A third defeat in six games, at lowly Valladolid, has the vultures circling at Camp Nou as Real Madrid move four points clear
At the end of Barcelona's 1-0 defeat at Valladolid on Saturday afternoon, Víctor Valdés took refuge in the bathroom. Somewhere in the distance, along the passageway, the Serbian central defender Stefan Mitrovic was smashing his way through the door of the home dressing room in celebration. But here, in the visitors' bathroom, all was quiet. Valdés positioned his camera and filmed a video résumé of the game, a kind of selfie press conference with a wall of white tiles replacing the usual collage of sponsors. This was, he said looking at the camera, a "bad game." The video is 30 seconds long and towards the end there is a suspiciously familiar noise. It is the noise of someone flushing Barcelona's title challenge down the pan.
That, at least, is the way it was greeted, and not entirely without reason. Outside the stadium something was launched at Gerard Piqué; the following morning everything was launched at all of them. El Mundo Deportivo feared that Barcelona had left "half a league" behind in Valladolid. The only surprise was that they said "half." Others didn't; they insisted that the entire season had escaped. "The players threw away the league ... and we were ashamed of them," ran the headline in Sport, yellow lettering screaming out from a cover in funeral black. The following night, Real Madrid defeated Levante 3-0 at the Bernabéu. "Madrid break free," cheered AS.
Barcelona are only four points behind Real Madrid at the top, one behind Atlético Madrid in second, and there are still 11 matches to go. One of them is the clásico in a fortnight's time, the chance to take points off their rivals and close to within a solitary point. Afterwards, Tata Martino was talking about the maths; Barcelona would continue to fight for as long as the title is mathematically possible, he said. Which is fine but when you start talk about the maths it's never a good sign and the maths doesn't make happy reading. Here's one simple sum to start off with: Real Valladolid had won just four times this season before Saturday. Now it's five.
Deservedly so too. Valladolid took the lead a little after a quarter of an hour, through Fausto Rossi. Barcelona had time to react but, apart from a couple of runs from Leo Messi, they simply didn't. When Neymar missed, sending the ball wildly over the bar, they never looked like getting an equaliser, still less a winner. At the end of the game both sides had taken six shots. Barcelona had given the ball away 77 times, more than in any game this season. The few passes they completed were unconvinced and unconvincing, fearful and isolated, directionless. Sideways and backwards they went before hoofing it aimlessly, not so much passing the ball as passing up on it.
Xavi Hernández complained about the grass and while the pitch was not great – and anyone who has been to Valladolid in winter knows why - his comments about the surface have now reached a point of self-parody that, even when true, do little to support his case or to suggest that they will find, or even seek, a solution. And if the ball bobbled, Barcelona ambled. If the ball travelled slowly, and at times it was torturous, they travelled slower. There was no intensity and no intent, no aggression, no competitiveness, just a feeling of emptiness and impotence. Lionel Messi drifted out of the game, Neymar never got into it. Even Sergio Busquets has started to look lost lately. Over on the Barcelona bench, an argument brewed between the fitness coach and the assistant. Otherwise, there was passivity.
"You have to go back to the death throes of the Gaspart era to see something similar," ran the match report in AS. Ramón Besa in El País has become one of the most significant "voices" of Barcelona's recent narrative. His opening line ran: "No football, no stars, no pride..." Against Valladolid, he wrote, Barcelona had "definitively stopped being a team.""Ridicule,""collapse", "freefall", "adrift", "crumbling", "vulgar", "decadent", "shameful" ... in the media on Sunday morning the judgements flowed and they were vicious.
There were mitigating factors, such as Andrés Iniesta being absent after his wife's miscarriage, and perhaps this game should not be taken as the most faithful gauge. It is also true that their season may not be defined by the league title: they are in the Copa del Rey final, against Real Madrid, and have a 2-0 lead against Manchester City in the Champions League. The European Cup eclipses all else. And yet, while the impression may be false, that lead against City now feels vulnerable. And curiously, unlike Madrid, Barcelona have tended to need to be good at home to be good abroad: Since 1998, Real Madrid have won the European Cup three times; each time, they were a disaster domestically. Barcelona have won the European Cup four times; each time they won the league too.
