Cracking open contest this. The lower leagues of European competition always offer better matches, limited sides devoid of any real tactics just going at each other.
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Not the first time weâve come from one nil down in the camp nou
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Like the Fitzgibbon Cup or the Leinster hurling round robin. Grand tippy tappy stuff
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ETH is livid
Feck
If man United were a racehorse theyâd be like sprinter sacre in his novice hurdle campaign. Very smart but a little bit green and need another year to fill into their frame but next seasonâŚ.
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Great to see so many youth academy graduates on both teams.
How has that not gone to VAR?
A proper game between two proper clubs.
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Is this a charity or a friendly match?
It was a privilege to watch that
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Theyâll meet regularly in Champions League Semi finals and finals over the next 4 or 5 years.
Itâll be like 2008 to 2011.
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A good game of ball.
Great game but Barca robbed. Fred as good as caught the ball in the area
Ironically enough @Cheasty, that felt more like a Champions League tie than anything over the past 2 nights. The Nou Camp is a special venue
Wjat a fucking game! Just brilliant.
That may well have been the final European game in the stadium as we know it.
Theyâll rightly fuck it up with the redevelopment. The features that make the Nou Camp great are:
i) Its lack of a roof over most of the stadium. This is its essential feature. Its open air nature. Thatâs why I talk about the magical air. Because itâs open air. Soon to be gone.
ii) That gorgeous incline around the tops of the stands at the ends. Soon to be gone (actually I think itâs already gone).
iii) The slight curve around the bottom of the stands, particularly at the ends.
iv) That sumptuous view of the hill behind (below). My word, what a vista. Soon to be gone.
The Nou Camp and the Bernabeu are (were) both phenomenal stadiums. But they were beautiful in different ways. The Bernabeuâs beauty was in its tight spaces, its claustrophobia, its towering, lurking stands, crouching almost vertically on top of each other, the lurking clock and vertical patchwork of executive boxes perching up high, like a small bird standing on a human shoulder. There was a landlockedness to it, a city centreness, an undergroundness. It was the perfect expression of the narrow, folksy, pedestrian streets of central Madrid in stadium form.
So too the Nou Camp was the perfect reflection of Barcelonaâs streetscape. Wider, more spacious, grand, ambitious, internationalist, coastal, open air. In harmony with its Eden like natural surroundings. The clear evening sky and its gradual turning to night was an essential part of the experience. You could imagine Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb playing in your mind over the vista of that sexy late April/early May evening sky. The Nou Camp 1982-2023 was an Eden.
The architects of generic FIFA bowls donât get any of this, they donât understand the massive difference subtle details make.
The architects of the Nou Camp redevelopment simply want to turn it into a bigger, gaudier version of the new Bernabeu, which itself will be a downgrade on what was there. They donât get it.
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Agreed, unfortunately, Iâve never been there. But it looks as beautiful as it is iconic.
So like the Cork club hurling championship then.
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