Evolution of Barça at the Bernabeu. If in recent weeks the team has appealed to what Antonio Gramsci called optimism of the will to combat the pessimism of intelligence, yesterday it immersed itself in a football that we could place in the territory of the pessimism of the will. Without conviction and with apparently chronic insecurity, for an hour Barça did not know how to counter Madrid’s strategy: provoke errors in a defense that tends to make them.
I don’t have the knowledge to analyze tactical nuances and have to rely on gut feeling and spontaneous perceptions. For example: in the Cope, Dani Senabre said: “With the defense that Barça has, it doesn’t matter if you have Lewandowski, Jesus Christ or Lucas Skywalker in front of you”. If Jesus Christ and Skywalker were in the market, we would probably sign them, they would immediately lose the halo that has made them superheroes of religion or fiction and their representatives would make a fortune.
Vinícius, a dangerous striker, rowdy and demagogue, asked the Bernabeu crowd to cheer. It is a custom that devalues ??the priorities of the gestural protocol of football. Historically, the crowd can be spurred on in the final minutes of a final or in extra time. But doing it five minutes after starting a game is the symptom of impatience, bad taste and an out of tune ego. These gestures have a result equivalent to appeals to hope or the resource of relativizing a defeat that should not be so important if Barça were not experiencing a moment of great fragility. A fragility that should cause, in addition to precision in the diagnosis, the ability not to return to the usual flaccid and manic-depressive rhetoric.
The fragility of Barça is not only football. There is a psychological component that exacerbates emotions to the point of turning them into dogmas and slabs. Just as it seems that the rivals attack and hit more easily than us, it also seems that defeats, setbacks, refereeing errors and fatalities do not affect them as much. A few years ago, in a substantial conversation with two connoisseurs of the academies of each team (former First Division players), the Barça player was very eloquent when it came to underlining the nuances in the training of young people and the importance of the game model, the philosophy of the positions and details such as shaping up or mastering the oriented control. The Madrid player, on the other hand, was blunt offensively: “At Madrid, from a young age we teach players to win.”
The possibilities of reaction are limited and Barça cannot do anything but be patient and continue trusting in their own possibilities. Recklessly borrowing to strengthen the team still does not make the team a foolproof alternative. In addition to knowing it, it is convenient to adapt the story of expectations to a realism and humility that, while the Bernabeu public chanted the olés that define the underworld of rivalry, we should turn into a form of pride as tangible and hopeful as incorruptible vigor of Gavi.
