Real beat Barcelona in the Spanish Super Cup match – 4:1
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In the final of the Spanish Super Cup, Real won one of the most striking victories in the history of the confrontation with Barcelona. He defeated it with a score of 4:1, and the main beneficiary of the Catalans’ unexpected flexibility was Madrid forward Vinicius, who scored a hat-trick in the first half.
After this match, which took place in Saudi Arabia, Barcelona coach Xavi had to make something like a big policy statement. In it, he asked for forgiveness from fans and promised to respond to the failure with work to correct mistakes, insisting that he still “believes in both the project and himself.”
A single match, even against the main rival, even a match with a fairly valuable prize at stake, does not seem to be a reason for repentance, not a global failure. But everything is clear. This local failure turned out to be somehow too painful and too revealing, or something, in the sense that it was easy to discover everything important that prevents Barcelona from now looking exactly the same as it looked in the previous season. In it, she beat Real Madrid in the “golden race” of the championship by ten points. Now the enemies have switched roles. Real Madrid, after 19 rounds, is seven points ahead of the Catalans (though Girona is still next to them, but it’s hard to imagine that they will keep up the pace until the finish) and have already won two of the two El Clasicos. In the previous championship in October, Madrid defeated Barcelona away – 2:1. Now, on a neutral field, they demolished it quite convincingly.
Meanwhile, even the details were revealing. Well, let’s say one of the oddities associated with Barcelona this season is the love of conceding goals early.
There are already an insane amount of them in the national championship and the Champions League. It took Granada and Alaves less than 20 seconds to score against the Catalans, Antwerp a little over a minute, Mallorca eight, Girona and Las Palmas 12, Celta 19… This already something reminiscent of a bad trend, which is easy to explain: quick goals are most often a sign that the team lacks concentration and composure.
With Real Madrid, Barcelona stepped on the same sharp rake that it had stepped on all season. In the opening ten minutes, she missed twice in episodes that spoke not so much about the class of Madrid, for example, the class of those who gave assists to Jude Bellingham and Rodrigue, but about the amazing flexibility of the Catalan defense, which literally threw the gate wide open in front of the recipient of these passes, Vinicius.
Some of those matches in which Barcelona let their opponents go ahead already at the opening stage ended happily for them. But it is clear that such a scenario could hardly have happened in Riyadh, given who the opponents were this time. Filled to the brim with courage, Real could not be embarrassed by Robert Lewandowski’s superb strike, with which he reduced the gap to a minimum, and Madrid continued to look for weaknesses in the Catalans’ rear, which in fact did not require any fantastically keen eye.
In principle, the desire to defend is highly commendable, but in this particular match Barcelona, it seems, would have been better off getting rid of it by taking care of the density directly in the penalty area.
In general, before the break she made another mistake, and Ronald Araujo had to push Vinicius in the back, who found himself in front of the goal, running into a yellow card and a penalty. The striker himself realized it, joining the honorable company: in this century, only legends – Luis Suarez, Karim Benzema, Lionel Messi – scored hat-tricks in El Clasico before him.
And what happened after the break did not add any new shades to the game that were pleasant for Barcelona. She lost because of a second yellow card, who again fouled Vinicius Araujo, and even before that she conceded the fourth goal – from Rodrigue, without getting any chance to make the loss less devastating. And Real Madrid’s football exuded both freshness and absolute comfort. There was no escape from the feeling that the people of Madrid read everything, see everything. As well as from the feeling that, no matter how local this breakdown may be, it is one of those for which the coach who committed it would have to thoroughly, with feeling, justify himself.
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