Barça 1-2 Espanyol

Sometimes in football, like in this match, the most incomprehensible things occur; the littlest player on the field (Ivan de la Pena) comes through with an unlikely header, unmarked and unchallenged, and then he adds to the tally with a monumental gift by Victor Valdez chipping it over the keeper after receving a wayward clearance from the same character. Bottom beats top, left is right, and suddenly we’re back into the mix, an escape from relegation a certainty?

Now, people on the other side of town (mostly cules) are going to downplay the loss, blame the ref or a subpar performance before a Champions League match midweek against Lyon looming. Xavi himself said that the ref took over the game, listened to the protestations of the Espanyol players, pulling out the red card, and awarded the “pessimism” of Espanyol to get in the way of the beautiful football that they were “dominating” with.

What a load of rubbish. They have no inherant right to beat all comers just because they can play neat pretty triangles on the pitch. Sometimes they need to fight. It was a chippy game from the get-go, a true derby match (emotional and heated) and Barca were giving just as much as they were getting. The cards were even throughout on the field (6 apiece) with one weird yellow going to the Barcelona bench for dissent. The red card didn’t look all that bad at first glance, but in slow motion you could see studs up in the lead foot for Keita and the trailing foot hitting the Espanyol player. There’ll be complaints, but it was a fair call, especially considering we lost a similar call in the corresponding fixture at the beginning of the year at the Montjuic; a game that threw us into a death spiral and humiliated us in front of the league. Karma. ‘Nuff Said.

I said we’d be lucky to get 3 points out of the matches against Sevilla, Barca, Real Madrid and Villareal, anything else in the next two is gravy I think.

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