After playing 42 classics on the pitch, Xavi Hernandez will live for the first time this Wednesday, at 2 pm with DirecTV Sports TV, in the semifinal of the Spanish Super Cup in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) a Barcelona-Real Madrid as coach of the club of his life.
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The last time that the now Barcelona coach played against the eternal rival was on March 22, 2015 at the Camp Nou, when in the 80th minute he replaced Andrés Iniesta.
Xavi faced the last months as a player of the first team of Barcelona before signing for Al-Sadd of Qatar, a club in which he played until 2019 and then trained before signing, in November 2021, as the new coach of Barça in replacement of the Dutch Ronald Koeman.
Barcelona added the three points (2-1) and took another step in his career to win the League, a title that at the end of that season he lifted together with the Copa del Rey and the Champions League.
Negative streak
Coincidence or not, since then Barcelona have only won six of the seventeen classics they have played, having lost seven times and drawn in four other games.
In fact, Barcelona has lost the last four games against Real Madrid. Figures that contrast with the balance that Xavi adds against the white team. In the 17 seasons he wore the Barça jacket, he won 17 classics, drew 12 and lost another 13 in which he scored 5 goals and distributed 10 assists.
In addition, with the 42 games played on the green, he is together with the madridistas Gento and Sanchís the third player in history who has played the most classics, only surpassed by the 45 of Sergio Ramos and Leo Messi, now in the ranks of Paris Saint- Germain.
Leadership from the court to the bench
In his career as a player, the player from Terrassa (Barcelona) led the Barça engine room at the core, especially after the arrival of Pep Guardiola on the bench in the 2008-09 season. On the pitch he experienced first-person historical victories such as 2-6 in 2009 at the Santiago Bernabéu and 5-0 in November 2010, two of the most memorable games of the Guardiola era.
He was also part of painful defeats such as that of the 2007-08 season at the Santiago Bernabéu, in full decline of Frank Rijkaard’s stage as coach, where his team not only made the hallway to the league champion but also conceded a 4 -1 painful.
Almost seven years after his last classic, Xavi takes a step towards the band to face it as a technician. He will not do it at the Camp Nou or at the Santiago Bernabéu. The King Fahd International stadium in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) will witness its debut in the first official classic away from Spain.
EFE
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