Second halves are rarely at the midpoint of anything. You know they are upon you not by a calendar, but by a set of unseen cracks in your very fiber and standing that seem to widen all at once — for a man, for instance, it’s the pretty girl who now looks right through you, the sudden back spasm, the name of that childhood sports hero suddenly no longer on the tip of your tongue. You can survive a second half for a while, even thrive, but there is nothing to prepare you for that first gust of chilly wind, the blow to your confidence delivered by the quick loss of things you took for granted.
For Barça 2009-10, we can now declare the real first half of the season over — the unbeaten one, the largely injury-free one, the one in which we were serene about the smallish gap between ourselves and our perpetually fretful archrival. (You would thought that 5 points was 50, so unconcerned did everyone — except Madrid — seem about the rest of the season.) Players are now going down like Columbus has brought smallpox upon them: Now Xavi is out for 15 days and Keita a month — throw those logs on the pyre along with the bodies of Yaya Toure, Dani Alves, Abidal and Chygrynskyi. The lead is down to 2 points after yesterday’s universally foreseen loss to Atletico — a 6-6-9 team that shockingly dominated Barca in midfield and made Carles Puyol look about 75 years old on their counterattacks. Phil Ball says neither Barca nor Real would be “suicidal” if they lost La Liga, so long as they won the Champions League…but if you thought Messi cried after failing to defend the Copa del Rey, they’re going to have to build an ark to navigate the sea of tears if Real’s smash-and-grab spree is vindicated in the end over the patient tutelage of La Masia. Death Star is in our rear-view mirror again, and gaining fast.
So one defeat can turn a major chord minor; yes, it can. Which is not to say that Barça shouldn’t have won the match — they should have, handily. The one difference between last year and this year hides in plain sight: goal scoring. 68 after 22 matches last year; 53 after 22 this year. Goals came in swarms last year, in Everlasting Gobstoppers. The chances are there again this year, not quite as many…but the strikers are now missing; Pedro blew about four yesterday, and Ibra fumbled his customary two or three. As the old saying goes, strikers are paid to miss; but not this much, and not over the course of a season. We’ll have to wait for a new second half for that to change.
(Image credit: piterart/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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