La Liga is a competition of endurance that Barça started by sprinting to gain a classification and psychological advantage. A young, talented and energetic team that seems to have rediscovered confidence. This resurrection is based on great physical commitment. Raphinha, for example, returned to being that player who under Bielsa’s direction ran like everyone else and played like no one else. There are players who, by fulfilling collective obligations, connect them with the ball, with the game, with the goal. If each player achieves that 10% more involvement and effort, it adds up to 110% for the entire team. Flick, precisely the man who caused Barça its deepest wound, has managed to find the remedy in record time. Tactics, which seems to have taken over the entire football debate, is only a small part of the revolution. Where there seemed to be a shortage, Flick, discreetly, found footballing answers, reviving the professionalism and emotion of his players.
On the other hand, Madrid started the championship with the problems that come with abundance. Coming from a League, a Champions League and a European Super Cup win, recovering Courtois and Militao, having Vinicius as a candidate for the Ballon d’Or and presenting a world figure like Mbappé, sounds like success before it even starts. And a trap. Sky-high expectations, sure anguish. I remember that in the happy days of Los Galácticos (there were also unhappy ones) and after one of the loudest signings, Florentino himself smelled danger: “The blow we are going to give ourselves,” he said amid the popular clamor, aware that the greater the expectations, the higher the peak from which you can fall. An effort of adaptation and adjustments is needed, but the enemy of these first games was anxiety for fear of disappointing. Football does not exempt anyone from emotional tremors, not even the best.
As we leave the League in flight mode, the national team appears with its newly acquired prestige. And it makes you want to watch it. The Euro Cup and the Copa America were two different ways that football found to show us its playful decline. There is strategy, commitment, duels won and lost, physical struggle… What has ceased to exist is play. For that, a degree of freedom is necessary, a dose of spontaneity, a contribution of imagination. All of that is being supplanted by force, speed and the empire of control, to which technology is making a serious contribution. Where the clinical eye of the coach used to reach, now comes the tireless statistical search of the algorithm. We are not far from the day when one team will ask for a draw and the other will grant it.
In the last European Championship, Spain pulled us out of that football monotony, winning the Championship and saving it from mediocrity. Creator of tiki-taka The team that led them to glory ended up falling into excess and died of a thousand touches in the World Cup in Brazil and in Qatar. Touches and more touches, always towards the sides and without finding the player who would add danger to the possession. Two young men of African origin were enough, one with a snake around his waist and the other with a turbo in his legs, to change the speed and make the attacking game less predictable.
Spain was present in Germany and it was future in Paris. In two major international matches, it took control of the game to dominate the matches and knew how to accelerate with speed, skill and imagination to surprise in the last 20 meters. This is not modern football, but good old-fashioned football.
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