Much will be said in he coming weeks over this game, there will be match bans and fan arrests, calls for retribution from officials and from either set of supporters, but in the end it will be just one game (RCD Espanyol) played in one city (Barcelona), where in spite of being down one goal for much of the game, the visitors eked out a win against an over-matched home squad by scoring two in the final half, and the decider coming on a penalty awarded in an extended period of injury time that reached well beyond the Saturday night start time and ended past midnight in the early hours of Sunday.
What do we know though about the off-field troubles, though? Well, midweek on the Boixois Nois website, the ill-famed ultras that support Barcelona FC (but are not allowed to enter the Camp Nou) threatened to give the Montjuic Stadium a well-deserved “send-off” as this will be the last derby hosted there. 10 minutes into the second half, the Barca supporters sitting in the upper deck of a half-empty Montjuic started throwing objects onto the Espanyol supporters below. A flare went off in the crowd, no one was seriously injured, and other than a minuscule group of Espanyol muscle who tried to scale the barrier below and cross the pitch, order was secured and the violence was curtailed. For those used to seeing this in Italian soccer this would have been a fairly innocuous bit of crowd trouble, but this was Barcelona and the media have blown things out of proportion.
Espanyol blame Barca for allowing their supporters to travel and make mischief across town. An angry Barca president Joan Laporta blames Espanyol for not securing the stadium, the league for not doing more against the violent ultras as he has done, and both clubs have hammered the stadium security. Attached to this, in the wake of the violence and the loss, Sanchez Libre the Espanyol chairman, has returned to that typical “big-club paranoia” that the league has been bought and paid for at the expense of smaller clubs like Espanyol.
Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with him. I’m an Espanyol supporter for godsakes, but in this case he doesn’t have much to stand on. The red card sending off for Nene was appropriate for an aerial challenge where he led with his hand outstretched. There was contact on the player and not the ball that led up to the decisive penalty and Espanyol’s goal was dicey in and of itself. What he does have a right to complain about is the typically shoddy refereeing of Luis Medina Cantalejo, who has stepped into the brown-stained shoes of Graham Poll as the worst referee in the world. Any referee worth his salt communicates with players, guides play and controls the game quietly and sternly. The authoritarian Cantalejo botches calls, waves flags mercilessly and angrily denounces the sort of dissent he brings on himself. In this match, Cantalejo failed to control the sort of problems that tipify derbies (overly enthusiastic tackles, heated emotions, and rough play)