Besides, this wasn't really a one-off. And the problems are deeper, running right through the club, where it has always felt like they are just a couple of bad results from a crisis. The team has recently propped up the institution, not the other way round. Since Sandro Rosell became president, there's been a creeping sense of decline and of divorce between some of those who led the club's contemporary rise and some of those who now lead the club. Víctor Valdés will leave at the end of the season when his contract expires; the last time his contract was up for renewal, in 2009, he didn't hesitate. In part, he admits, because Joan Laporta was like a "sporting father". Johan Cruyff was removed from the honorary presidency and Pep Guardiola departed.
Tito Vilanova suffered cancer. So too did Eric Abidal, who was not offered the chance to continue. Jordi Roura took over temporarily. Vilanova returned in time to see Barcelona win the league, but the 7-0 aggregate defeat against Bayern in last season's semi-final marked last season. Pre-season was poor. In the summer, Messi was pursued by the inland revenue. He got injured and from his rehabilitation in Argentina he described the club director Javier Faus as a man who "knows nothing about football". Barcelona were pursued by the inland revenue too, after they were reported by one of their own members over the Neymar transfer. They claimed they had done nothing wrong but paid €13m. The case is now before a judge. Rosell challenged the courts to call him; a few days later he announced his resignation.
Media reports hinted at personal interests and division into camps. At Barcelona they have always talked about the "entorno"; this year it has emerged again. "There are some things that don't seem to change ever and that is one of them," Piqué admitted in World Soccer. "A club that is divided cannot ever be good." Martino arrived swiftly late in the summer after doctors told Vilanova he could not continue. From the start, debates raged about the style, the identity, of Barcelona. Now, it is hard to avoid the sense that his ideas do not entirely tally with some of the squad. Results hid the shift and problems, some of which the players saw early on but are only apparent now. "The emperor's new clothes," as Santi Giménez put it in AS.
Where this goes next is hard to judge, too, and the uncertainty is considerable. Valdés had already announced that he was leaving; last week Carles Puyol did too. Rumours persists about Xavi departing. He is 34. The three are Barça's club captains. It is perhaps over simplistic, but this is a team that is not as young as it was. "The problem is that people get used to [success]" Piqué admitted. "The reality is that all these people have not cost a euro and there are loads of them - Andrés, Leo, Xavi, Víctor, Puyi, Pedro ... that's unique, that might not happen again."
The renewal process has been uneven. Neymar arrived too of course, but no centre-back did. The season before Alex Song came for €19m, presented as a defender. The experiment there lasted four games before it was abandoned. So much has happened over the last few years that it would have been a surprise that it did not affect the results and the play. It is hard to draw lines of causation but there are countless conditioning factors and recently, at least, results have been certainly affected. "For as long as it is mathematically possible ..."
Here are a few more sums: having had a six-point lead, Barcelona now trail Real Madrid by four -a 10-point swing explained by an abysmal 2014. On Saturday, Barcelona lost a second successive away game for the first time since 2008, and at least back then it was at Riazor and the Bernabéu. You have to go back to that season, Barcelona's big pre-Pep Guardiola collapse, for the last time they were third this late into a campaign. Even the respective run-ins appear to favour Madrid: although the next month sees them face Sevilla and Real Sociedad away and Barcelona at home, it's hard to imagine them not winning their final six games. Barcelona, meanwhile, have to travel to the Bernabéu, Espanyol and Villarreal, and have Athletic at home then the other title challengers, Atlético, on the final day. Atlético go to Athletic, Valencia and Barcelona. They're still there, but Madrid have opened up a gap now.
Before Saturday's game, one headline declared: "Objective: 12 wins." Now, for Barcelona it has to be "Objective: 11 wins" and even if they do win all 11 they may not win the league. It is no longer in their hands and Real Madrid are unbeaten in 29 in all competitions and three draws and 14 wins in the last 17 league games. It's hard to avoid the sensation that it could get worse for Barcelona too; right now, the clásico feels more like a threat than an opportunity. They have not opened the scoring away in four months and they have lost three of the last six. Having dropped just five points in the first 18 games, Barcelona have now dropped 13 in the nine games of 2014. It is about sensations not just stats but a nine-game 2014 league table reads: Real Madrid 23, Athletic Bilbao 18, Levante 16, Atlético 15, Barcelona and Celta Vigo 14. "The league is difficult," Sergio Busquets admitted.
*Talking points*
* "Mestalla explodes: 'Corruption in the Federation!'," shouts the front cover of the Valencia sports daily Super Deporte. According to the paper, Valencia see a "black hand" against them. "If the mistakes are a tendency, they stop being mistakes," coach Juan Antonio Pizzi said, albeit his tone was even and his words more nuanced than the phrase in black-and-white suggests. The complaints centre on the penalty that was given to Athletic Bilbao during the 1-1 draw. Funnily enough they do not focus on the offside goal that gave Valencia the lead. Or Philippe Senderos. Or, come to think of it, even on the penalty itself: if they did they might notice that at best Sofiane Feghouli's challenge was very clumsy and, at worst, that he might have hit Ander Herrera in the face.
