Luis Enrique said he wanted the Camp Nou to tremble and tremble it did, just not the way he hoped. Saturday started with Luis Suárez scoring at the south end in the 55th second and ended with Leo Messi scoring at the north end in the last second. In the 92 minutes and four seconds between those goals, they suffered. Eventually El Mundo Deportivo cheered “a happy ending” and, surveying the final scene, there was something a bit cinema about it: an explosion, the hero lying on the ground motionless, slowly opening his eyes, looking around, and realising that somehow, with implausible inevitability, he’s still here. He’s survived; they’ve actually done it. Now here come his friends, running towards him, relieved and elated, hauling his exhausted body off the floor and embracing him.
Or something like that.
“You’ll buy the papers tomorrow and read that Barcelona beat us 2-0 but that doesn’t mean anything,” the Valencia midfielder André Gomes said. A crowd of 92,915 people came to the Camp Nou; their fear only evaporated with the final kick. Those who arrived too late to see the first goal and left too early to see the second – and although there were fewer than normal, there were plenty of them – had watched through their fingers until, with Valencia pushing for an equaliser, the entire team on the edge of the Barça area, a long ball clipped into space sent Messi away all alone on one last run.
The clock ticked up towards 93 minutes as Messi ran. He missed his chance but got another one, the ball bouncing off Diego Alves and back to his feet, with an open goal before him. There was a huge roar and as Messi celebrated his legs gave way. He lay behind the net, barely moving, arms on his chest, breathing heavily, but when they lifted him up, Dani Alves shaking the cramp from his legs, there was a smile on his face. Barcelona had struggled and they had clung on, desperately waiting for the whistle, but they had survived. More than survived, they had taken a huge step towards the league title, they said. Not least because they had suffered.
A total of 56 seconds had been enough at each end of the game, Santi Giménez describing it in AS as a “palindromic victory”, one in which bookended by those goals was a match in which “Barcelona were crapping themselves so much they needed a prescription for an astringent”. In that time, Valencia had taken 11 shots. As the first half progressed, each chance was clearer than the last. The ball flew across the face of goal, players sliding in, inches away. Shots were sliced wide. And final passes were scuffed. Paco Alcácer hit the post and Dani Parejo missed a penalty. Catalans’ cheeks were permanently puffed out.
“We suffered,” admitted Barcelona’s goalkeeper Claudio Bravo. “Never in my life have I seen a game with so many chances against Barcelona,” said his Valencia counterpart Diego Alves.
It is hard to recall a game in which Barcelona were dominated so much, in the first half at least. “Valencia play, Barça win,” said the headline in El País. The Barcelona-supporting columnist Juan Cruz hailed the club’s new signing: some guy called Miracle. It was a “going over,” said Josep Maria Bartomeu, the president. That’s Josep Maria Bartomeu, the Barcelona president. Others used words such as beating, drubbing and bath. “They were better than us,” Sergio Busquets agreed. The first half had been “superb,” said Valencia’s manager, Nuno Espirito Santo.
It was also a faithful reflection of their approach for most of the season, the philosophy favoured by Nuno and his Scottish coach Ian Cathro, just even more so. Nuno talked about a “superhuman effort” and Valencia ran further and faster than Barcelona. And although by the end their energy sapped, they were slowing down, the speed and intensity and the way it was coordinated had mostly been too much for Barcelona, who could not escape the pressure. With Javier Mascherano as the deep midfielder and Busquets and Xavi Hernández in front of him to either side, Valencia suffocated them.
Instead of waiting, packing the defence and creating a deep, narrow block to make it hard to find a way through as others have done, Valencia played high, right on top of the Barcelona back four. Right on top of Mascherano and Xavi too, giving them no way out. “The percentage of mistakes we made was abnormally high,” Luis Enrique admitted.
Only once did Barcelona properly break through the line of pressure, when Busquets found Messi to make the opening goal in the first minute. Instead, Valencia were winning possession a long way up the pitch and heading straight to goal. Barcelona lost the ball constantly and the consequence was usually a player running at them, with others sprinting towards them too. Feghouli in particular terrified Adriano while every pass looked to progress, maintaining momentum and pace. Nothing backwards or sideways, always forward. And forward they came, again and again.
The plan worked to perfection, but for one thing: somehow the goal never came. “Brave, but no reward,” lamented Super Deporte. In the dressing room, the laments were louder. This was the ultimate in frustration for a coach: a game in which it all works, but it doesn’t. For the first time in 10 games, Valencia were beaten and, with Atlético Madrid winning, they slipped four points off third place. “My emotions are weird ones,” Nuno admitted. “I am proud but not satisfied. The first half was brilliant. There were too many chances for the result to end up the way it has. We are convinced that this is the right path to follow and I am proud but not satisfied, because ultimately what matters is the result. We leave here hurt and sad.”
