Barcelona rescues a draw in an agonizing derby against Espanyol

If our lives, complex for us, bland for humanity, could be summed up on a piece of paper, imagine a football match.

sent

and

some doodles that should help Barcelona avoid defeat in Cornellà.

Four strikers who ended up being five, with

,

and

as hopes, and the search for the impossible: rewrite destiny.

in the 96th minute

to rid Barça of defeat and torment an Espanyol team that has not beaten the Catalans at home for 15 years.

[Narration and statistics]

Espanyol was always better at resisting than living.

That's why he needs constant enemies and that they beat him up.

When that afternoon in 1997 they demolished the old Sarrià stadium, where rough and emotional derbies frolicked with mythology, no one expected to see more than rubble.

But after the cloud of dust caused by 92 kilos of explosives, the grandstand of the north goal still appeared.

Still standing.

Twisted, but firm.

That rebellious concrete was nothing more than an identity metaphor.

Perhaps it was not even bad for Espanyol to wake up from the same grave.

Because not even the clock had reached two minutes of play and Barcelona had already caught the opening goal.

So much so that he discovered both the difficulties of the Blue and Whites in a tidy start, and the torment of

in the covers.

Between Busquets and

cleaned the court for

so that he could try out the lateral center.

The centrals went in search of

.

And

, the most mischievous, had only to sneak in from behind and show the inside of his foot to direct the ball towards the net.

Pedrosa, who knows why, stared at the scene a few meters away.

That Barça ecstasy, too precocious, did not help a good management of the match.

Xavi, beyond those media sermons in which he tries to satisfy the scribes in the face of the yearning for style, has the behavior of an academic coach.

If something works, better not touch it.

Hence, he refused to twist the game plan with which he thrashed Atlético a week ago.

All the players repeated except the suspended

.

In the place of the Brazilian came his natural substitute,

.

As much as the American lives in suspicion and that his profile does not fit at all with that orchestral work - midfielder in attack, winger in defense - with which Xavi dismembered Simeone's pressure.

Dest did not escort Busquets, nor did he offer advantages from the inside, nor did he help Adama on the shore, who only managed to face his duels in the sun with Pedrosa.

He was the former Wolverhampton player, the only Barça player who decided to go deeper.

Vicente Moreno

had tried to cut off the interior corridors of Barcelona using

, one of those players who go everywhere with the rosary and the scythe.

Therefore, necessary.

The fierce pressure of the Albanian compromised that calm for which Xavi so much prayed in the band.

While the coach demanded patience, the players accelerated the attacks.

The game was going awry for a Barcelona that did not find in

the battering ram to clarify a Goya painting.

Ferran was presented with an extraordinary opportunity to make it 0-2.

He reached for the long stick with his head, but the ball floated where it shouldn't.

He tried again with his head and with the score tied, but the ball also went away.

And there, the perfect excuse for Espanyol to respond to the gates of purgatory.

played the raffle.

And after Raúl de Tomás denied the striker's greed and noticed a propitious solution on the front, Darder's seas parted.

He hit it, in the face of Pedri's opposition, forcing the ball into a rotation that disarmed the goalkeeper.

Xavi was taken away by demons before the innocence of his people.

would not be

an innocent boy.

His marked rebellion helped him win a ball in the area and score the 1-2 that was not.

Just before the ball had bounced off Frenkie de Jong, caught by the VAR offside.

That blow came to Barça with another even harder one.

Araujo injured

Eric

had to close the defense.

He made it horrible.

Darder only had to pass the ball over him to leave De Tomás alone against Ter Stegen.

The Espanyol striker, an excellent finisher, caused an earthquake in Cornellà with the goal that left a Barcelona stiff that did not give up.

Because, in the agony and before the hammering of centers into the area, Luuk de Jong was still able to rise above everyone to hunt down a tie that seemed impossible.

The expulsions of

and

, when the night no longer admitted sanity, served as a suitable culmination.

“There is something amoral in the attentive observation of the bravery and risk of others”, wrote

after years of facing the memory of wars.

The same feeling left the derby in Cornellà.

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