Abraham P. Romero Madrid

Madrid

Updated Monday,15January2024 - 22:51

  • Dancing with wolves in Xavi's moonscape
  • Super Cup: The night Vinicius mortally wounded Xavi
  • Barça don't believe Xavi

The picture was totally different from that of twelve months ago. In January 2023, Joan Laporta exultantly walked out of the VIP door of Riyadh's King Fahd Stadium as his players clamored for a "new era" in Spanish football. On Sunday, at the Al-Awwal stadium in the Saudi capital, the change of scenery of the Super Cup final also left a change in the face of the Barça president. Serious and without making statements, tired from a week that began with a personal matter in Bali and ended with a failure against Madrid, Laporta, always an extrovert and a party animal, quietly got on the Barça bus.

It was a tough night for the Barça squad, with long faces from the final whistle in Arabia to the arrival in Barcelona. Long faces that went from the box to the last physiotherapist, but that had their fucking culmination in the figure of the coach. Xavi Hernandez is the biggest victim of what happened on Sunday night in Riyadh. Accustomed to putting up with ridicule for his tendency to make more or less bizarre excuses, the coach did not want to give rise to anything similar. The wiggle that Madrid had given him made him useless. "We're, we have to improve a lot to win titles. We have to put up with the criticism and ask for forgiveness," admitted the coach, to whom his next phrase - "Barça will be back" - will not help him to dodge the debate that is less and less buried about his continuity.

Find out more

The clause.

Real Madrid leave Barcelona and Atlético in prehistory

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Real Madrid leave Barcelona and Atlético in prehistory

Super cup.

Ancelotti's "cloud" and the memory of the lost final: "Pride and resentment helped us"

  • Written by: ABRAHAM P. ROMERO (Special Correspondent)Riyadh

Ancelotti's "cloud" and the memory of the lost final: "Pride and resentment helped us"

The reality is that the Blaugrana, the current La Liga champions, are seven points behind Real Madrid and eight behind Girona, who have a game in hand, and will play tomorrow for a place in the quarter-finals of the Copa del Rey against Unionistas and the quarter-finals of the Champions League against Napoli next February. This season's results do not invite optimism: they have conceded 10 goals and conceded two in the last three Clasicos, all lost, and have also lost to Antwerp, Girona and Shakhtar. And in La Liga, despite winning, they conceded two goals from Almeria, two from Granada, two from Mallorca, two from Celta and three from Villarreal.

A bleed that points directly to the coach, because although the quality of the players can interfere with the offensive aspect of the team, the defensive part is evident that requires work in training that is not becoming visible in the games. In other words: if there is no quality, you can miss a goal, but if the team doesn't defend well, it's because the coach doesn't work on that variable. This is how at least part of the board understands it, which, however, publicly continues to close ranks around Xavi, without hiding, of course, that being who he is, one of the best players in the club's history, provides him with a credit that someone else would not have, and that others, in the case of Valverde, did not have.

NO EXCUSES

There are no excuses, then, for Xavi, who Laporta will keep until the end of the season, barring catastrophe, but who, according to sources close to the club, sees how the options of extending his project beyond the summer are diminishing. Although no one in the city, of course, dares to say it out loud.

In addition to the precariousness of Xavi's situation, there is another difficulty, which is that of having a dressing room where there are no leaders. In Riyadh, on one of the darkest nights in recent seasons, only Sergi Roberto dared to speak: "I'm worried about everything, we're. You have to learn from your mistakes, be self-critical and get out of it. Against Madrid it always hurts," admitted the captain, who is not in dispute about qualities, but in whom charisma is so difficult to achieve.

Behind him, no one. With Gavi injured, with Pedri still out of the injury quagmire in which he has been for a year and a half, it is not an easy outlook for Barça, who will face an enthusiastic team like Unionistas de Salamanca, Villarreal's executioner in the previous round, almost without time on Thursday. And as Barça stand, a surprise is not out of the question... this time definitive.