Asked what he thought after the game Athletic's coach, Ernesto Valverde, nailed it. He said he had not yet seen a replay but admitted that live in the stadium, in the heat of the game, he is "just the same as everyone else: if it's in my area I don't think it's a penalty; if it's in theirs, I do."
* The word textbook gets used too much, becoming a horrible cliché. But Ronaldo's header to open the scoring against Levante really was. You could image a picture of him with all arrows and lines drawn over the top: the colossal, straight leap; the jack-knife shape of his body; the ball hitting the middle of his forehead; neck tense and nodding forward, hard; the ball going down into the turf and into the corner. It was the first of three goals and it might have been more but for the goalkeeper who has made more saves than anyone else this season ... Costa Rica's Keylor Navas.
* "All you need to play football is one ball and two bollocks," says Rayo's coach, Paco Jémez. Tonight, his side travel to San Sebastián. It's been quite a weekend at the bottom too after Valladolid and Betis both won. Betis beat Getafe, who have sacked their coach Luis García after 12 games without a win. And while the focus was inevitably on Barcelona, Valladolid were superb on Saturday afternoon.
* "I agree with the labour reform of this government," Real Madrid's president, Florentino Pérez, said on Sunday night. "We're more competitive with lower salaries." Wonder if he has told Ronaldo that?
* Just when you wondered if it might be all over for Atlético too, without Diego Costa and Diego Godín, they recovered from a poor first half to beat Celta 2-0. David Villa got both: he's on 13 for the season.
*Results:* Valladolid 1-0 Barcelona, Betis 2-0 Getafe, Celta Vigo 0-2 Atlético Madrid, Granada 2-0 Villarreal, Espanyol 3-1 Elche, Almería 1-3 Sevilla, Real Madrid 3-0 Levante, Valencia 1-1 Athletic Bilbao. Monday: Osasuna v Málaga and Real Sociedad v Rayo Vallecano
Latest La Liga table Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.
At the end of Barcelona's 1-0 defeat at Valladolid on Saturday afternoon, Víctor Valdés took refuge in the bathroom. Somewhere in the distance, along the passageway, the Serbian central defender Stefan Mitrovic was smashing his way through the door of the home dressing room in celebration. But here, in the visitors' bathroom, all was quiet. Valdés positioned his camera and filmed a video résumé of the game, a kind of selfie press conference with a wall of white tiles replacing the usual collage of sponsors. This was, he said looking at the camera, a "bad game." The video is 30 seconds long and towards the end there is a suspiciously familiar noise. It is the noise of someone flushing Barcelona's title challenge down the pan.
That, at least, is the way it was greeted, and not entirely without reason. Outside the stadium something was launched at Gerard Piqué; the following morning everything was launched at all of them. El Mundo Deportivo feared that Barcelona had left "half a league" behind in Valladolid. The only surprise was that they said "half." Others didn't; they insisted that the entire season had escaped. "The players threw away the league ... and we were ashamed of them," ran the headline in Sport, yellow lettering screaming out from a cover in funeral black. The following night, Real Madrid defeated Levante 3-0 at the Bernabéu. "Madrid break free," cheered AS.
Barcelona are only four points behind Real Madrid at the top, one behind Atlético Madrid in second, and there are still 11 matches to go. One of them is the clásico in a fortnight's time, the chance to take points off their rivals and close to within a solitary point. Afterwards, Tata Martino was talking about the maths; Barcelona would continue to fight for as long as the title is mathematically possible, he said. Which is fine but when you start talk about the maths it's never a good sign and the maths doesn't make happy reading. Here's one simple sum to start off with: Real Valladolid had won just four times this season before Saturday. Now it's five.
Deservedly so too. Valladolid took the lead a little after a quarter of an hour, through Fausto Rossi. Barcelona had time to react but, apart from a couple of runs from Leo Messi, they simply didn't. When Neymar missed, sending the ball wildly over the bar, they never looked like getting an equaliser, still less a winner. At the end of the game both sides had taken six shots. Barcelona had given the ball away 77 times, more than in any game this season. The few passes they completed were unconvinced and unconvincing, fearful and isolated, directionless. Sideways and backwards they went before hoofing it aimlessly, not so much passing the ball as passing up on it.
