A sense of anti-climax but Barcelona still deserve their title

Barcelona: Tito Vilanova didn’t see his team win the league. It was coming up to midnight on Saturday and across the city, out near the airport in Cornell-El Prat, the final whistle was about to go on the 2012-2013 title race.

But the end had effectively come months before and it had come, at least in part, like this: with Real Madrid conceding a goal from a set-piece and limply dropping points away.

Helenio Herrera, Barcelona’s coach between 1958 and 1960, famously once claimed that his team would win their next match without getting off the bus. This weekend, Barcelona won the league without getting on it.

Real Madrid knew that if they did not beat Espanyol on Saturday, Barcelona would clinch La Liga with four games to spare. Barcelona knew it too but Vilanova wasn’t watching. He didn’t see Christian Stuani put Espanyol into the lead or Gonzalo Higuain equalise; no nerves, no tension, and better things to do.

“I was just about to go to sleep after preparing our game [against Atletico Madrid the following day], when I looked at the internet to see the score,” he said, pretty much nailing TV coverage here.

“I saw that they were 1-1, so I put the telly on for the last three minutes. They didn’t show the game, really, they just kept focusing on the bench. So I didn’t see it.”

Then the whistle went and Barcelona were champions, just as everyone has known they would be since before Christmas. Vilanova and his wife Montse said congratulations. And then Tito went off to bed.

So it was that Barcelona arrived in Madrid on Sunday already champions, were given a guard of honour by Atletico Madrid and played out a game that felt more like a pre-season friendly. Radamel Falcao scored the first. Lionel Messi then walked off the pitch and headed silently down the tunnel, injured.

And in his absence, with Barcelona down to 10 men and with Diego Simeone replacing Arda Turan and Falcao, Alexis Sanchez equalised before Gabi scored an own goal to give Barcelona victory. There were embraces and cheers; four or five players turned and applauded the couple of hundred Barcelona fans high in the stand above.

And that was pretty much that. On Saturday night, after Madrid’s loss, Dani Alves posted a picture of himself with a bottle of cava and after the win over Atletico on Sunday there were more photos: Iniesta with Sanchez, modesty covered by the shirt draped across his lap; the squad on the bus, heading across the runway to their plane home; players in the dressing room, raising a finger for each title won: six for Iniesta, four for Busquets, one for Cesc Fabregas. There were T-shirts, too, “champions” written on them. But there was something just a little flat about it all.

Barcelona’s sporting director Andoni Zubizarreta had already complained that the title had come to be a little “clandestine” and on Sunday morning, it wasn’t on the cover of the Madrid papers.

Conveniently, they had other sports to hide behind, AS wedging its tongue in its cheek to declare knowingly: “Basketball to the rescue.”

When it turned out that basketball did not come to the rescue, Real Madrid losing the Euroleague final to Olympiakos, Fernando Alonso and Rafael Nadal did. Formula 1 was the cover this morning. Anything but Barca.

Now, that was perhaps inevitable these are, after all, avowedly pro-Madrid papers and the Catalan ones certainly did carry title winning front pages but there was something about the feeling left by this title that went further than a little rivalry.

On page five of the Catalan daily Sport, the headline on Josep-Maria Casanovas’s column insists: “this should be celebrated properly.” On page six, the headline on Joan Vehils’s column insists: “this should be celebrated in style.” It was as if they were trying to convince themselves and everybody else.

A poll asked whether fans valued the league title success. 93 per cent said yes. That sounds like a ringing endorsement until you turn it on its head: 7 per cent of Barcelona fans attach no value to the title? Really?

Under the stands at the Calderon, Tito Vilanova insisted: “I have no doubt that we are the best team in Spain this season and by some distance.”

The fact that he was even asked was significant. Perhaps it is natural that a league title that Jose Mourinho ceded before Christmas should have less impact than one won dramatically at the end of the season.

“News” comes from “new”, after all, and this is a title that everyone knew that Barcelona would win for a long time. Perhaps if the season had been the other way round, Barcelona pulling away from Madrid at the end rather than leaving them in the distance at the start, it might be different.

The sense that Madrid abdicated contributes too, right down to Barcelona not having to play to claim the title, and leaves people with the doubt in a championship reduced to two teams, as to whether Barcelona won the league or Madrid lost it.

