Home ›› 12 Jan 2022 ›› Sport
It is traditional to say there are no favourites in the Clasico but this time even Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti was unable to keep up the pretence.
For the past decade, there has been some justification in the usual platitudes, the assertion that games between Real Madrid and Barcelona have a rhythm unto themselves, that form is no measure and the victor will be the one that holds firmer in the heat of the battle.
Any superiority has been fleeting, a strong run of form here, a vulnerable coach there. Sometimes the dynamic has depended simply on the competition the game has been played in.
Since 2010, 40 meetings have brought 16 Barcelona victories, 10 draws and 14 wins for Real Madrid.
Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team were the last to enjoy real dominance, beginning a run of five consecutive wins in 2008 that included a 6-2 thrashing at the Santiago Bernabeu and a 5-0 humiliation at Camp Nou. Across those five games, Barcelona claimed an aggregate score of 16-2.
Since then, neither club had put together four wins on the bounce against the other, until this season, when Madrid ground out a 2-1 victory in the rain at Camp Nou in October, in what was the first meeting of the two clubs since Lionel Messi departed last summer.
Madrid’s ascendancy has not been so dramatic, or even, until recently, particularly noticeable. Unlike Guardiola’s Barca, it is not a dominance of ideas or style. There is yet to be a scoreline that spells out their supremacy in capital letters.
