There had never been so many people in the provisional stadium where Barça, my team since I was eleven years old, played their unfortunate match against PSG in Paris on Tuesday. Very soon the faces of young people who were probably going to see their team play for the first time, encouraged by the possibility that the end of a curse would be fulfilled at home, were the same ones that one can imagine if one is a fan of any other team, deposits in him the illusions that derive from the love of colors or, simply, he has been and is a Barcelona fan since childhood.
The illusions came from a miracle, that the Barça of now, that of The footballer was first for Madrid and then he wore the colors that this Tuesday he helped crush. With all merit, it must be said immediately.
In that meeting in Paris there were some events that made the Barça team harbor illusions that were later disappointed as the ambitions of poor children before learning that the Three Wise Men do not exist. Before the Paris game, Luis Enrique made fun (later he would say it was a joke) of his Barça colleague's ability to take away from his team the scepter held first by Mbapé, and something else happened, far from the field, but that It had to do with what was going to happen on the field.
The former Argentine goalkeeper, legendary Atlético de Madrid goalkeeper, known as Mono Burgos, said in a television interview something about one of Barcelona's leading footballers, Lamin Yamal, who was taken the wrong way by those who run football in the different instances called to the important match. Burgos said that of course that boy, of African origin, who is still sixteen years old, and that he is a shining revelation of soccer, had to play well, because it depends on that that one day he won't have to ask at traffic lights.
There was a multilateral protest, and Burgos was stripped of his newly minted title of commentator on Spain's main television station. The match was played, Lamin Yamal was the most brilliant of the footballers, Barça played like angels, if angels can be a point of sporting comparison, and Barça and what this means, fans who do not know the managers We are not from Barcelona, nor are we going to win with that victory but rather the joy that comes to us from the illusions of childhood, we feel that life was reborn, that Barça made us return to the time of Pep Guardiola when even the Madrid fans applauded in its stadium the legendary football of Ronaldinho.
Coincidentally, Ronaldinho was among the spectators who, in the stadium where PSG is the owner, applauded the boy who was beaten by Mono Burgos.
With that illusion, that of winning, that of having won, that of being able to win, we have lived since then, a week ago this Tuesday. In fact, I myself live like this, as a Barça tifosi, at least since I was eleven years old and heard the match on the radio that is my own personal legend. At that time, in a stadium in Bern, the Portuguese Benfica was competing against Ladislao Kubala's Barcelona (with Di Stéfano, the great footballer of that time) for the European title, which on the other hand would almost always belong to Di Stéfano's team, the Real Madrid.
On that occasion Kubala was accompanied, for example, by Don Luis Suárez, the greatest legend of Spanish football, and an often infallible goalkeeper who was Ramallets, a man with a sad face and divine hands.
The match went down in football legend as one in which the goalposts played and they did so in favor of the Portuguese team, in which another European and peninsular legend, Eusebio, was at that time. Barcelona's defeat was 2-3, and the match entered the Barça legend of bad luck.
This boy who then lived with pain and tears, the real ones, the tears of a child, that disaster, faced in a similar way the new horror of Montjouich, the headquarters where PSG now made Barça live another dark episode of its history.
On that occasion, faced with the disaster in Berne, I decided not to leave the house for several days, since there is no worse mockery than the one that a defeat of these characteristics causes, nor is there a better solution to solve the moral consequences of the sadness to write about it. And that's what I did, I wrote.
I experienced that disaster against Benfica at home, I was a child, I could leave school under any pretext, and I started writing. I don't know what I would do then, on what paper I would have at home I told the moral reasons for my crying, what I said about Kubala, what about Eusebio, what about Ramallets. I know, however, what happened now, what happened during and after this disappointed football lesson that was the present misfortune of Montjuich.
Now, adult and old, I came from a job that took me to the other side of Europe, to Bulgaria, whose capital, Sofia, has a beautiful cathedral in which I saw young and old cross themselves, and although I did not fall into that temptation I have I thought later that perhaps a prayer would have been good for the fate of my team, which would later be so beaten...
I came back for the match, the occasion was too important, it was almost a final, the Barça that belonged to Luis Enrique was going to take revenge on Luis Enrique, and on Dembèlè, who was a promising Barça player and now makes fun of us at PSG... He Football mixes revenge and joy, it excites different degrees of meanness or human greatness.
I arrived home exhausted, because before sitting down to watch the screen (which didn't work, until the god of television took pity on me!) I had to participate in a program about a Spanish surrealist, Francisco Nieva. There was nothing in the refrigerator but an Italian panettone, so with hunger for the future I ate the present with the first scare, the most symbolic of this cruel, desperate match.
The Uruguayan Araújo, in charge of following Mbappé around the field, was expelled by the referee in use of his refereeing, and that carom that always occurs on the playing fields to annoy your team was started with collateral damage that the soul broke.
That collateral damage was the replacement of the teenager Yamal, elevated to the darkness of the stands to bring in others of greater magnitude to shore up a defense that in the end was a drain through which Luis Enrique's French made the undoubted talent of their team pass. figures, among them that of the damned Dembélé, who when he was a Barça player seemed so indolent, fanatic and restless. In this game, in addition to scoring and scaring, he smiled and laughed, his jaw pounding.
I didn't let the match end; even though the television had come to my senses, even though the panettone fixed my stomach, even though there were some poetry books at home that could stop my tears of defeat, I could start writing this text just like when I was eleven years old, Faced with a similar disaster, but I must say less humiliating, I began to write on any piece of paper the real, childish nature of my tears. Lamin, when he was leaving the field, was seen on camera in a similar attitude. That night all of us Barcelona fans were Lamin Yamal. And we all lost hope, tears and patience.