A slight Madrid impulse at Anoeta: all bad news for Madrid except the three points; leagues have been won with more inexplicable issues. The worst: Brahim’s injury. Brahim brings a fatal imbalance to Madrid for the rivals, he is a player of intermediate territories and therefore unchained from the offensive functioning of the team: the offensive is him, and when attacking it is the rivals and above all his teammates who have to unravel his zigzag; the result is usually dazzling. He was in the physical form that those footballers are in who perceive that this is going to be their year. If it is, it will have to be so after Christmas because he will be out for three months. Neither the lacklustre play of Madrid, which allowed Real to score two or three goals before the Whites, nor the noise that has accompanied Vinicius these weeks (everything that was once original, nice or symbolic becomes an unbearable affront if he does it, from dancing to telling people to shut up) compete in bad news with the casualties, which are repeated at the start of each season. The team is a clock whose parts have to be changed every so often, causing tremors.
In Girona there is another light, that of Barcelona. With an exceptionally injured De Jong, whose fans fear his return. Dani Olmo has easily adapted to Barça and Lamine Yamal has taken up the torch to put the team in the direction of a game idea, which is what Barça was lacking. After Messi, the Barcelona fans assaulted the youth academy, for lack of money, to find someone not to replace him, which is impossible, but at least to renew the light with which the Argentine soaked everything. There were various attempts caused by anxiety (that number 10 carrying the back of Ansu Fati) until reaching a player so premature that the vertigo of the bet being frustrated and, with it, the player was scary. Good: it has multiplied by two. The lights don’t blind him, the prestige of the Euros doesn’t weigh down, nor does being on the Ballon d’Or list or being on everyone’s lips: at 17 years old, Yamal unblocks games, scores, assists and shows up undaunted on any field to support the unexpected turn of events regarding the Madrid-Barça rivalry. Reinforced with Mbappé, the Spanish and European champion is four points behind Barcelona, and that’s not much.
Flick retired from football at the age of 28 due to injuries. He was unable to watch a Bundesliga match in any stadium for two years: the world, his own, kept turning even after he left. He knew, he said in an interview with the German federation in 2015, that at some point he would have to answer what he would do after football, but he did not know that this question would come to him so quickly, before he had turned 30. Low’s assistant at Brazil 2014, the last World Cup won by Germany, Flick talks and talks about pressing as the key to the game: the ball is for us. From his time in the youth categories of German football, we can conclude what Pedri de Yamal said at the end of the match against Girona: he highlighted him, the star, his help in pressing. “The players,” said Flick, “need to make the right decisions in an instant. They must be able to counteract the pressure of the opponent and they must have the technical ability to implement the best possible solution.” And that’s where Barça is, and Madrid isn’t there yet.
