White Angels by John Carlin

Author:John Carlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408820827
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

11: The Bullet Man and el Superdàsico

It was a Wednesday morning. The Barcelona—Real Madrid game wasn’t being played till Saturday night but that morning’s four big sports dailies were carrying sixty-four pages between them on the big match. They were not saying anything that had not been said a thousand times before. But they were saying it anyway. One paper had an ‘exclusive’ interview with Ronaldo who, at twenty years old, was the top goal-scorer in Europe. Question: ‘Do you want to take on Real Madrid?’ Answer:’Yes. I really want to beat them.’This translated into a screamer of a front page headline. ‘RONALDO: I WANT TO TAKE ON REAL MADRID.’

The year was 1997. Ronaldo was playing in the claret and blue colours of Barcelona, his one season at the Catalan club before moving on to Inter Milan. He would score the one goal of the game, helping extend Barça’s unbeaten run at home against Real Madrid to thirteen years.

More than six years would pass before the Brazilian played again at Barcelona’s Camp Nou. This time he was wearing the white of Real Madrid. On the day before the match, 6 December 2003, the four big morning sports dailies carried sixty-eight pages on the superclásico One of them featured an interview with Ronaldo who confessed that, yes indeed, he was ‘really looking forward to taking on Barcelona’. But this time they did not use that line for the front page. This time they had something even better. Ronaldo was making a prediction, like Muhammad Ali used to do. Real Madrid would win 1-0 and he would score. ‘0-1: MY GOAL’ screamed the headline over a photo of the Brazilian. Roberto Carlos added to the pre-match frothing. Real’s other — and in his own way no less remarkable — Brazilian had played against Ronaldo in the Real defeat in Barcelona in 1997. Now he proclaimed that with Ronaldo on the same side, the Real team would finally put to an end two decades of humiliation in Barcelona. Real Madrid had not won once in twenty years of matches away against Barça at the Camp Nou. The stakes for both clubs were, as was always the case, shatteringly high.

The two teams had played hundreds of games since their very first encounter in 1902, when Barcelona won 3-1 at home, but the game this weekend, on this night of 6 December 2003, was el Partido del Siglo, the Game of the Century. Or at least it would be until the two sides met again at the Bernébeu the following April.

There is no rivalry quite like it in European sport. Manchester United v Liverpool, Milan v Juventus: they don’t come close. (Beckham himself was quoted as saying how underwhelming his past duels for Manchester United against Liverpool seemed compared to the game that loomed at the Camp Nou.) Celtic v Rangers in Glasgow may have something of the same edge, because of the religious rivalry, but even that fixture has lots some of its heat since Rangers started admitting Papists and Englishmen into the ranks.

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