Real Madrid or how to lose to live another day

Pep Guardiola regrets an opportunity missed by City in the duel against Madrid. AFP7 via Europa Press (Europa Press)

It could be conceded that Real Madrid lost in Manchester to live another day, but the truth is that they lost, there should be no doubt about that.

The scoreboard says it and the chronicles of the party testify to it, some reluctantly, entangled between the exercise of journalism and the proper propaganda.

The only one determined to openly contradict him is Karim Benzema, a footballer accustomed to relativizing the value of numbers and who left the stadium smiling, challenging his team to do something magical next Wednesday at the Santiago Bernabéu: win.

Rarely will a European defeat have been welcomed with the collective enthusiasm that was unleashed last Tuesday.

Praise flew everywhere and the oldest of the place remembered those grandiose words of an illustrious journalist in the farewell to dictator Francisco Franco: "This is how only the great men of Civilization die, Europe," he wrote.

It is still early to bury Madrid, there is no doubt.

History forces due respect to him and anyone is capable of reciting half a dozen similar miracles only in the last five years.

But it is also early to bury Manchester City, a steamroller with Wi-Fi and chrome trim that collectively dismembered its rival to end up paying an excessive toll,

the one that the best players in the world usually claim when the big teams have a button unsewn.

That way three goals slipped past Pep Guardiola's men, who had prepared a tactical hell for the visitors and a little purgatory for some journalists.

We can ignore the background and discuss whether the Catalan coach was more or less courteous to Ricardo Sierra, the colleague in charge of conducting the post-match interview for the Spanish public: both would have seen each other at this point in their careers.

What came after – and which is so similar to what came before, even to the usual – should be framed in that kind of post-traumatic stress disorder in which a good part of Spanish sports journalism seems immersed since Guardiola won the stripes of admiral of the negotiated.

Jorge Valdano himself, in this same header, theorized some time ago about the reasons that could drive so much antipathy: Guardiola's opposition to institutionalized

, his status as a Barça myth, his political manifestations... "There is only one reason to hate him ”, he finally summed up: “the soccer

that their teams give when they step on the Bernabéu”.

Perhaps because on Tuesday we attended one more, this time far from Concha Espina, those who are still denying her bread and salt preferred to put together another artificial controversy to reaffirm their prejudices and thus avoid addressing that uncomfortable truth that haunts them through the head since, what do I know, prehistory?

Well maybe.

What lies ahead, again focused on football, is a decisive match between the magical realism of Madrid and the Guardiola method with Paris on the horizon.

There, watching the snow fall on the roofs, he found Gabriel García Márquez the ending he was looking for for El Coronel no one writes to him, that "shit!"

majestic that one of the contenders must endorse as soon as the clash is over because in football, above literature, they continue to rule the goals and the result: losing to live another day, now, yes, it will no longer be an option.

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