Xavi Hernández complained about the grass and while the pitch was not great – and anyone who has been to Valladolid in winter knows why - his comments about the surface have now reached a point of self-parody that, even when true, do little to support his case or to suggest that they will find, or even seek, a solution. And if the ball bobbled, Barcelona ambled. If the ball travelled slowly, and at times it was torturous, they travelled slower. There was no intensity and no intent, no aggression, no competitiveness, just a feeling of emptiness and impotence. Lionel Messi drifted out of the game, Neymar never got into it. Even Sergio Busquets has started to look lost lately. Over on the Barcelona bench, an argument brewed between the fitness coach and the assistant. Otherwise, there was passivity.
"You have to go back to the death throes of the Gaspart era to see something similar," ran the match report in AS. Ramón Besa in El País has become one of the most significant "voices" of Barcelona's recent narrative. His opening line ran: "No football, no stars, no pride..." Against Valladolid, he wrote, Barcelona had "definitively stopped being a team.""Ridicule,""collapse", "freefall", "adrift", "crumbling", "vulgar", "decadent", "shameful" ... in the media on Sunday morning the judgements flowed and they were vicious.
There were mitigating factors, such as Andrés Iniesta being absent after his wife's miscarriage, and perhaps this game should not be taken as the most faithful gauge. It is also true that their season may not be defined by the league title: they are in the Copa del Rey final, against Real Madrid, and have a 2-0 lead against Manchester City in the Champions League. The European Cup eclipses all else. And yet, while the impression may be false, that lead against City now feels vulnerable. And curiously, unlike Madrid, Barcelona have tended to need to be good at home to be good abroad: Since 1998, Real Madrid have won the European Cup three times; each time, they were a disaster domestically. Barcelona have won the European Cup four times; each time they won the league too.
Besides, this wasn't really a one-off. And the problems are deeper, running right through the club, where it has always felt like they are just a couple of bad results from a crisis. The team has recently propped up the institution, not the other way round. Since Sandro Rosell became president, there's been a creeping sense of decline and of divorce between some of those who led the club's contemporary rise and some of those who now lead the club. Víctor Valdés will leave at the end of the season when his contract expires; the last time his contract was up for renewal, in 2009, he didn't hesitate. In part, he admits, because Joan Laporta was like a "sporting father". Johan Cruyff was removed from the honorary presidency and Pep Guardiola departed.
Tito Vilanova suffered cancer. So too did Eric Abidal, who was not offered the chance to continue. Jordi Roura took over temporarily. Vilanova returned in time to see Barcelona win the league, but the 7-0 aggregate defeat against Bayern in last season's semi-final marked last season. Pre-season was poor. In the summer, Messi was pursued by the inland revenue. He got injured and from his rehabilitation in Argentina he described the club director Javier Faus as a man who "knows nothing about football". Barcelona were pursued by the inland revenue too, after they were reported by one of their own members over the Neymar transfer. They claimed they had done nothing wrong but paid €13m. The case is now before a judge. Rosell challenged the courts to call him; a few days later he announced his resignation.
Media reports hinted at personal interests and division into camps. At Barcelona they have always talked about the "entorno"; this year it has emerged again. "There are some things that don't seem to change ever and that is one of them," Piqué admitted in World Soccer. "A club that is divided cannot ever be good." Martino arrived swiftly late in the summer after doctors told Vilanova he could not continue. From the start, debates raged about the style, the identity, of Barcelona. Now, it is hard to avoid the sense that his ideas do not entirely tally with some of the squad. Results hid the shift and problems, some of which the players saw early on but are only apparent now. "The emperor's new clothes," as Santi Giménez put it in AS.
Where this goes next is hard to judge, too, and the uncertainty is considerable. Valdés had already announced that he was leaving; last week Carles Puyol did too. Rumours persists about Xavi departing. He is 34. The three are Barça's club captains. It is perhaps over simplistic, but this is a team that is not as young as it was. "The problem is that people get used to [success]" Piqué admitted. "The reality is that all these people have not cost a euro and there are loads of them - Andrés, Leo, Xavi, Víctor, Puyi, Pedro ... that's unique, that might not happen again."
The renewal process has been uneven. Neymar arrived too of course, but no centre-back did. The season before Alex Song came for €19m, presented as a defender. The experiment there lasted four games before it was abandoned. So much has happened over the last few years that it would have been a surprise that it did not affect the results and the play. It is hard to draw lines of causation but there are countless conditioning factors and recently, at least, results have been certainly affected. "For as long as it is mathematically possible ..."
