As you browse through the tourist
guidebooks of “must-see” things in Barcelona, apart from the Gaudi works and
the Olympic village and the Las Ramblas and the flamenco shows, they mention
this museum that’s the most visited in the city. No, I’m not talking about the
Pablo Picasso museum although that attracts a fair share of visitors too. I’m
talking about the museum at the football club of Barcelona – FCB. Now given
that I really enjoy watching the team play and try to follow pretty much every
game, such a sort of thing really makes you wince a little bit, but I guess the
marketing types need to make a living after all. From the famous Mes que un club motto to the merchandise
at the many FCB stores littered all across Barcelona (including the airport, of
course), they have taken the football club and made it into a sellable
commodity. Pretty much every other kid in the city wears a Messi jersey.
Getting tickets is a far from
simple matter because the club works on a complicated system wherein members
need to release tickets for them to be available. We managed to get fairly
decent seats to watch Barca take on Athletic Bilbao in a La Liga match. Although
Bilbao may not be doing too well in the league this season, they made a lot of
people sit up and take notice with their annihilation of United in a Europa cup
tie. I was fairly confident that Barca would see them off easily at home,
especially since they had played a Europa match against Shalke only 2 nights
back, but then you never know. Barcelona had also drawn 2-2 away at the San
Mames earlier in the season so this was no sure-shot. Oh well, that’s what
makes it all fun.
As we walked through the Gothic
quarter on the morning of the match, we saw a bunch of Bilbao supporters
standing around a bar singing something in Basque (I guess it must’ve been the
team song) pointing in the direction of a few local kids decked up in their
Barca kits. The needle! The city was getting ready for the match.
After overcoming some linguistic
barriers, we were able to pick up our tickets at the pick-up center near Plaza
Catalunya and figured out the best way to get to the stadium was to take
so-and-so train in so-and-so direction. So we step on to the train in our Barca
gear and as expected – the train is mostly full of people heading to the game.
It’s funny how supporters of a team are not very different in that regard,
irrespective of the sport or the country. Whether you take the line 3 to Les
Corts or the Churchgate local to watch a cricket match at the Wankhede, or you
take the 4 to the Bronx to watch the Yankees play, the general atmosphere is
pretty much the same. You have your supporters wearing imitation T-shirts, some
looking fairly sillier than they do on a regular workday, all chatting about in
good humor and anticipation of getting a favorable result. It’s something non
sport fans will never get. The energy. The anticipation. We did notice a few
stares in our direction – not sure if it was because seeing a couple of Indians
heading over to the game is unusual or they were patronizing “oh these tourists”
looks, but we did notice a few. Spain is similar to India in that sense –
people will stare at you quite openly. More on that later.
As we went closer to the Camp
Nou, there was the usual throng of supporters patiently waiting outside the
gates hoping to catch a glimpse of the team bus and maybe get a picture of the
back of Messi’s head or Cesc’s elbow. We headed over to the hot-dog stands
outside and I helped myself to a can of Estrella – fairly unremarkable beer,
but any trip to a sporting mecca is incomplete without a taste of the local
hooch. We headed inside to catch our first glimpse of the imposing stadium that
is the Camp Nou. You expect a stadium that can hold almost 100,000 people to be
fairly huge but of course, you can’t really taste the atmosphere until you
stand there and hear the said 100,000. I checked later that approximately
85,000 people showed up that night, which proves that an empty seat here and an
empty seat there can really add up.
As the players came out and
started to warm up, I looked behind to see a bunch of Japanese tourists (at
least I assumed them to be Japanese) taking in the action as well and I felt
myself turn fairly patronizing myself about how they were here just for the
tourist experience. That’s where the stares on the train came back to me. They
were propagating a stereotype for me, just as I was for those on the train. That
was my one big epiphany of the night. Oh well, back to the pitch. The teams
were still going through their pre-game drills prompting a bunch of camera flashes
going off around the stadium in the midst of the usual cheering and whistling
(I had to tell my wife that the whistles are a form of jeering in Spain – very different
from the appreciative whistles they let fly from the cheap seats in India).
And then it began. Kick-off was
preceded by an 85,000+ strong rendition of the Barca club anthem and the
unfurling of the flag. As the match kicked off, Barcelona settled into their
rhythmic passing game. Now at this point, it’s worth mentioning that the crowd
could stay perfectly silent during the game when something potentially
significant was unfolding and that’s a sure sign of a knowledgeable public.
Cesc and Xavi hadn’t started so Thiago and Iniesta were playing in the midfield
along with Busquets and Messi was leading the line with Tello and Alexis in
tow. The midfield tiki-taka was just as mind boggling to watch live as it
always is on TV. There were the usual patient buildups, the give and goes and
some amazing runs from Messi. The ball did hit the back of the net fairly
early, but the whistle had blown and that tempered the Camp Nou that was ready
to erupt.
Overall, it was the kind of
performance that is starting to be taken for granted from this Barcelona side.
Iniesta displayed some fantastic ball-control and along with Messi was running
the Athletic defense ragged. There were some marauding runs forward by Pique
and some excellent fire-fighting by Mascherano who is starting to look more and
more like a center-back with every passing match. Alves spent a lot of his time
in the attacking half of the pitch, as is his wont, and even Adriano went
forward more than Abidal generally would’ve and it all made for some attacking
football. Thiago was fairly disappointing through the game because his first
touches were often too heavy and I remembered him giving the ball away cheaply on
more than one occasion. After a period of domination in the first half, the
first goal duly arrived from a precise Messi pass and with some excellent
finishing from Iniesta. We went into the half-time break feeling fairly
confident that we won’t be witness to a rare home loss. It was more of the same
in the second half and Tello, who had been fairly anonymous up to that point,
sped into the box and won a penalty for a shove by the highly rated Javi
Martinez. Messi tucked away the penalty without a fuss and around this point,
any lingering anxieties went away. Pique had to make a clearance off the line
but by-and-large the defense was untroubled by Bilbao’s attack.
Xavi came on towards the end of
the second half for Iniesta and that prompted huge cheers from the crowd, but
the loudest cheers of all were reserved for their adopted son, Messi. Watching
the crowd dote on Messi reminds you a bit of the Wankhede crowd’s unconditional
love for Sachin. It’s like a grandparent looking on their prodigal grandson
who, in their eyes, can do no wrong. The place erupted as it had threatened to
all night when Messi scored the goal. 2-0. Game over.
In the end, it wasn’t the most
exciting match ever, but it felt great to be part of the experience. It’s hard
to not take a bit of a philosophical angle on the whole thing and realize that
behind what we are able to watch, there are thousands and thousands of hours of
training that we didn’t. And to understand that it’s this whole Catalan
sub-culture that manifests itself on the pitch every time Barca step on. Critics
point to the high horse that the club and its followers sit on, but the reasons
for the unabashed display of Catalan nationalism that goes hand-in-hand with
the club have their roots in the Civil war and are deep enough that anyone who
has not lived there can’t even begin to understand. It’s something that I don’t
even pretend to do. Maybe the locals don’t object to putting the club’s museum
on the list of Barcelona to-do’s. One can only guess. Not knowing Spanish -
leave alone Catalan - leaves me culturally poorer and in a position where I
will only always be merely scratching the surface. All that aside, I was
fortunate enough to watch what may be the best football team of all time. Visca
Barca!