That’s a doubt that also lingers because when it comes to the head-to-heads, it is hard to avoid the sensation that the balance of power has shifted Madrid’s way: since the 2-2 draw in October, Madrid have knocked Barcelona out of the King’s Cup and defeated them in the league with a weakened team, albeit in a match that felt largely insignificant.

Just as last year, there was a sense that Madrid’s league title would lack something if they took the title without beating Barcelona, so that same debate is posed once again this time round (with some inevitably switching trenches).

Then, of course, this season has been conditioned by that King’s Cup semi-final defeat and, above all, the Champions League semi-final.

Barcelona have reached six Champions League semi-finals in a row, more than anyone else ever, but they conceded seven goals to Bayern Munich. Seven. So many goals leave quite a mark, the sheer dominance of Bayern, the completeness of their destruction, cannot fail to leave scars.

When Vilanova was asked by Gazetta dello Sport’s Filippo Ricci for his valuation of the season on Sunday night, there was something telling about the fact that he requested a little clarification: “In the league, you mean, or the season [as a whole]?”

But then continued: “Any season in which you win the league is a successful season.”

He is right, of course. As he insisted, when it comes to the league, Barcelona have been the best side and by some distance. Between those two Sport columns, there was room for one more article, a double page spread. The headline ran: “A good league sure deserves a party.” There it was again, that sense of trying to convince everyone, possibly even of protesting too much, and yet Sport were right too. This is a league title that almost defies analysis, and appears to defy celebration too. And that is unfair.

There has been a sense of vulnerability, a little lack of drama, sure, but this has been an extremely good league campaign. Barcelona currently stand 10 points clear of Real Madrid, with a game in hand.

They are on 91 points; win their last three games and they would equal the 100-point record Madrid set last season a record universally lauded and rightly so. But now, that 100-point mark, an all-time record, is being held up as a minimum, as if a title without equalling their rivals Madrid is worthless. In fact, it would be astonishing.

That 100-point total provides an objective for the last three games, a point to be proven; the chance to equal their rivals, adding value to this season. It is a target that comes at the end of a season in which, for almost six months, there hasn’t been a target. It is perhaps even more impressive that Barcelona have won 29 of their 35 games when you consider that, given their lead, they didn’t really need to.

They have scored 107 goals: the joint second highest total ever, with three games left still. They have scored in every single game: Messi scored consecutively against every team in the division and has 46 in total. The stats in Spain always leave a doubt, not least because every season those figures grow bigger while the rest of the league shrinks, but they remain impressive.

Mourinho recently claimed to have ended Barcelona’s hegemony but now they now have the title back. His team broke their run and Barcelona have broken back. If there is a hegemony, it is Barcelona’s. This is their fourth league in five years. Over the last ten years, they have six to Madrid’s three. It is not purely coincidental.

For Xavi, this was a seventh league title; for eight members of the squad, it was their first. It was also the first under a new coach, after the departure of Pep Guardiola. For others, of course, it will be their last. Barcelona cannot allow the title to blind them to their flaws; nor though can they allow their flaws to blind them to this success or to the things that they do well, and there are many of them.

This is also a league title that has been achieved despite injuries and illness, with their coach absent because he has cancer. As Javier Mascherano put it bluntly but effectively: “He’s not in New York on holiday.” Think about the implications of that for a moment. This remains a remarkable achievement; “if Tito gets well and we win nothing,” it doesn’t matter, the president Sandro Rosell had said. Instead, they won the league. Vilanova suggested that no other club would have come through it so well.

While Vilanova was talking, you could hear the fans outside singing but they were the Atletico fans. There was no conga line in the car park on route from dressing room to bus, in fact the players came through one by one and mostly in silence. There was little in the way of screaming and shouting, little externalisation yet of the satisfaction they must surely have felt. Outside perhaps 200 fans gathered to cheer them off, singing: “Champions! Champions!” But it was all quite low-key.

At 9.51pm, a plain green bus with blackened windows pulled out from behind the Calderon and slipped onto the M30 and round to the airport. “We have celebrated more than people think,” Gerard Pique said.

They deservedly celebrated some more on Monday. They also boarded another bus. This one had the markings of the team, champions for the 22nd time. It also had an open top.