Melchior, Gaspar and Baltasar were about to close their packages with tons of coal. No one was going to be spared, not the box, not the bench, not the grass. But then the page Gündogan appeared, grayer than the British sky, but who did not avoid responsibility when the regulation time had expired and prevented, from 11 meters, his team from saying goodbye to the League even with the grapes in the stomach.
The comeback, agonizing and necessary like few others, gives breath to Barça and, above all, to Xavi, protagonist a few days ago with an unprecedented fight after winning in a bad way against Almería. “It won't happen again,” he snapped. So everyone expected a Barça that would take on the world at the Insular, a team full of players “running like animals”, as their coach had claimed, but until after the break there was no trace of four-legged beings on the pitch. . Again, and not even the first time, Barça threw away the first half, completing 45 minutes of flat encephalogram in their game. “We played a game to win and we won,” the Egarense certified despite everything after the comeback.
That Xavi is not going through his best moment was noticeable in that initial stretch. The coach, as nervous as always, became desperate with his team due to his ineffectiveness, and Munir's goal, from Sandro's cross – fate always has twists in the script – finally unnerved him. Xavi lost his temper shortly after, when González Fuertes did not see a very clear grab on Sergi Roberto in the middle zone. Usually calm and collected, the captain was possessed by an unknown spirit and ran towards the fourth official to protest. Xavi, with a bad face, stood next to him and touched his face, calling him “cheeky.” “What a shame!” He cried out for not signaling a foul in the center of the field. That's how things were. “We made too many mistakes in the deep pass and we had trained it,” he lamented about the first half.
But the anger towards his players ended up being confirmed with delayed effects, since the reaction came in the second half. “We lacked that final talent to score goals early, but after the break we understood the game better and we were more patient,” he summed up, satisfied.
When a tie seemed like an inevitable destiny, Xavi took a gamble by making his debut for Vitor Roque, a luxury spectator of the comeback. “It goes well in depth,” he later justified. The Brazilian left details of his ability to sniff out spaces and even touched the goal at the buzzer, but he didn't get it right. It didn't matter much. He will never forget his trip to Las Palmas, where he made a happy debut.
