All the ghosts of childhood took shape when watching how Barça perpetrated another aberration against good taste and football decency in their match against Alavés.
The new generations can have a taste of the desert journey that it took to live through those decades, from the sixties to the nineties, saving the glorious year of the Messiah Johan Cruyff's League (1973-74), with the 0-5 at the Bernabéu, and the 1984-85 season with Bernd Schuster at the helm, a geek leading a group that is rather reminiscent of The Dirty Twelve (1967), a memorable film by Robert Aldrich.
The Barça of Xavi, but also of Joan Laporta and Deco (whom, as a player, Guardiola fired, according to the chronicles of the time, so that he would stop intoxicating), because someone must be responsible for signings as dubious as those of Barrios turned out to be, Pérez, Tomé, Juanito the Guanche or Hierro, the bad one of the two brothers (the good one signed for Madrid), just to name a few.
So, when there was still no talk of philosophy, or high pressing, or five-man defenses or whatever, but simply the rival was calling the shots, Barça played just as badly as they do today. Return to the past: horizontal passes, collisions against the wall like an automaton and the rival's goal in a counterattack.
At that time people suffered in the countryside between victimhood, restlessness and deep sadness. Today, far from New York, you have to put up with the ESPN commentators.
As if it were a trick of fate, one tortured oneself by wondering why he was from Barça. The answer was offered the other day by Joan Manuel Serrat, a culé from the cradle, no less than in his conversation at Harvard. “Football, I don't know how it has done it, but it nails us to a story of loyalty that doesn't happen in anything else,” he reflected.
“You change everything, your nationality, your family, your family doctor, your psychiatrist, everything except your team,” he continued. And he recalled the exception of the “only heart transplant” he said he had ever known. That of a friend who was from Madrid, he joined Barça and became Madrid again, "all based on political events, something I will never understand." Being an emotion, “you even understand your opponents, who are like you with another shirt.”
And, despite the disappointments and now that Serrat doesn't like what he sees in his team either, his final joke about the emptiness of a weekend without leagues is certified. “I don't understand those who don't like football, how do they go to bed on a Sunday night, with what feeling”?
