In the middle of his personal campaign for Messi to remain at Barça for the next eternity, Don Luis Suárez, the Ballon d’Or, sang to him in Carousel to the Barça leader a Galician song that he adapted to his passionate interest: “Don’t go, Leo Messi, you’re going to climb us!”.
The Barça captain came from the limbo of the bench, he shook his team as if lifting it from the ground and in four minutes changed the sign of a game that seemed organized by the legacies of a sleepwalker. The dazzling action of the most coveted of the world’s footballers (and worth what it weighs) turned a matinee into a delight. The spirit of Granada, when Barça recovered the illusion that was stuck in its throat of fear and raised a match that looked like the gallows, suddenly returned and Betis found that basket of strange fruits that exceeded their merits.
In such an extraordinary way, Barça lived a few minutes until Betis returned to the danger zone, the draw. In that strange moment when Barça is sleepwalking or dead again, the most unlikely of scorers emerged from the cold, the enthusiastic Trincao to clinch a victory that, until Messi arrived, seemed like a distant feat. Kipling has a poem, If, that tells of the effort that must be maintained to face victory or defeat with equal courage.
Both Granada and Villamarín have been matches in which Barcelona has shown that poems like this can be turned into football, to the joy, for example, of Koeman, who already deserved joys like this. Don Luis Suárez promised in Carousel patent his claim, if Messi leaves Barça will escaralla, which is how the Galicians say to go to hell. Betis, 2; Barça, 3. History is full of scores like this.