Barça achieves one of the most incredible victories in its recent history, understanding its last 125 years as recent, and it does so with a goalkeeper who smokes. The motto More than a clubso mismatched that according to what moralistic orders, taking on a new dimension thanks to a Polish goalkeeper determined to sabotage his team with a disastrous performance and emerging victorious despite his perseverance in making mistakes. A defeat would have pointed him out as guilty, a delirious 4-5 in favor exonerates him and it will even be funny to review his mistakes. If the guy thought about quitting tobacco, rule out this morning. The normal thing is to imagine him smoking a cigarette with just two deep drags on the hotel terrace with beautiful views of the Lisbon night. Bad day to quit smoking. Also to sniff glue (sic).
Szczesny likes smoking because he has an old face. It would have fit in the seventies, before tobacco got a bad name. Legend has it that Johan Cruyff was capable of having a cigarette at half-time in a match, as was the German Breitner. They were other times. Decades later there were still footballers addicted to cigarettes, but they hid it. Among my declassified anecdotes I will always remember the Italian full-back Francesco Coco, not for leaving a football mark on Barça, but for asking me for a cigarette at the Santander airport after a match against Racing. He pulled me away from the group as if he were going to confess a locker room secret to me, but all he wanted to do was feed smoke into his lungs. Pity. The Bulgarian team from the 94 World Cup, Kluivert and Reiziger sharing a room in the middle of dense smoke, the Frenchman Mathieu, more alien than person… Szczesny is heir to a long tradition.
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But the big question to ask now is not to know what tobacco the Pole smokes but why Hansi Flick chose him to be the starter given how calm we were with Iñaki Peña. Word in the locker room is that Szczesny had already reached competitive form in training after returning to football from his retirement in Marbella. Also that his experience in such a young team was a factor to be valued. All of that is very good, but the feeling is that Flick, whose main virtue is applying a high sense of justice with his players, has not applied it with Iñaki Peña.

Szczesny collided with Balde in a bad start that led to the 2-1
The youth squad’s first substitution came due to slight indiscipline. The man arrived late for a technical talk and Flick, a German who assumes the clichés of his nationality, applied the corresponding punishment. The second substitution was even more strange. It was in the next match, the final of the Spanish Super Cup, and it was not motivated by anything in particular, the coach simply chose Szczesny. The decision was surprising because Peña had been doing very well but, as the Pole did not clash in the semi-final against Athletic and was lucky enough to camouflage his reckless expulsion against Madrid under the rout of the classic, a debate was opened that, given what has been seen, has never been must have occurred. Flick has single-handedly invented a problem that didn’t exist. This Tuesday a Greek striker named Pavlidis scored three goals in half an hour against the goalkeeper he likes the most of the two. In short, we don’t remember a Greek scoring three goals against Barça in a game. In half an hour, I won’t even tell you. Botching two of the three, there is no precedent. Where before there was a goalkeeper with regained confidence and another who was funny because he had a resume and also smoked, now there are two who don’t know what to do with their lives. The goal now is for Iñaki not to fall into tobacco.
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