Luis Enrique was delighted. Had this result left Barcelona reforzado, reinforced, he was asked? “Reforzadísimo”, he replied, adding the superlative. Others followed suit, as if surviving Valencia was better than just beating them. Which, emotionally, it may well be. Titles are made of this, they said. Style matters, but right now scores matter more. “To win you have to know how to suffer,” Jeremy Mathieu had said after the win in Vigo; now his words were recovered. “We struggled but got the win,” Bravo said.
There were other reasons to be happy. Suárez scored again. No one got injured. Luis Enrique admitted that there were players who had reached Saturday low on fuel, but they had come through. “I am knackered from all the travelling and I haven’t played a single minute,” he had said before the game. There is a personality and resilience about Barcelona that was not there before: look at this game and the Vigo game and it is hard to imagine them winning them last season. Then there’s the fact that Luis Enrique read the game right. At half-time, he took of Adriano, moved Mathieu to left back, put Mascherano at centre-back, put Busquets back in deep midfield and brought on Ivan Rakitic. If they still suffered, if there was no security until the last minute, it was different now.
Above all, this was a huge victory because of who it was against and when, because the consequences of defeat or a draw would have been dire and because a draw was always a possibility. Valencia are arguably the strongest side Barcelona will face between now and the end of the season, certainly until they play Atlético on the penultimate weekend. After drawing at Sevilla last weekend, when they played significantly better than they did here, they could not drop points again. They have emerged with that reduced two-point lead maintained, with a game fewer to play. “The title, ever closer” ran the cover of Sport; “We’ll win it,” ran El Mundo Deportivo, echoing Gerard Piqué’s promise after his mistake cost them two points last weekend.
The context matters too: the game against PSG and Sevilla, even Celta before that. Much has been made of the fact that a week that could have damaged Barcelona’s season, called the Tourmalet after the hardest climb on the Tour de France’s mountain stages, is now behind them and they are still top. With each passing week, the games played column is almost as important as points won column.
On one level that is a curious argument, because they did drop points in Seville last week and they still have the derby at Espanyol to come next week before they set off downhill; they are not through this stage yet and they will not come through it with all the points they wanted. But there is something in it: not least because Real Madrid are about to go into the same run that Barcelona have just come out of: Vigo, Sevilla, Valencia. And there is comfort in the suffering against those teams because if they suffered against them Madrid may suffer against them too.
Luis Enrique certainly always knew how significant this was. “I don’t normally do this, but this time I am asking them to come because of how big a match this is,” the Barcelona manager said. “I want the Camp Nou to tremble.” For 92 minutes and six seconds, it did just that.
Talking points
• Real Madrid beat a hugely impressive Málaga side 3-1 but at a price. Cristiano Ronaldo thumped a penalty against the post, his first miss in 10 this season, but got the third in the last minute and produced an outrageous piece of skill in the first half of a difficult game. Madrid were struggling until James Rodríguez played two one-twos and hit the top corner. The win was a relief and probably an important one but most of the focus was on the bad news. Gareth Bale and Luka Modric picked up injuries and miss the Champions League semi-final second leg with Atlético. Bale will be out for two or three weeks, Modric for close to six weeks. Karim Benzema might miss the game too and Marcelo is suspended. Fábio Coentrão, his replacement, hasn’t played for over a month.
• “My team behaved very well for the way they were treated,” said Málaga’s manager Javi Gracia, enigmatically.
• Griezmann. Golazo! He scored two, the first a beauty, to take his total to the season to 20 in the league.
• Speaking of lovely goals …
• Another late goal, another comeback, another vital point. Not Barral this time – although he did smash one off the bar – but Víctor Casadesús. He scored in the 87th to give Levante a 2-2 draw with Espanyol and keep them a point ahead of the relegation zone.
• José Antonio Romero was wearing a green tie. “My shirt is white but my tie is not black,” Córdoba’s third manager of the season said after his side’s 0-0 draw with Villarreal. “I will not let people bury us while we are still alive.” Their chances of survival are few, though. At one point during a game in which they were overrun but escaped without losing, the radio commentator said “the best thing that Córdoba can do is burst the ball” and the point doesn’t really help much. They’re eight points off safety with six games to go. And frankly they’re not likely to win many of them. They face Athletic, Barcelona, and Rayo. That said, games with Eibar, Granada and Levante do at least give them the chance to close the gap on other sides fighting relegation.
• Almería. This is going to get messy, isn’t it? They’re not in the relegation zone, says the LFP. Oh yes they are, says the RFEF.
• Diego Mainz scored twice, one for each team, as it finished Granada 1-1 Sevilla.
Results: Levante 2-2 Espanyol, Barcelona 2-0 Valencia, Deportivo 1-2 Atlético, Real Madrid 3-1 Málaga, Athletic 4-0 Getafe, Rayo 2-0 Almería, Granada 1-1 Sevilla, Villarreal 0-0 Córdoba, Eibar 0-1 Celta. Monday night: Elche v Real Sociedad.
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