Barça plays with fire

The Barça directs its classification for the knockout stages of the Champions, consolidating its first place in the group, but the reality of the culé game denies the solidity of mathematics. Barça played with fire and flirted with disaster against a Dynamo Kiev in a box which they won 2-1 in a duel in which the goalkeepers of both teams shone.

If the worst thing that can happen to a paranoid person is to be really persecuted, the worst thing that can happen to a team with obvious problems facing the opponent's goal is to miss three times called in the first three minutes of the game. That is what happened to Barça yesterday in the face of a COVID-reduced man who presented a boy named Ruslan Nescheret in the goal.

The Ukrainian goalkeeper complied with another of the rules that terrorize teams that, like Barça, are in crisis with the goal: meet an anonymous boy who pulls off a superb game that he will never forget.

Barça started briskly and giving the feeling that the 90 minutes for Dinamo Kiev were going to be torture. Messi scored again from a penalty five minutes into the game. A maximum penalty indicated after the demolition of Messi by Michael Oliver with the greatest reluctance that has been seen on a football field. Before his gesture no one dared to protest because it seemed that even the referee himself was lazy to point out what he had just seen.

After 1-0, Barça was a gale of occasions in which Pedri almost collapsed the crossbar and Griezmann collapsed himself when he failed to empty goal. He would no longer raise his head. Then came Ansu's chances where Nescheret began to come up to the point of showing off against Messi as well.

Barça, pressed, moved the ball well and created chances, but when he looked at the scoreboard and saw that he was only 1-0 and got all evils from a penalty. Like the paranoid who discovers that they are really after him, the Barça players were aware that they have a problem with the goal.

Faced with this reality, they shrunk and Dynamo Kiev could put their heads out to breathe and say here I am. They even put fear in the culé body with a couple of counterattacks and a header against which Ter Stegen stood out, back to the Blaugrana frame.

The first part ended as it started, with young Nescheret reminding Barça of his lack of aim and showing off against Pedri and Ansu. At halftime, more than a coach, Barça needed a psychologist.

But if the start of the first half was frustrating due to the missed chances, the second was a drama that only Ter Stegen and Piqué avoided. In the first play, Ter Stegen avoided the tie in a one on one and in the consequent corner kick Dinamo scored, but the goal was canceled because the ball had gone in the background on his flight and two minutes later he saved the tie again before Buyalskiy. Later, he would perform another miracle before Supryaha.

Any attempt to react by Barça, such as a free kick by Messi or a header from Sergi Roberto's goal, was conjured up by an already gigantic Nescheret who supported his team in their second professional game. The first one he played last Saturday.

Faced with the jam of the forwards, it was Piqué who broke the spell of the night of the young goalkeeper by heading a cross from Ansu. But not even so could Barça breathe easy. Tsygankov picked up the rebound from Ter Stegen's umpteenth save to shorten the gap and maintain the tension until the last moment, where Nescheret returned to get a new save against Dembélé. If there had been an audience, the kid would have left to applause. And Barça, between murmurs of disapproval.