A casting to try to return

In his crazy flight forward, Xavi Hernández starred last Friday in another episode of those that leave us all with a very bad taste in our mouths.

Some because of his legendary status (Xavi's, I say).

Because we love him, we respect him and we feel him as ours, almost a family member.

And to himself because it is in his mouth where the words amplify the form and meaning that the Barça coach himself wants to give them.

“Madrid adulterates the competition, even a blind man can see that,” he said at the press conference prior to the Mendizorroza match.

And he said it without thinking about his own reputation as the winner of the last edition.

Or in that of his players.

But above all, he said it without thinking about blind people, people like my colleague and friend Toni López, an immense journalist at CRTVG, who are not at all to blame for the degree of frustration that Xavi Hernández may feel and would deserve, at the very least, an apology. sincere for a joke more typical of the new installment of Torrente, the foolish arm of the law, than of an elite sports figure in the year 2024: the cruelty in the speech itself acquires even more negative connotations when one spends the day denouncing it in other people's mouths.

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Beyond this dialectical misstep, the extended goodbye of Xavi Hernández has caused an enormous media explosion in Barcelona because the big blockbusters have opportunities in the making.

And the search for a new tenant for the Barça bench is, almost as much or more so than the selection of a new striker.

Or Sergio Busquets' replacement, if such a creature exists.

Or another Woody Allen film with Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem as protagonists.

The casting call to replace Xavi has just officially opened its doors and the names of possible candidates are beginning to sprout on the pages of the newspapers like mushrooms in hot, humid and gloomy places.

Everyone thinks they know the perfect coach to eat the toad.

The perfect man, you could say, since putting a woman in charge of a men's team is still not contemplated in the current mental standards of professional football: it was tried in tennis and the test ended up dying out in the middle of a sexist debate, so Imagine the result if Barça's sports management dared to take a single step in this direction.

He will be a man, as he said, and among the many that are being heard these days, none of them seem to fully satisfy the megalomaniacal appetites of the Barça fan.

Only the return – highly unlikely – of Pep Guardiola seems to generate a certain consensus among the different families that make up the current Barça census.

All the others, including Frank Rijkaard and Luis Enrique, raise some kind of suspicion among a hobby that, from fighting so much over feathers, long ago forgot how to roast a chicken.

And this is no small problem for a club that counts among its fans the largest army of crooked faces and frowns in world football, a group that apologized to Bobby Robson long after having thrown him out the window and despised Van Gaal because he did not He reminded him enough of Cruyff.

That is what the Míchel, Motta, Márquez, Flick or Torrent of the moment will face if they turn out to be the ones chosen for glory: a past so happy that, as Sabina sings, one should not try to return.

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