Distance duel. As football is excited by the myth of return (even if it is by an interposed person), Messi at Maradona’s altar fired literature. We hoped that the party would give us scientific references of who was better. Seeing it as a duel was a somewhat ridiculous fantasy, because Maradona was sanctified in Naples more than 25 years ago. The passage of time is the perfect escape: each one was the best of his time and another butterfly. But football is not conciliatory and, already in the warm-up, Messi was greeted with the cry of “Diego, Diego, Diego”. A vote in triplicate. The match did not change the perception because Barça played wide, Gattuso locked him in a cage and Messi is allergic to exhibitionism. Since the temporary alibi does not work, you have to go to the territorial one. In Argentina and in Naples, competing against Maradona is impossible. The revenge, at the Camp Nou.
Let’s do justice with hate. Emotions have a good memory and Guardiola at the Bernabéu is no small thing to further recreate the myth of return. In this case, it was only necessary to know the size of the dislike. And also which of the three possible proposals prevailed. A quick examination leaves the following conclusions: that of being Mourinho’s counterpart passed into oblivion, his status as a Barcelona myth does not prescribe, but it is his declarations in favor of independence that has renewed the irritation. It is a very current misunderstanding. Guardiola does not hold any public office and fame does not endow anyone with more wisdom, so his opinion is worth one. It is those who give political importance to the words of a coach who amplify them and turn them into a manifesto. There is only one reason to hate him, master class football that their teams give when they step on the Bernabéu.
Communicating wounds. Is it easier to be defeated when there are internal problems, or is it easier to have internal problems when you are defeated? Barça is indifferent to the question because both things happen to it. He drags wounds and they fester when bad results arrive. Also when they get a good result after a lousy game, as happened in Naples. There are strictly football wounds, because hundreds of millions in signings failed to adapt to a club that suffers from acute nostalgia. Illness that will only be cured by dancing to rivals and winning a sextet, as if Guardiola’s Barça were replicable. And then there are the institutional problems, where terrible communication is perceived, which neither convinces the fans, who rediscovered the handkerchiefs, nor the players, who do not hide their discomfort in their statements. The curious thing about the case is that, due to the theory of communicating vessels, it has been Real Madrid that seems to have been left with the problems. The classic remains to return them.
Count football. We commentators are afraid of being out of our time and we make efforts to appear modern. In the effort to find new features of the game, we discover insignificant details that fail to cover essential issues. Or we tell old things with new words. What used to be low, medium or high pressure is now high, medium or low block. Everything is block, as if a team were a pile of cement. Thus, we end up speaking for trainers, forgetting that the audience is made up of more casual people. Our mission is to find the knot in the game, talk about the range of talents that decide much more than tactical drawings, or notice the telluric movements that produce moods. Find the epic that draws the emotion. Humanize football, in short, and accept its contradictions. Don’t make it a scientific question to jump on the trend.