Eight reasons Barcelona lost to Liverpool in THAT Champions League semifinal.

[Wolf.17]

It can often feel quite intrusive, thinking about football matches like that football match after the event. A catastrophe for millions, a moment of sublime transcendence for millions more, and there you are, sat in the middle, poking around in the ashes. Wondering if one side played the wrong full back.

On the other hand, what is the internet for if not filling with content? And what are your eyes for if not absorbing all this content? And what are human beings for, if not attempting to understandable the incomprehensible twitchings of an incomprehensible universe? So here we go. Barcelona lost, 4-0, to Liverpool because:

They picked the wrong team
There are no particularly good ways to play against Liverpool, for Liverpool are a very strong team: dangerous, well-organised, and incredibly energetic with and without the ball. But there are a few very bad ways to play against Liverpool, and one of those ways is: slowly.

The fact that Ousmane Dembélé picked up an injury in a dead league game at the weekend might be bad luck, or it might be an appalling act of carelessness. Either way, that front three — Luis Suárez, Lionel Messi, and Philippe Coutinho — looked terribly one-paced, particularly with Messi often drifting deep.

Hindsight colours everything, of course. Coutinho is a good player, an experienced professional, and perhaps his familiarity with Anfield weighed in his favour. Still, he was pretty limp in the Camp Nou, and continued that here. In hindsight, through the cooling mess of the apocalypse, his selection seems emblematic of a team that got their approach entirely wrong.

Yet perhaps Barcelona only actually lost because:

Alisson made a couple of really big saves in the first half
Ah, finishing. Football’s first impression comes at the last. Get it right, and the job’s an easy one; get it wrong, and nothing else matters.

So it’s probably important to remember that for all the other stuff, the crazy stuff, the chaos that is already transitioning into hysterical legend, that if Barcelona had taken any of their presentable chances in the first half — and there were a few — then this morning Jurgen Klopp would be taking the positives and Barcelona would be off to Madrid. Replay the game with Simon Mignolet, nice lad though he is. See how that goes.

None of which changes the fact that:

Their heads went
Not at 1-0 down. You can be sure they’d prepared for Liverpool scoring at some point. But at 3-0, everything drained away. It is often said that the minutes either side of half-time are good times to score, because they are the goals that sow the most chaos. Plans get taken apart. Team talks are rewritten, or rendered irrelevant.

But if you’re looking to unsettle your opponents, nothing beats a goal and then immediately another a goal. The first goal asks the question: What is happening? And the second answers it, before the defending side have even had a chance to think: This is happening. This is. And you can’t stop it.

Gini Wijnaldum’s one-two (two-three?) combination sent Barcelona to the canvas. They weren’t able to get up. Because Liverpool played very well. Because that heavy Roma defeat suddenly swam back into minds and hearts and legs. And because:

Anfield is a magical cauldron of magic
Of course, you may not believe in magic. But there were 50,000 Liverpool fans packed in Anfield last night who did, and who kept saying so at the top of their voices. And what is magic, really, if not the irruption of the directed human will into the smooth progress of reality.

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Watch: Liverpool Celebrate Victory Over Barcelona with the Kop
Before the game, Arsène Wenger engaged mystical mode: “This is the most heated stadium in Europe. In the return game, it’s the only place you don’t want to go is to Anfield. Because the atmosphere and everything is special there.” Messi, of course, was visibly frustrated at his side’s failure to score a fourth last week. High standards? Or did he know?

Maybe it’s Anfield; maybe it’s the fear of Anfield. Maybe it makes no sense to consider those two things as distinct. It’s loads of people shouting, either way. Perhaps it’s the best explanation for:

That corner
Head’s Gone: a comedy in one act. A passel of defenders, standing around, waiting for football as usual to unfold; two quick thinking attackers making them look like training cones. Drunk training cones. Drunk training cones that have fallen asleep at the bus stop. Kebab meat all over their trousers.

After the event, Suárez said his team “looked like schoolboys” as they stood around ahead of the fourth goal. It’s hard not to read this as a grave insult to schoolboys everywhere, not least because at least one kid would probably have said: “Hey. Isn’t that Divock Origi over there? Let’s go and stand near him. That seems like a good use of our time.”

After all:

Origi is the greatest big game player in the history of football, apparently
Got the away goal against Borussia Dortmund in 2016. Scored in the home leg as well. Scored a 96th minute winner against Everton this season, along with the 86th minute winner against Newcastle last weekend. Scored twice here. The lad has pure narrative flowing through his veins.

Which brings us nicely to:

The restoration of karmic balance
Fascinating team, Barcelona. Since Lionel Messi’s emergence they’ve been consistently somewhere between “one of the best” and “the absolute best”. And yet if you haven’t at some point been annoyed with them — a soft decision here, a snide dive there — then you basically haven’t been paying attention. Or you’re a Barcelona fan.

(And if you’re a Barcelona fan, and you’re reading this then, then stop. Close the window, turn off the computer, go back to bed, and hide beneath your pillow. Give yourself some time. It’s OK. Frenkie De Jong is turning up next season. It’s going to be OK.)

You didn’t have to go full UEFALONA!!!!!!! to get a little wound up by, to take a random example, Sergio Busquets peeking through his hands at the referee. Cynical. Unnecessary. Distasteful. Egregious. Entirely at odds with the branding exercise, the idea of being more than a club. And so on.

That special kind of mild irritation that is as heartfelt as it slightly pompous. You know the one: “That’s not right.” Maybe a little spluttering.

Following this thread brings us to this position: cracking team, excellent players, wouldn’t mind seeing them fall to pieces occasionally. To end up on the wrong end of a 20-1 shot, perhaps. That’ll do nicely.

Though it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for:

Ernesto Valverde
Who is now the un-proud architect of not one but two of the Champions League’s greatest second-leg collapses, and is probably going to get sacked for repeatedly embarrassing the club on international television.

Edited May 9, 2019 by - Dark
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