Lewandowski saved Barça from the trigger blow in Son Moix, where only the wonder of the Pole stood out in the winning goal. It was an absolutely personal creation, without warning, in a play that arose without noise and ended masterfully. Very little had happened before, then nothing at all, except a couple of meritorious interventions by Ter Stegen, who vindicates himself again. Mallorca is one of those teams that invite rivals to eat a frog. He does not hide his intentions, nor does he deceive anyone. He's playing to stay in the category at all costs, which in his case is digging ditches near his box, digging in and looking up to spot the hulking Muriqi, a Kosovar striker who looks like something out of Game of Thrones or the prequel that's airing now. In the aerial game he treats the defenders as if they were dolls. It is a team that lives by making life very difficult for its opponents, even more so if their opponent gets confused, makes mistakes and enters a loop of despair.
Before Mallorca began to squeeze Barça's patience, Lewandowski ventilated the aroma of a closed room that the game had with a great goal. The importance of the goal was recorded in a fact that explained the rough nature of the match: it was Barça's only chance in the first half. Statistics are not needed to verify that a football game, any football game, allows the most ultra-defensive team in the world a chance or two, an unwritten law that Mallorca heeded in the surprising appearance of veteran Jaume Costa, a winger from all his life he has forged a more than estimable trajectory. He arrived without warning three meters from the goal and shot, but Ter Stegen stopped the shot with the perfect mix of good position, adequate profile and iron arm.
Ter Stegen is not a favorite of the barcelonismo. He has been, with every reason in the world, and this season he does all kinds of merits to claim his goalkeeper status. He finds himself in a moment where reproaches for a bad performance are still heard more than praise for phenomenal ones. In this League he has scored several category games. Mallorca is one of them.
The goalkeeper rescued Barça from a mediocre performance, the worst so far in the championship. With his sights set on the duel with Inter, transcendental for the club, and a handful of injured players, Xavi put together an unprecedented team. The left-footed Balde occupied the right flank of the defence, Piqué and Christensen met for the first time in central defense, Ansu Fati made his debut with the starters in this edition of the League.
Something in the lineup sounded like a team of circumstances, more unusual than deficient. Barça has plenty of good players. He has assembled a squad that does not admit alibis, but in Son Moix it worked very badly, to the point of wasting the early advantage that he gained and granting Mallorca a good number of opportunities, unsuspected in a team that attacks little or very little.
Without defensive forcefulness, or control in the game, Barça was exposed to a considerable skid. He did not leave anything remarkable, except the effectiveness of Ter Stegen and Lewandowski. On the contrary, he opened a sea of doubts on the eve of his visit to San Siro, where he will return to the fearsome landscape of the Champions League, where he has been failing for a few years (Rome, Liverpool, Lisbon, Munich).
If the precedent is his performance in Mallorca, the fear is well founded. It's up to him to reverse his recent history in Europe and quickly clear the memory of a game that only lit up the flash of Lewandowski. And what a piece of flash!
