Even without Lionel Messi, Barcelona are playing brilliant football at the moment.
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“The fans know that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time and a few people all of the time, but you can’t fool everyone all of the time”, writes Relano, whose paper also focuses on the problems faced by coach Rafael Benitez with a project “which was born dead”. It was a good team, we made mistakes and we paid.
Beleaguered Madrid boss Rafa Benitez had vowed to attack the champions, but set up in a formation that isolated the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema as their defence was ripped apart by Barca’s fully firing forward line. I didn’t see Real Madrid give up at all.
“We were better”, he said.
“We were superior, but that is to our credit, not their discredit”. There is a long way to go but it is always important to win here…It has been a great all-round performance. “It will go down into history as a memorable game for all Barca fans”.
“It’s painful for us to lose, and to lose the way we did”.
“Losing like this and against a rival like Barcelona hurts us a lot”.
“We have to be united, dust ourselves off and be aware that there are six months remaining for us to fight for all three titles”.
“We apologise to the supporters, that wasn’t the game we wanted to play”. If that had been a goal, we could have gotten into the game.
He continued: “When you lose in this way there is a worry as to how the players will react”.
“We need to recover our team quickly, their spirits, for the next game”.
“Winning like this against players of such a high level is hard, but we managed to pull off what we were hoping to do throughout the game”. Our plan was to keep possession.
“Besides the lessons delivered by [Sergio] Busquets, Andres and Neymar, I think the whole team were 10/10, including [Claudio] Bravo”.
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The hosts could have climbed into the top four with victory and they led through Paco Alcacer’s early goal but Las Palmas, who could have won if they had taken their chances, equalised just before the hour through Jonathan Viera.
