Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid

by Sid Lowe

Whose fault was it, then? The author of that La Prensa article was a certain Juan Antonio Samaranch – later the head of the IOC. A Catalan, yes, but an Español fan and a career fascist, a card-carrying member of the Francoist state party. It was to be the last article he wrote for almost a decade. Samaranch wrote about the ‘exaggerated’ press campaign that followed the first leg, Madrid’s failure to act with the ‘gentlemanliness’ of which they always boasted and the behaviour of the Chamartín crowd. He also questioned a referee who ‘saw which way the wind blew’. ‘There could have been many more goals, maybe twenty,’ Samaranch wrote. ‘Barcelona did not exist and the same would have happened to any team. In that atmosphere and with a referee who wanted to avoid any complications, it was humanly impossible to play . . . they accepted this wealth of adversity with a smile, as if saying to their rivals: “We know we can’t play, so you play any way you like”. ‘If the azulgranas had played badly, really badly, the scoreboard would still not have reached that astronomical figure. The point is that they did not play at all,’ Samaranch continued. ‘There is no need to look for guilty men, because there were none on the pitch. Barcelona simply were not seen all afternoon. That was the best thing they could do in the circumstances. That’s the way it ended and that’s the [only] way it could end.’