2024-01-07 12:00:29
BarcelonaBarça has subscribed to a fanciful story and the stubborn reality is slipping away. So much so that we are already in a new year or that the first round of the League has been played. Laporta and Xavi have announced so many times that everything is about to miraculously change, they have appealed so much to faith, magical thinking, levers, external enemies, the epic of overcoming a poisonous inheritance and the nostalgia of ‘a brilliant past that sounds empty, like a scratched record.
There are no arguments to support his pathological optimism or enough rabbits in the top hat. We had to wait for Pedri to return, for De Jong to reappear, because then yes, the team would work like clockwork. It was necessary to start negotiating the transfer of João Félix after he scored the winning goal against Atlético de Madrid, and Balde was a thousand times better than Jordi Alba just before Cancelo took his place on the left wing. Heroes are made in a hurry that grab front pages and fill pages with reports in which they scratch their beginnings and talk about their discoverers and then disappear from the lineups without time to digest neither their dazzling arrival nor their sudden decline. The case of Lamine Yamal is paradigmatic because it is in danger of becoming a syndrome. The youngest debutant, the most precocious goalscorer, the one dubbed “the new Messi” has passed into nothing the witness of the limelight, the celebrity and the illusions of Vitor Roque, who must have enough without suffering jet lag.
Lamine Yamal, without a doubt, has no fault or responsibility in the expectations that were placed on him. At the age of 16, he could not carry the weight of a team that does not know what it is playing for two years after the arrival of Xavi and a club that lives on the edge flirting with ruin based on knock-on effects. There is not a single player, not one, who is reliable this season. Everyone from Araujo to Lewandowski is below the level expected. The problem is structural, global and the solutions are perishable because there is still no clear diagnosis. One day he points to the press, the next to sociological Madridism, the next to Libero or the last pass that didn’t arrive to justify not kicking on goal during the entire first half against Las Palmas. And so, no matter how they put it, it’s impossible.
#Lamine #Yamal #syndrome #takes #club