This was not just a victory, it was an exorcism, the olés ringing round the Olympic stadium as high on Montjuïc hill Barcelona laid ghosts to rest. Bayern Munich – the ogres who had put eight past them in Lisbon, defeated them six times running with an aggregate score of 22-4, and hadn’t even conceded the last four times they met, the team that were just too good, repeatedly reminding them of their own grim reality – left here in pieces, expertly sliced apart.
Four times Barcelona cut through, Raphinha scoring a hat-trick on his 100th game and Robert Lewandowski getting another in a 4-1 win that felt like a revelation, a new life.
“You owe us one,” Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, had told Hansi Flick; here the former Bayern coach who, like Lewandowski, had been on the other side during that 8-2 humiliation four years ago, a painful, pathetic portrait of the Catalans’ decline, repaid them handsomely.
“The past doesn’t count; what counts is here and now, that’s what we can influence,” he had insisted, but he knew this was about the past too. And about the future: there were six players under 21 in his starting XI, an immensely talented generation emerging. As for right here, right now, they look genuinely good again.
A decade since they last won this competition, a long while since they even thought they might, how Barcelona had needed this, players falling into the arms of astonished fans at the end. How they did it too, an exhibition in incision and fearlessness, danger embraced and defeated. Maybe that’s also about youth, Marc Casadó, Pau Cubarsí, Fermín López and Lamine Yamal superb, not scared of anything. This was a football match played on a cliff top, and all the more enjoyable for it, a sense of jeopardy in every move.
So determined were Barcelona to play high, so willing were Bayern to do something similar, that it produced a breathless game often squeezed into the narrowest strip, an abyss on either side. The threat was always there because far from edging their way around the drop, nervously looking down, they were sprinting round it, fighting for every inch where there was no space and the chance to release the pass beyond the line, where there was loads of it. And where the game would be won.
Barcelona were the first to do so, after just 45 seconds, López’s quick, clever ball sending Raphinha sprinting free, the Brazilian going round Manuel Neuer to make Montjuïc erupt. And so it began, a fine and very fun line trodden by both teams. Bayern took advantage next, Harry Kane heading in on six minutes, or so he thought. VAR ruled that one out for offside but not the next, when he volleyed Serge Gnabry’s cross beyond Iñaki Peña to make it 1-1.
Chasing offsides is Barcelona’s policy but in truth it felt like a hell of a risky one at this stage. Bayern were taking hold, more opportunities looking like a matter of time, Kane’s cross-ball to Raphaël Guerreiro almost creating the second. And yet with Bayern also stepping high – if not quite so high – Barcelona fought their way into the game, one centimetre at a time, then suddenly in 40-metre leaps, and it was the Bavarian team who would get caught.
Chasing offsides is Barcelona’s policy but in truth it felt like a hell of a risky one at this stage. Bayern were taking hold, more opportunities looking like a matter of time, Kane’s cross-ball to Raphaël Guerreiro almost creating the second. And yet with Bayern also stepping high – if not quite so high – Barcelona fought their way into the game, one centimetre at a time, then suddenly in 40-metre leaps, and it was the Bavarian team who would get caught.
The first time they were it was with a simplicity that infuriated Vincent Kompany and the hint of a push which did too. Lamine Yamal’s clipped delivery eliminated two lines. Kim Min-jae leapt, misjudging the flight. López, lingering behind, a hand in the back, turned, ran into the box and lifted beyond Neuer. And, from there, Lewandowski put it into an open net.
The plan was coming together, to be executed again with a precision that would prove breathtaking. Seemingly cornered deep in his own half, Casadó worked a way out and struck a wonderful long diagonal to Raphinha, running free again to send a fantastic shot into the corner. And so, while Bayern sought a way back after half-time, they did it again. Lamine Yamal produced a superb swinging delivery into space and Raphinha was away again, guiding his shot past Neuer to make it four. Time then to enjoy this in a way no one expected, every completed pass another cheer, Barcelona’s bete noire toyed with this time.
What a night it had been, vindication for the Brazilian who had felt pushed out in the summer and was thrown to the air at full-time here, teammates giving him the bumps, the celebrations speaking to the significance of this. Released and embraced, life is different now. For all of them.
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