Last season Xavi Hernández frowned when in the press room he was insisted on the proliferation of 1-0 in favor of Barça, a winning but suspicious score passed by the most exquisite palates of the Barça environment. The Barça coach, who as a player satisfied precisely that taste for the most sophisticated game like few other players, lamented the excessive demands placed on his team, although deep down that has always been his objective since he decided to become a coach, and even more so when He landed on the bench at the Camp Nou. In Dallas a youth squad named Fermín López gave him a cable. Actually, the favor was mutual.
Barça's lineup in Dallas responded to this desire to climb a few steps in terms of the level of play. Today's summer tours, demanding because commercial reasons rule, make it necessary to show all the cards ahead of time. The classics arrive in July. Xavi put it all. Only Gavi, convalescing, was left out, but the epicenter of the team was clearly in the midfield. With the ball, Barça acted with three defenders (Araújo, Christensen and Koundé) and between that trio and the two players above (Lewandowski and Dembélé) they were all midfielders: Oriol Romeu, De Jong, Gündogan, Pedri and a traveling Balde.
The staging of Barça was excellent. The Barça players liked each other with a possession of more than two minutes which, taking into account that we are talking about the second game of the preseason, was not bad at all. In that phase of inspiration, Barça combined neat exits from behind with short passing bases to circumvent Madrid's pressure with long passes to look for Dembélé into space. It was a demonstration of versatility that the French striker culminated in scoring 1-0 with another aspect of the game that speaks of a hard-working team: an attacking free kick in which the blackboard worked its magic.
In that phase that ended up languishing as the minutes passed, De Jong and Oriol Romeu stood out, those in charge of making the long shadow of Sergio Busquets forget. The Dutch and the Catalan form a double pivot that is no longer hidden in which Romeu is more positional and recuperative and De Jong, very fine in Dallas, is increasingly recognized in the footballer who was at Ajax, more of a pivot than an interior player. Gündogan, still in the adaptation phase, and Pedri remain for that role closest to the forwards.
Madrid, for its part, has changed its suit with the arrival of Bellingham, a top attacking midfielder who greatly conditions Ancelotti's drawing. Without a referential nine with the departure of Benzema, the 4-3-3 vanishes and both Vinícius and Rodrygo play much more focused. The modification mainly affects Vinícius, who is much more threatening and constant in the game when he is attached to the wing. In Dallas, the Brazilian did not stand out until, already in the second half, he played the winger. And when Madrid managed to sharpen and threaten Barça, Ter Stegen appeared with very meritorious interventions.
When it was 1-0 threatening in the press room after the game, Xavi opted for a 20-year-old youth player unknown to the general public with a name devoid of glamour: Fermín. The Andalusian, at the Masia since childhood and on loan to Linares last season, returned the favor to his coach by breaking the 1-0 score. He scored a great goal from outside the area and gave another to Ferran Torres with a spectacular vision of the game. What an irruption of yours.
