pardoned the central Martorell, witness just before the break of the Lombard goal, the work of the Turkish Çalhanoglu with a dry shot from the front. Barça arrived late, retreated badly, did not cover the counters and with Sergi Roberto and Marcos Alonso suffering too much on the wings.

Christensen, injured

And you see that the beginning of the match had been encouraging, hiding the ball in Inter in a giant rondo where the icing was missing: finding Lewandowski. Inter understood that the best way to defend the Pole is to stop the other players and prevent the ball from reaching him. Pedri lived surrounded by three rivals, and only Dembélé seemed to escape the Italian vigilance, but every time he did a brilliant action he threw water in the wine by failing in the last decision. The Frenchman is still a man of extremes, able to excite and despair in the same play. Barça saw how, little by little, frustration took over his body, his mind. He fell into the Milanese trap. And to top it all off, Christensen got injured. The Dane, who was playing at a very high level, could not finish the game and gave his space to a Gerard Piqué who can find himself, almost without knowing how, playing the classic at the Santiago Bernabéu.

Xavi moved the team, but he didn’t want to stretch Dembélé’s ears. What he did is switch sides by sacrificing an inconsequential Raphinha on the turf. And the change of side improved Dembélé a little. A cross of his, in fact, ended in Pedri’s goal that seemed to remove the fog from the Camp Nou, but the VAR, whistleblower, saw involuntary hands from Ansu Fati, who had been on the pitch for a few minutes to revive the attack Nothing was going well for him at Barça. It wasn’t the day. In fact, the VAR itself did not want to see some hands from Dumfries in the last minute that looked even clearer. Barça ended up angry with the VAR, the referee, the opponent and themselves. The serious refereeing error does not alone explain a too loose game of a team that has come back with a bad face from the selection stop.

Barça ended up attacking the defense of an Inter that didn’t even try to counter. His priority was to waste time, to lose the roles of a team that fell into the trap, with quarrels with Gavi and Sergi Roberto. Xavi’s team lacked light and calm. He missed some injured players, but he also missed being able to give life to a Robert Lewandowski who, after going unmarked in the Bayern field, was also unable to be the savior in Milan. The second consecutive defeat away from home leaves Barça with no room for manoeuvre. It will be up to him to make jumps in the void, now without a safety net. He will not be able to fail against the Interists at the Camp Nou, and even then he will not be able to breathe easy. Bayern will be the judge of a group that was meant to lift the spirits of the Barcelona fans and, instead, has turned into an ordeal. It will be necessary to suffer to see the light. And avoid an elimination that would be dramatic, in every way.