Contrasting fortunes sets up mouth-watering El Clásico

By Ian Hawkey
Published

How best to set up the first clásico of the season? By accident as much as design, the Spanish league, and its fixture schedule, find that La Liga’s standout match, the one that captures as much global attention as any club soccer game in the calendar, is a concentration of suspense and anticipation. Come matchday 12, Real Madrid, who host Barcelona on November 21st, is what the world always wants: It's a proper duel for the summit, a game in which three points will look decisive, even 16 matchdays from the end of the season. 

Here's the scenario: The winner will go top of La Liga, but it's now more complex than that. If the winner is Barcelona, there will be a six-point gap at the top. The equation changed dramatically this Sunday evening, when a powerful third party in the never-ending story of Barcelona versus Real Madrid impacted again on the leadership of La Liga. This season’s best spoilers are Sevilla, who will not be champions in May, but are ruggedly and defiantly the party-poopers of the joust between Spain’s two leading clubs and title-candidates. On the first weekend of October, Sevilla beat Barcelona 2-1 at home; on the first full weekend of November, they did the same to Madrid, 3-2, in a vibrant match to end the weekend. 

Barcelona, who won 3-0 against Villarreal, one-time pace-setters in the 2015-16 Liga, will feel the best set for their most important domestic collision: they have won every match in La Liga since their Sevilla setback; they have registered three successive clean-sheets in the league, a reassuring turnaround after the heavy scorelines inflicted on them in the preludes to the campaign, by Sevilla in the European Super Cup – Barcelona scored five, Sevilla 4 – and Athletic Bilbao – 5-1 on aggregate to the Basque club - in the Spanish Super Cup. 

Barca's doubts? The Messi factor. He is injured and it cannot help but have a bearing on how Barcelona travel to the Spanish capital. Word right now is that the Argentinian’s muscle problems, sustained in September,  are taking longer to heal than anticipated, that there is a significant doubt whether or not he can participate against Madrid.    

Does it matter? Since Barcelona’s defeat against Sevilla, Barcelona have won every Liga match they have played. Of their 22 goals since then, Luis Suarez and Neymar have scored 20. Neymar scored twice against Villarreal and one of his goals was a piece of art, a balletic twist of his body, while waiting for a light volley he had played to himself to arch over his marker, and finished with precision and power.  

Luis Enrique, Barcelona’s head coach, has begun to find himself in the position his most celebrated predecessor, Pep Guardiola used to be, at least at press conferences. Guardiola one complained that, week after week, he was required by reporters to find new ways of describing Messi’s brilliance in the period from 2009 to 2013. “You run out of superlatives,” Guardiola would shrug. Luis Enrique has already exhausted his lexicon of Neymar tributes. After the Villarreal win, he made a comparison: “I had the good luck to play alongside Ronaldinho,” he said. “I remember how we as team-mates used to be in awe of the skills he showed in the warm-ups. Neymar’s [second] goal against Villarreal was like one of Ronaldinho's.” 

Madrid’s players are obliged to report that they have more injury problems, man for man, than Barcelona do, even if La Liga’s leaders may be without Messi. Both Madrid full-backs, Marcelo and Dani Carvajal were out against Sevilla. James Rodriguez, who scored Madrid’s second goal, returned from more than two months out injured, which was a balm for Benitez, but he will fret about about the shoulder injury Sergio Ramos sustained while scoring Madrid’s first goal in Seville, with an overhead volley. Benitez will worry even more if Messi finds his fitness in time to join the prolific Neymar and Suarez, and if Madrid's senior, injured players, do not.