One of the most difficult things to achieve in this life is to have a place to return to.
Spain knows, since this Saturday, that it can always return to Barcelona.
In the Espanyol field, before more than 35,000 people, with the red and yellow stands, there was no football match.
There was a reunion.
They saw each other again who one day were separated.
They saw each other again and verified, what things, that they still want.
Eighteen years later, almost, or almost without, a lifetime, Barcelona embraced Spain and showed it that it had missed it.
If not all, then a good part of that city, handed over without fuss to the national team in a festive claim of lost rights.
[2-1: Narration and statistics]
Barcelona loves Spain.
And she told him.
In few environments so warm, so enthusiastic, has the national team played at home lately.
The team won against Albania, but that, football, was the least of it.
The rest?
That the national team has taken back this city.
The arrival to the field already allowed to intuit the party.
The vast majority of those who walked to the stadium or looked for parking in the surroundings carried the Spanish flag in their hands, or around their necks, or around their waists, or in the air.
Later, inside, with the stadium dyed red and yellow, there was a festive atmosphere to which the musical selection contributed (Raphael and his great night as number one), a large flag in one of the backgrounds ("Barcelona with the selection ") and the reminders, from Andrés Iniesta to Dani Jarque passing through Pedri.
oh!
And of course, the "I am Spanish."
Because, it should be remembered, in Barcelona, in Catalonia, there are many people who feel that Spain is their country and that the national team is their team.
There was a desire to return when seeing the group now of Luis Enrique,
There was no uncomfortable situation in the hours before, during, or in the hours after the game.
The Catalan National Assembly had asked that the balconies of the city be filled with esteladas, and except for some isolated, very isolated, their call hardly found a response among their own.
Instead, the Spanish flags did shine on the streets near the field, a normality that was not always the norm in recent years.
The next time Spain plays in Barcelona all this will not be news, it will not even be noteworthy, except for the fact that the team can put those 35,000 back on the field to see a session like last night, inconsequential, quite bland in football, against a rival with hardly a name.
Because, having told the truly important thing about what happened last night in Cornellá, it is convenient to dwell for a while on what the Spanish team did on the pitch.
Unai Simón was absent in goal, with a sudden and unexplained loss, Robert Sánchez, who was going to play, the goalkeeper was David Raya, and Rodri who played Busquets.
The rest are more or less regular players who, as has happened to this team on many occasions, did not know how to decipher the accumulation of men that Albania proposed for the match.
It is known that the way Luis Enrique's group is built, he feels much more comfortable playing against rivals who look him in the eye.
The best nights of the Asturian project have been against Germany, Italy, France or Portugal.
There emerges the best version of a group where the coach's obsession with automating movements, especially when he loses the ball, turns each game into a minefield for the players, eager to comply with the orders received since the World Cup is just around the corner. the corner.
Yesterday, Busquets, who is a fixture, and Unai Simón were missing, but the rest could be the starting team if tomorrow was the first game in Qatar.
So it is good to resume, four months after the last time the team could be seen, the feeling that the bet is what it is, that it is not going to change and that it has its virtues and its defects.
You can sense many more of the former than of the latter, but there is a bit of everything, and that obviously has its risks.
For example, the difficulty in creating chances against tight defences.
Spain hardly had chances to score.
Neither at the beginning nor when Luis Enrique shook the tree putting Soler, Dani Olmo and Jordi Alba.
He went through the team through the innocuous movement of the ball, without much else to tell, getting ahead thanks to Ferran Torres, already playing center forward, but seeing how Albania equalized in a carom product of a poor clearance by Pau Torres.
It was fixed with a great goal by Dani Olmo.
But nothing more, perhaps in a premeditated action to leave the focus where it was: in the intense reunion between Barcelona and Spain.
With the selection, you already have a place to return to.
Other.
It should try to offer something more of a show, and even make it an official match, but the step has been taken.
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