This was not just a victory, it was an exorcism, the olés ringing round the Olympic stadium as Barcelona laid ghosts to rest high on the Montjuïc hill.
Bayern Munich, the team they could not beat, the ogres who had put eight past them in Lisbon, defeated them six times in a row, racking up an aggregate score of 22-4, and that had not even conceded the last four times they met, the team that were just too good, left here in pieces, expertly sliced apart. Four times Barcelona cut through them, Raphinha scoring a hat-trick and Robert Lewandowski getting another in a 4-1 win.
“You owe us one,” Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, had told Hansi Flick; here the coach who, like Lewandowski, had been on the other side the night of that 8-2 humiliation, the ultimate symbol of the Catalans’ decline, repaid them in full. “It is not about the past; it is about the here and now,” he had insisted.
Right here, right now, his team look genuinely good again. A decade since they last won this competition, how they have needed this. How they did it too, en exhibition in incision.
This was a football match played on a cliff top, and all the more enjoyable for it, a sense of jeopardy in every move. So determined were Barcelona to play high, so willing were Bayern to do something similar, that it produced a game squeezed into the narrowest strip, an abyss on either side.
The threat was always there, not least because far from edging their way around the drop, nervously looking down, they were sprinting round it, fighting for every inch, where there was no space, and the chance to release the pass that would allow them to run beyond that line, where there was loads of it.
Barcelona were the first to do so, after just 45 seconds, Alejandro Balde finding Lewandowski, who resisted the challenge to drop the ball to Pedri, who moved it on to Fermín López. His pass was superb, Raphinha sprinting free, going round Manuel Neuer, and making Montjuïc erupt. And so it began, a fine and very fun line trodden by both teams.
Bayern took advantage next, Harry Kane heading in to make it 1-1 on six minutes, or so he thought. VAR ruled that out for offside but not the next 10 minutes later. This time it was Serge Gnabry who got in behind Barcelona and provided the cross, Kane side-footing a volley past Iñaki Peña.
Chasing offsides is a policy – Barcelona have caught their opponents more than twice as many times as anyone else in Europe this season – but at this stage it felt like an excessively risky one, unable to get to the passer quick enough to make it effective.
Bayern were taking a hold of this, more opportunities looking like a matter of time, Kane’s lovely ball to Raphaël Guerreiro almost creating the second. And yet they too were stepping high – if not quite so high – Barcelona began to find a way into the game, one inch at a time, and then suddenly in 40-metre leaps, and it was the Bavarians who would get caught.
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The first time they were it was with a simplicity that infuriated Vincent Kompany, with the hint of a push which did too. Lamine Yamal clipped a pass forward, two lines eliminated. Kim Min-jae leapt, misjudging the flight. López, lingering behind him, a hand in the back, turned, ran into the area and lifted the ball beyond Neuer. And Lewandowski put it into an open net.
This was a plan, and it was coming together, to be executed again with a precision that would prove breathtaking, from one end to the other in a flash.
Another goal followed just before the break. Pressed deep into his own half, Marc Casadó seemed to be cornered, but he worked a way out and struck a lovely long diagonal ball to Raphinha. Running to the edge of the area he struck a shot from between Dayot Upamecano’s legs which flew into the far corner.
And so, while Bayern sought a way back in after half-time, they did it again. Lamine Yamal’s superb ball swung into the space on the left and Raphinha was away again, guiding a perfect finish past Neuer.
What a night it had been, vindication for the winger who had been pushed towards the door. Released and embraced, life is different now. For all of them.
