You can watch FC Barcelona take on Real Madrid in the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup live on ESPN Deportes (4pm ET, 17th August)

Familar Foes: Scattered and unorganized thoughts during what seems like the 700th Clásico of 2011

Okay, let’s do something unbecoming and lead this off with a confession. This is not going to be the sort of organized, edited, well-considered missive that I assume the Barcaloco readership has come to expect from me. Rather than doing what I usually do, which is try to focus completely on the match and then collect and record my impressions at the end (a strategy that always gets derailed by the fourth or fifth Dogfish Head IPA, anyhow,) I decided to keep a running, kind of rambling article going while I watched the match. So, this is scattershot but I think ultimately a decent record of what it’s like for me to watch matches.

It sure is hard to hate Iker Casillas, I idly thought during the team introductions of the Supercopa first leg. Mostly, I was trying to temper my expectations. No Maxwell, no Pique and no Puyol. Most importantly, no Xavi to control the middle and distract that most important player for Real in these matches last year, Pepe. Of course there were things to look forward to – especially my first shot at seeing how Alexis Sanchez (a signing I feel lukewarm about, not because I doubt his skill, but because of three reasons I’ll outline soon) and Thiago would fit into the first team. Thiago, yes, I’ve seen before, but not since his first Spain call-up and his star-turn performance in the UEFA U-21 championships.

Okay, briefly on Sanchez. He’s a terrific player. He’s usually dazzled me when I’ve seen him play for Chile, and although I confess to never seeing him for Udinese since I find Serie A nearly unwatchable, the reports from Italy are good. But I have three reasons for being apprehensive about the signing. The first is Barcelona’s relatively poor record with major signings in the Pep Guardiola era. As ever, I’m not sure whether to lay the blame for that on Pep himself or the influence of Joan Laporta and Sandro Rosell, but the fact is – Chyrgrynsky, Hleb, Adriano, Mascherano, Ibrahimovic. It’s a pretty uninspiring list. David Villa’s the one major signing of the last few years who has paid major dividends for the blaugrana but it doesn’t take a genius to sign David Villa. (Or, for that matter, Cesc Fabregas.) So, the odds are stacked against Sanchez in my view just because he was a big signing for the Guardiola-managed culés. (Briefly, to avoid any accusations of Pep-bashing, I have a ridiculously rose-tinted view of Guardiola, even considering his amazing accomplishments, and I don’t think there’s anyone in the world more tactically acute and I think he’s in pretty rarefied air when it comes to man-mangement, too, his long and ugly spat with Ibra notwithstanding.)

The second reason for my reticence on the Alexis Sanchez issue is that I don’t totally see how he fits into the team. Who loses playing time to accommodate him? Pedro? Iniesta? Villa? Cesc? Of course, there are six competitions this year and so plenty of minutes to go around and also, I pretty much trust Pep completely to work that out. So it’s a small irking, not a huge concern. As is the third thing that immediately bothered me about the signing, which is that I really want to see Ibrahim Afellay succeed at the Nou Camp and I’m worried that he’s the real odd man out here. I admit that my excitement about Afellay is mostly a concession to my romanticism, which is to say that after the era in which Real Madrid were playing most of the Dutch national team, I want to see a re-connection between Barcelona and it’s Cruyffian history. What is a Total Footballing side without a Dutchman or two? Irrational, yes, but that’s the luxury of being a fan and sometime opinion-column-writer instead of a manager or president of a club. I don’t just want to see Barca win, if I’m being honest, I want to see them win a specific way. And in my ideal world, that way includes major contributions from some Dutch players. Okay, small potatoes, but Afellay is my only hope on the subject right now. I do fear, especially in the wake of the Sanchez signing, that Afellay’s real role with the club will be to replace Bojan as the player I have inexplicable affection for that doesn’t get enough of a shot.

Back to the match, then. Real looked extraordinary out of the gate, and Ozil’s opening goal was as much as they deserved. The absences of Xavi, Pique and Puyol were felt in a major way, as the trio of Keita, Iniesta and Thiago struggled to control the middle of the pitch in the way we’re used to seeing and as the makeshift central defense lacked the dominating, could-be-anywhere-anytime presence of the normally stalwart Puyol/Pique combo. (And the cross through Mascherano’s legs proved the point.) A central defense without the two defenders looked as strange as the new Qatar Foundation kits. (I expect to adjust to the kits eventually, even though I don’t want to. But I really hope not to have to adjust to a world without the hugely underrated defenders manning the area.)

I found it easy to be distracted, or at least not totally connected. It’s just the Supercopa, I kept telling myself. But it’s a clásico!, another part of my brain responded. And, at the end, the part that never wants to lose to Real won the day and I found myself getting more and more engaged as the match wore on. Well, no, to tell the truth, it wasn’t gradual. I was paying half-attention until Sami Khedira did his best Nigel de Jong impression and then I became once again enraptured by the familiar feeling of wanting nothing more in the world than for the ridiculously gold-numbered Real Madrid players to lose, and to lose in as humiliating a fashion as possible.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s watching Sergio Ramos when he’s made, as he often is, to look like a total amateur. Ramos is, in stark contrast to the grudging respect I pay his goalkeeper, an object of my undying, intense and red-eyed scorn. It is such that when the Barcelona-heavy Spanish national team was marching slowly and boringly to their 2010 World Cup, I was hoping they’d win every game 3-2 with Ramos being responsible for both opposition goals. So, in spite of the fact that David Villa’s equalizer was a work of such astounding skill that no defender in the history of football could’ve hoped to stop it, I nevertheless relished in the fact that Ramos was left looking hopeless and pouty as it zipped powerfully past his head and into the corner of the goal. (And so, I guess the paragraph I could’ve written about watching Pepe fall on his face as Messi jinked past him on his way to the second goal would be redundant.)

At halftime, it was officially announced that Cesc Fabregas had signed for Barcelona, which I guess I should say a few words on. Fabregas, as I mentioned before, falls into the same no-brainer signing category as David Villa. Except, of course, that he starts on the bench for Spain because he’s blocked by Busquets, Iniesta and Xavi. So either he’s going to get quite a lot less time than he’s used to at Arsenal, or Busquets will be rotated out of the regular eleven, or Pep’s going to dramatically change the formation. Either way, the signing has major implications that I’m very curious about. Of course, Cesc is the ideal long-term replacement for Xavi (who isn’t getting any younger) but I wonder about his value for 2011/12. I expect that I’ll re-read this at the end of the season after Fabregas has been the most important player in a treble-winning season and laugh at my naivete. Well, so there’s a rare bout of optimism.

As for the second half, well. This is where I really start to lose my faculties for organization. Quick shots: Xabi Alonso’s goal proved once again the importance of Puyol and (or?) Pique. The introductions of Pique and Xavi provided something very much like unqualified relief. Barcelona looked entirely too comfortable even at 2-2, which is something I’d say there’s no real reason to worry about given that this is, after all, the first leg of the Supercopa. Whatever happened to Gabi Milito, I wonder. Victor Valdes proved several times that Barca fans who still can’t stand him have just not been watching for the last three or four years. Jose Maria Callejon is every bit as distasteful as he was at Espanyol. Cristiano Ronaldo diving is one of the few things you can count on in this unpredictable life. Finally, even though it’s just the first leg of the Supercopa, 2-2 is an extraordinary result for a team as depleted as this first eleven was, and I’m feeling cautiously comfortable ahead of the second leg.

You can watch FC Barcelona take on Real Madrid in the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup live on ESPN Deportes (4pm ET, 17th August)

Written by Barcaloco contributor Ryan Morgan