While in Munich they begin to discover, without complexes, that “playing against Madrid is always very strange”, as Thomas Müller said, here we once again fall in love with the umpteenth voodoo comeback by the whites. It is one more of the scourges that we culés have to suffer. Whenever we lose, we do it twice: on the day of the game in question and, I’m sorry to say, the next day at the newsstand. It’s a very Catalan thing, I would say. Or Levantine, if you want. Disguising everything as a critical spirit, also at the bar and at work, we like to dwell on our weaknesses and frailties, no matter how temporary they may be, as if in this way we would be freed from adversity or we could escape a bad result. That’s why I was moved by Jaume Marcet’s article the day before yesterday in the newspaper Sport. “You always have to feel proud to be from Barça,” he said. The companion recalled the desert journey that the 1980s were for people of our generation. “They lift the cups,” as Jordi Basté always says. The Venables league was a first step on the table for all of us. But before we had learned to be part of Barça, without many titles to celebrate, without the addictive dependence on results. Maybe we were victimists. And crybabies. But we weren’t rude. “What was the icing on the cake has become the essential part over the years, and this is a huge mistake,” Marcet continued. To say, as we said yesterday, from these pages, that Xavi’s team is not doing well in Europe, as Madrid is, when we had not even reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League for four seasons, or to grumble because the Camp Nou is under construction, when we should have started it many years ago, I don’t know what purpose it has, beyond digging deeper into the wound… I was talking about it with friends just yesterday, because by chance we were visiting the works from Spotify Camp Nou. Indeed, the rubble, the dust and the trucks, where we had seen Messi, Laudrup, Schuster and Maradona run, may seem like photographs of the apocalypse. But these same rubble, dust, cranes and trucks are also the prelude to a spectacular transformation that the club has boldly undertaken, after a very, very dark time.
A meme is running through the networks that makes me laugh a lot. Juanma Rodríguez, from El Chiringuito, comes out, stating with all firmness and conviction that “God belongs to Madrid.” According to predictions, before the year is over, we culés will be able to once again enjoy watching matches where it belongs, between the maternity hospital and the cemetery, which is where human beings like to spend time.
