SPANISH – BARCELONA Luuk saves a beaten Xavi

Luuk de Jong, the striker who was ridiculed for being a supposed whim of Koeman in the days when no one could be signed, saved Xavi again in the last minute to draw in discount (2-2) a game against a Espanyol who touched glory with the tips of their fingers after coming back from a Pedri goal in the first minute of play.

Neither Vicente Moreno nor Xavi Hernández surprised the rival from the start. Both opted for the expected alignment and the expected drawing. Both also accepted the shortcomings that their alignments caused. Both coaches seemed to be clear that they were going to play a game in which the movement of pieces throughout the 90 minutes was going to be fundamental. ThereMoreno won by a landslide against Xavi, who shot the best purse.

When Barça goes to Cornellà, two attitudes can be adopted: either Gavi’s or De Jong’s. With the first you can compete; with the second it is clear that the party will pass over whoever is intimidated. Gavi was tried to intimidate him with kicks by Aleix Vidal and Keidi Bare, a player who in 23 minutes of the first half could have been sent off twice for accumulating yellow cards, but the Andalusian was the example of the Blaugrana fight. De Jong, on the other hand, without receiving a foul was the image of fear.

And it is that Espanyol came out to the pinion in a game that had to mean the turning point before a fateful 2022. Not even Pedri’s goal after 76 seconds of the match discouraged a Espanyol team that maintained a game plan based on intensity and high blood pressure. If it was necessary, it was done and in the face of this intensity, Barcelona found few answers beyond Gavi and Adama, the rest of the team, allowed themselves to be intimidated.

If Barça had these two, Espanyol had an RDT who from the beginning smelled the blood on Dest’s side and a Darder who gave a soccer lesson that culminated with a shot from the edge of the area that Ter Stegen again could not stop. Before, Diego López had saved a shot from Adama and a header from Ferran Torres.

The match, as it should have been in the coaches’ plan, had a lot of cloth left to cut. And to start cutting it off, Eric came in for Araújo, whom Keidi Bare had withdrawn from the match, in a decision that was disastrous. The departure of the second part was Barça, who continued to live off Gavi, who had a goal of faith annulled for offside by De Jong, who continued to bother him and with the game scaring him more than an unshaven bull to a retired bullfighter.

Moreno retired Vilhena and Keidi Bare, to bring in Melamed and Morlanes, while Xavi got fed up with Frenkie’s shit and put in Aubameyang.

Moreno’s changes worked much better than Xavi’s, because after 20 minutes Eric fell asleep like a child before Darder’s filtered pass, who was still giving a recital, and RDT took advantage of the center-back’s nap to shoot Ter Stegen. The Eric thing was a complete disaster.

Desperate, Xavi realized that in order to try to overcome the disaster, he had to turn to Dembélé and recover Nico, a player he had neglected in favor of a dire De Jong. Barça no longer had any other plan than to go desperate. Xavi, in a manual shipwreck, pulled Koeman’s recipe and filled the pitch with strikers in a hysterical end of the game in which Piqué and Nico saw the red card with time running out, staging the culé’s impotence. And then Luuk de Jong appeared. The one everyone laughed at.