With a goal on the hour by Ousman Dembélé, Barcelona defeated Valladolid 1-0, with this agonizing victory the team led by Lionel Messi is one point behind Atlético de Madrid and two ahead of Real Madrid, its next rival on the weekend, in what will be one of the most important classics for the Catalan team in search of saving a difficult season at an institutional and sporting level.
The minutes leading up to today’s game for Barcelona began with a tribute to Lionel Messi for becoming, with 767 games, the player with the most games played in the Barca jersey, one of the few marks he had yet to add to his legendary record as a Blaugrana footballer.
A streak of poor play
Although Ronald Koeman lined up his best eleven to play the match, it is undeniable that the level of the team is not the best and that more than a whole it is a cyclone of bursts of individual talent trying to defend each one as best as they can, the glorious years where good collective play was the maximum doctrine to win the matches have been left behind.
Now it is enough for Barcelona with plays outside the game to get ahead in matches that ultimately are those that crown or stumble champions, sometimes soccer is a sport with many facets that are summarized to a single goal to get the victory.
A classic where the season is defined
To say that this is the most complicated season for the interests of FC Barcelona is to be correct, because it has been a year of change in both institutional and sporting matters, but it was not an organic change of natural selection due to the passage of time but because of the destruction in the least appropriate way of everything built in almost 6 years of management of the controversial president Josep Maria Bartomeu who plunged the club into a wave of sporting scandals and bad financial decisions.
Against this backdrop, the match between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid next Saturday, April 10, is of vital importance for the team from Barcelona, given that after being eliminated from the Champions League, the club must be crowned champion in the local competitions where every game played in the league must be won, taking advantage of the poor results obtained by Atletico Madrid.
In addition, the Culé team will play the final of the King’s Cup against Athletic Bilbao on April 14 in a single match. By winning the cup and achieving a good result in the league table, it will be possible to say in the future that this season went from being the worst in recent years to become the basis of the new sporting era of FC Barcelona.
@alex-martinez
