Tuesday, May 5, 2015
rzegorz Krychowiak wiped the blood from his face yet it kept on coming. People rushed around him, working as quickly as they could but not quickly enough, and he watched through the tears, powerless as what he and his team-mates had built for 14 long months came down before his eyes. It was over, or very nearly: not quite in the blink of an eye, but in the crunch of a nose. Krychowiak’s nose was broken and so was Sevilla’s incredible run, more than a year in the making, 34 games unbeaten at the Sánchez Pizjuán. The league title race, meanwhile, had been put back together again. By Cristiano Ronaldo.
“Cristiano was the star of a team that suffered,” Carlo Ancelotti said; he was the star of a team that can still win the league and proved that they still want to, one that are not giving up. With three games to go, Madrid remain two points behind Barcelona. The newspaper Sport declared Barcelona “closer than ever”, and the title is still in their hands, but there was something forced about it: they are not as close as they hoped. In fact, the balance of power probably tilted back a fraction on Saturday when Barcelona won 8-0 at Córdoba and Real Madrid won 3-2 at Sevilla. Win every game and Barcelona are champions; drop any points at all and Madrid probably will be. Real Sociedad (H), Atlético (A), and Deportivo (H) await Barcelona; Valencia (H), Espanyol (A) and Getafe (H) await Madrid.
What awaited on Saturday looked set to be decisive, the moment in which maybe the race would effectively end. Sergio Ramos described it as “life or death”. Madrid and Barcelona missed each other by 35 minutes at Seville airport on Friday evening, Barça heading to Córdoba, Madrid to Sevilla. They were playing four hours and 130km apart, in cities connected by a 45-minute train journey. “The league, decided in the south,” ran one headline on Saturday morning, which was reasonable enough. After all, Barcelona faced the team at the bottom; Madrid went to the Pizjuán, where the noise is so loud you can still hear it the next day, where Barcelona had dropped points a fortnight ago, and where Sevilla had not lost since March last year.
The pressure was on. By the time Madrid took to the field to the sound of the Pizjuán belting the club’s hymn, the country’s best, they knew that Barcelona had beaten Córdoba 8-0 – a result that when Dépor picked up a point later ensured Córdoba were the first team to be relegated. At Seville airport, a group ofBarcelona players huddled round Gerard Piqué’s radio as they prepared to board a flight. Might this be their moment? Madrid had to win to have any chance of taking the title and, for once, winning was not going to be easy. For once, they might not even be favourites. But then they got a break.
