Life is good lived on the edge. Barcelona played the clásico atop a high-wire, a fearless plan executed with perfect precision, and finished at the top of the table, six points clear. Three days after scoring four against Bayern Munich to exorcise European ghosts, Hansi Flick’s team came to the Santiago Bernabéu and scored four more, their wonderful week complete. Robert Lewandowski, at 36, got two; then Lamine Yamal, 19 years his junior, became the youngest ever to score in this fixture; before Raphinha lifted in the last, history written.
The risk Barcelona supposedly ran was the one that undid Madrid, players in blue and red streaming into the space behind that line of white, Carlo Ancelotti’s team sliced apart by a team that started with six under-21s. “There are games in Germany they call clásicos but it’s not the same,” Flick had said, and he was right. And yet even the real one isn’t always quite like this; what the German described as “the start of a journey” was as good as it gets. It also ended Madrid’s unbeaten run at 42, conserving a record for his new club.
