Vinícius too hot for Barça to handle in a clásico that was far from classic

Vinícius Júnior had a long walk home but not half as long as the people he passed on the way. The Brazilian was on the other side of the ground when he was taken off with four minutes left and Real Madrid 1-0 up in the clásico, slowly heading eastbound around the edge of the pitch. As he went along the front of the north stand, some Barcelona supporters came to shout at him. Others gave him the finger. More took pictures where once they took the piss. Mostly they were just glad to see the back of him. Which is pretty much all their players had seen too, Óscar Mingueza especially.

Mingueza had already played his last minutes an hour earlier, departing early defeated. Now Vinícius left too, eventually cracking into a smile and pointing at the scoreboard. His work was done and the game was too, it seemed. He hadn’t been on the bench long when it definitely was. Barcelona had the ball but couldn’t find a way through and never looked much like finding one either. Despite or perhaps because of sticking Luuk de Jong and Gerard Piqué up front, although Sergio Agüero and Memphis Depay were there too, there were more forwards than football and not one shot on target. “Madrid had had better opportunities than us,” Marc-André ter Stegen admitted after, and they were about to get the clearest of all.

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In the 93rd minute Marco Asensio sprinted up the left, clear. Eric García saw Ter Stegen save Asensio’s shot but not Lucas Vázquez coming past him to finish it off. “That’s for my mum: it’s her birthday,” Lucas said later. She was having a lovely day, Ter Stegen wasn’t: gripping at his shorts, shouting, he leapt in the air, fuming. All it lacked was Yosemite Sam’s hat to land on. “The second goal shouldn’t happen,” he said, bluntly. It had been so simple. The whole thing had. And although Barcelona did then score, Agüero turning in a volley on 97, it was too late.

“We made the mistake of thinking it was finished,” Carlo Ancelotti said of that final goal, which was understandable because it was. Real Madrid had won a third clásico in a row; he had won his first. Asked how it felt, he raised an eyebrow, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Good.” Then he added: “It’s only three points, not six.” But doesn’t it mean much more than that, he was asked? You know, what with it being the clásico and all. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. As for Ronald Koeman, he insisted: “It’s very, very hard to take. It’s difficult to understand this result.”

Only it really wasn’t that difficult, and that could be seen not just through what happened on the pitch but maybe what was said off it, too. “They took their chances, we didn’t. Sergiño Dest’s opportunity has to be scored,” Koeman said, which was easy enough for a start. Equally easy to grasp was the sporting director, Ramón Planes, admitting that a team “in construction” don’t really have the players who win games. “We can’t ask for more,” he said, the latest in the long list of ‘it is what it is’ lines that could well be doing more harm than good, an excuse to hide behind.

There is something in that, of course. Agüero, De Jong, and Memphis aren’t Messi, Suárez and Griezmann. And while Dest smashed an easy opportunity over the bar at one end, David Alaba smashed a significantly harder one into the net at the other. It was true too that there wasn’t much more from either team. But there was something in that being the explanation offered up that felt like it explained more. Something too in the acceptance of Madrid winning that way and in Barcelona losing that way as if that meant it mattered less; in the attempt to reduce it all to pegada, the ability to land the knock-out punch. “They scored, we didn’t,” Koeman said.

“We’re close to beating a big team,” Barcelona’s manager insisted, but once again they didn’t. Besides: were they? Are they? Really? And is “close to” OK? Is the acceptance acceptable?

“Their goal was a shot, not a move,” Sergio Busquets said perhaps saying more than he intended. As if, quite apart from not really being true, that didn’t count somehow. As if Barcelona had lots of moves. There was talk too of Madrid winning solely by the counter-attack, as if that was OK, then. As if they hadn’t seen what Vinícius had done to them, as if winning the clásico that way was somehow wrong, too easy – without wondering why it was so easy for their opponents or if that maybe, just maybe, that was the right thing to do. “Practical and intelligent,” Ancelotti put it.

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Madrid’s manager was not entirely happy but it had gone more or less as he imagined and the impotence of Barcelona’s response was not entirely unexpected. “Defensively we were very solid and it’s difficult for opponents to make chances against us [but] we have to be solid a bit further forward,” Ancelotti said. “We were good defensively and very efficient in attack.” Before the game, he told his players that if they made no mistakes, if they were patient, they would win. Afterwards, they privately expressed surprise at how comfortable it had all been, how right he was. There was no wild celebration in the dressing room.

“The manager said to play with a mid-block, tight, and come out fast,” Vázquez said. It may have sounded like a simple, limited plan, but it didn’t make it the wrong one. Every time they did, they caused Barcelona problems. So why wouldn’t they do it? And if they didn’t create much more than Barcelona, didn’t go for them, it may have been as much by design as accident, because they didn’t need to. Because this way worked better. If there was a player who exercised control, it was Luka Modric. And Vinícius tore into Barcelona in the first half, Mingueza substituted at half-time. “He does it well,” Ter Stegen admitted, “he’s got a lot of speed and you can’t always defend that.”

Once he had helped make the first goal, the game was where they wanted it. It always had been, even though an opener for Barcelona might have changed that.

Ancelotti has been insistent on defensive improvement, rarely satisfied even on those nights when they have won. The attacking quality is “genetic”, he said. Strip it down to basic quality and there is no one with a player as good at Luka Modric or Karim Benzema, a goalkeeper as good as Thibaut Courtois, a passer like Toni Kroos, or a player as electric as Vinícius, the real victor on Sunday.

“Ancelotti is the same as he was last time but more intense, more insistent on the defence,” Dani Carvajal said at the start of the season. He has talked about wanting defenders to be “pessimists”, not “optimists”. This weekend, he said he often felt fear – but was never “terrified” – and that feeling that way was no bad thing. “If you don’t have fear you can think the lion in front of you is a cat.” But Barcelona are no lion and, deep down, no one knows that better than Barcelona themselves.

Osasuna 1-1 Granada, Athletic Bilbao 2-1 Villarreal, Elche 2-2 Espanyol, Cádiz 0-2 Alavés, Valencia 2-2 Real Mallorca, Atlético Madrid 2-2 Real Sociedad, Real Betis 3-2 Rayo Vallecano, Barcelona 1-2 Real Madrid, Sevilla 5-3 Levante

Ultimately, the game of the season was not even the game of the day. On any given Sunday, Betis beating Rayo Vallecano to go fourth, even if just for a little while, might capture the attention. Sevilla beating Levante 5-3 might, too. And last year’s champions Atlético Madrid coming back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 with this year’s leaders Real Sociedad certainly would. But this wasn’t any given Sunday, it was clásico Sunday. A game whose coverage on Spanish TV started with the commentator circling the Camp Nou in a helicopter but what followed didn’t match the buildup. The clásico was no classic, a game less fun than any other on Sunday.

“This was a high-level match,” Koeman said, but that didn’t really convince either.