Here are a few more sums: having had a six-point lead, Barcelona now trail Real Madrid by four -a 10-point swing explained by an abysmal 2014. On Saturday, Barcelona lost a second successive away game for the first time since 2008, and at least back then it was at Riazor and the Bernabéu. You have to go back to that season, Barcelona's big pre-Pep Guardiola collapse, for the last time they were third this late into a campaign. Even the respective run-ins appear to favour Madrid: although the next month sees them face Sevilla and Real Sociedad away and Barcelona at home, it's hard to imagine them not winning their final six games. Barcelona, meanwhile, have to travel to the Bernabéu, Espanyol and Villarreal, and have Athletic at home then the other title challengers, Atlético, on the final day. Atlético go to Athletic, Valencia and Barcelona. They're still there, but Madrid have opened up a gap now.
Before Saturday's game, one headline declared: "Objective: 12 wins." Now, for Barcelona it has to be "Objective: 11 wins" and even if they do win all 11 they may not win the league. It is no longer in their hands and Real Madrid are unbeaten in 29 in all competitions and three draws and 14 wins in the last 17 league games. It's hard to avoid the sensation that it could get worse for Barcelona too; right now, the clásico feels more like a threat than an opportunity. They have not opened the scoring away in four months and they have lost three of the last six. Having dropped just five points in the first 18 games, Barcelona have now dropped 13 in the nine games of 2014. It is about sensations not just stats but a nine-game 2014 league table reads: Real Madrid 23, Athletic Bilbao 18, Levante 16, Atlético 15, Barcelona and Celta Vigo 14. "The league is difficult," Sergio Busquets admitted.
*Talking points*
* "Mestalla explodes: 'Corruption in the Federation!'," shouts the front cover of the Valencia sports daily Super Deporte. According to the paper, Valencia see a "black hand" against them. "If the mistakes are a tendency, they stop being mistakes," coach Juan Antonio Pizzi said, albeit his tone was even and his words more nuanced than the phrase in black-and-white suggests. The complaints centre on the penalty that was given to Athletic Bilbao during the 1-1 draw. Funnily enough they do not focus on the offside goal that gave Valencia the lead. Or Philippe Senderos. Or, come to think of it, even on the penalty itself: if they did they might notice that at best Sofiane Feghouli's challenge was very clumsy and, at worst, that he might have hit Ander Herrera in the face.
Asked what he thought after the game Athletic's coach, Ernesto Valverde, nailed it. He said he had not yet seen a replay but admitted that live in the stadium, in the heat of the game, he is "just the same as everyone else: if it's in my area I don't think it's a penalty; if it's in theirs, I do."
* The word textbook gets used too much, becoming a horrible cliché. But Ronaldo's header to open the scoring against Levante really was. You could image a picture of him with all arrows and lines drawn over the top: the colossal, straight leap; the jack-knife shape of his body; the ball hitting the middle of his forehead; neck tense and nodding forward, hard; the ball going down into the turf and into the corner. It was the first of three goals and it might have been more but for the goalkeeper who has made more saves than anyone else this season ... Costa Rica's Keylor Navas.
* "All you need to play football is one ball and two bollocks," says Rayo's coach, Paco Jémez. Tonight, his side travel to San Sebastián. It's been quite a weekend at the bottom too after Valladolid and Betis both won. Betis beat Getafe, who have sacked their coach Luis García after 12 games without a win. And while the focus was inevitably on Barcelona, Valladolid were superb on Saturday afternoon.
* "I agree with the labour reform of this government," Real Madrid's president, Florentino Pérez, said on Sunday night. "We're more competitive with lower salaries." Wonder if he has told Ronaldo that?
* Just when you wondered if it might be all over for Atlético too, without Diego Costa and Diego Godín, they recovered from a poor first half to beat Celta 2-0. David Villa got both: he's on 13 for the season.
*Results:* Valladolid 1-0 Barcelona, Betis 2-0 Getafe, Celta Vigo 0-2 Atlético Madrid, Granada 2-0 Villarreal, Espanyol 3-1 Elche, Almería 1-3 Sevilla, Real Madrid 3-0 Levante, Valencia 1-1 Athletic Bilbao. Monday: Osasuna v Málaga and Real Sociedad v Rayo Vallecano
Latest La Liga table Reported by guardian.co.uk 13 hours ago.