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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Sid Lowe

Barcelona knew Robert Lewandowski was good. But not this good

Robert Lewandowski prepares to warm up before the match at Mallorca, in which he scored the only goal of the game
Robert Lewandowski has scored 12 goals in nine games for Barcelona and more than justified the club’s aggressive summer pursuit of the striker. Photograph: Quality Sport Images/Getty Images

Turns out the guy who had scored 618 career goals, and run at more than 25 a year every year for more than a decade, was quite good. There were plenty of players missing when La Liga returned from the international break this weekend, but not him. He, it seems, is inevitable. And so when they had finished, there he was, quietly standing above them all. Robert Lewandowski, the Polish Ian Rush and the Spanish Pichichi. And, who knows, perhaps something more: he, after all, has just taken his team to a place they hadn’t been in two and a half years.

This was the weekend the Williams brothers kept rolling, Nico and Inaki returning home from debuts with different countries to set each other up as Athletic scored four for the third time to go top of the everyone else league. The weekend in which Girona and Real Sociedad went wild, scoring eight between them, including one that was ridiculous from Rodrigo Riquelme and something a bit special from Alex Sorloth in a 5-3 away win. The weekend when so, unexpectedly, did Getafe and Valladolid: not normally Spain’s great entertainers, they served up the best show the Coliseum’s seen since 325AD.

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