Magical. Breathtaking. Miraculous. Hail Barcelona
THERE are moments covering football matches when you get a sense that something might happen. Something that could just be extraordinary.
That sense came at the Nou Camp on Wednesday evening, deep into the final minute of the five added for injury time, when Brazilian superstar Neymar collected possession and flighted the ball into the Paris SaintGermain (PSG) penalty area.
What happened next can be distilled frame by frame: the ball was in the air; there was a rush of movement towards it; a Barcelona shirt pushed ahead and stretched out a leg.
Then came the realisation that the player in question was Sergi Roberto, pilloried before this match by his own supporters, and that — yes — he really was going to reach it before the goalkeeper and lob it into the net.
In such moments, there can even be an audible response before the goal is scored. It happened in the vast press box in Barcelona.
Someone close to me — don’t ask me who — started to say “Oh my . . .” and then there was the eruption.
The realisation that the match, the tie and quite possibly the destiny of the Champions League, had changed; that the greatest comeback, joked MASTER PLANNER: Luis Enrique about beforehand, had been pulled off. As a journalist, the next thought that flashes through your brain is stone-cold sobering: you have to do this justice.
You have to rewrite, fast and lucidly, accurately, and emphatically. Not easy, when the night’s narrative has been ripped up in the space of 10 frantic minutes.
This was knockout football at its most brutal. True, this was not a final or semifinal, but there is still an added knot of pressure in the stomach of every player, coach, official of Champions League teams when it comes to the sharp end of the tournament.
I was in the PSG team hotel in the hours before the match and, despite their four-goal advantage, there was still a palpable sense of tension.
They were facing Barcelona, the wounded beast of Barcelona, in front of 96 000 Catalans and with 90 — or 95, as it turned out — long minutes ahead of them.
It was a night to either make history or be history and — as a reporter — the stakes are raised accordingly. You have to capture the drama of the moment — the feel of what it all means and its resonance — but also place what is happening in the sport’s broader narrative.
After all, this match was being billed as the end of this great Barcelona team, and the arrival of a new European superpower.
Instead, for the Ligue 1 champions it was sporting trauma, followed by recriminations, upset and disbelief.
Their players were all bearing that haunted, thousand-yard stare of the vanquished as they stumbled off the turf.
For Barcelona, it was a night of pure sporting heaven, of redemption, superlatives and manic celebration.
Their head coach Luis Enrique — so browbeaten in recent weeks — lost it, the fans lost it and so did many of the locals in the press box.
The rest of us were just thinking: did that really happen?
Neymar had declared he would score twice — but did not score his first goal until the 88th minute.
Enrique had said Barcelona could score six and might claim the winning one in the final minute. They did. Yet it still felt almost preternatural.
Beforehand, there had been some debate about whether or not I should even travel to report on a tie which looked like it was already over.
We decided I should on the basis that it was important to bear witness to the end of an era, for confirmation that the “MSN” — [Lionel] Messi, [Luis] Suárez, Neymar — was on the wane (indeed, Messi did not have one of his better nights), that Andres Iniesta — who was substituted — was past his best and that Barcelona needed rebuilding.
All of that might well still be true, but that just makes what happened even more heroically glorious.
History was made. A miracle did happen. And I was fortunate enough to see it. left