When Barça was in ruins and Granada in glory, the Blaugrana team came back from hell in an epic game that was decided in extra time by 3-5 in one of those duels that enters the museum of nights in its own right unforgettable for the culé team at the cost of cruelty for a Granada that was a handful of glory. When someone tells you they don’t like soccer, put on this monumental game.
Barça was about to ruin the season in the silliest way. Denis Conner, the mythical patron of the United States team in the America’s Cup, said that “there is only one thing better than winning: losing and winning again.” The Barça experienced it yesterday in a frantic encounter difficult to explain. For example, how do I tell you that the Granada goalkeeper conceded five goals and it was huge?
Someone should explain to the Barça players that monopolizing the summary video of the most glaring mistakes of the year is not a goal in itself and that in mythology, Sisyphus does not need competition. The king of Corinth spent eternity (still continues) in the underworld condemned to carry a heavy rock up the slope of a steep hillside so that, once the top was reached, the rock would fall again on the other side and thus begin again.
Koeman’s team was planted in Granada with an impeccable beginning staging in which they executed a game monologue that cornered Granada. But every time Barça reached the top carrying the stone, it fell again on the other side. There was no way to realize the good game by scoring a goal.
There, Aarón was great against Messi and Araújo, Trincāo was diluted in the final meters and Araújo failed to measure his jumps. If in the rival area Barça was Sisyphus, in their own it was Don Pésimo. Again, errors in defense aggravated the team’s penalty. A monumental blunder by Umtiti, which was a surprise starter, facilitated a deadly Soro recovery of necessity that Kenedy pushed into the net.
At the beginning of the second half, Barça was the victim of the initial trauma. Furthermore, Diego Martínez was the first to make a move and at that moment he had the game in hand. Soldado returned to portray Umtiti to score 2-0. From the first moment of the game, the forward detected that behind the Frenchman’s back he had a vein to exploit.
With Barça depressed, groggy and colliding with the sticks (up to three times Barça shot at the wood) everything seemed decided and sentenced. Until on the rarest occasion of the match, Aarón swallowed a ball from Griezmann, which was revealed in the final minutes as decisive. In the discount, he focused so that Alba scored the tie that leads the game to extra time. Did they want something weirder? Alba head.
The overtime did not disappoint. Griezmann took advantage of the moral advantage of the comeback to score 2-3, which Barça, in homage to Sisyphus, squandered with a penalty the minute the match evened.
With the match broken, Barça finished their comeback in the final stretch. First with De Jong scoring and then with another goal from Alba. Sisyphus left the stone above and Barça went from ruin to glory before an imposing Granada that remained on the shore. Soccer is wonderful.
