Chronicle Editor
TURNS out the guy who had scored 618 career goals, and ran at more than 25 a year every year for more than a decade, was quite good. There were plenty of players missing when La Liga returned from the international break this weekend, but not him. He, it seems, is inevitable. And so when they had finished, there he was, quietly standing above them all.
Robert Lewandowski, the Polish Ian Rush and the Spanish Pichichi. And, who knows, perhaps something more: he, after all, has just taken his team to a place they hadn’t been in two and a half years.
This was the weekend the Williams brothers kept rolling, Nico and Inaki returning home from debuts with different countries to set each other up as Athletic scored four for the third time to go top of the everyone else league.
The weekend in which Girona and Real Sociedad went wild, scoring eight between them, including one that was ridiculous from Rodrigo Riquelme and something a bit special from Alex Sorloth in a 5-3 away win.
The weekend when so, unexpectedly, did Getafe and Valladolid: not normally Spain’s great entertainers, they served up the best show the Coliseum’s seen since 325AD.
The past weekend had what was briefly the season’s silliest mistake from Espanyol goalkeeper Álvaro Fernández — until he went one worse three minutes later, letting in a 96th-minute equaliser against Valencia.
It didn’t have much Iago Apas, sitting on the bench with a dodgy tummy, but it did have Gabri Veiga hitting an outrageous 30-yard winner for Celta against Betis, beaten on the road for the second time running and only the third all year. In all likelihood, it had Julen Lopetegui’s last stand, Sevilla a single point and a single place from the relegation spots, and the manager a single call from the sack after a 2-0 defeat by Atlético Madrid.
And it had Osasuna at the Bernabéu, where Sergio Herrera’s strange grip over Karim Benzema tightened.
In a game nowhere near as good as any of those, it also had a goal from Robert Lewandowski, which isn’t really news any more but which is the point. You have to go back to the opening day of the season for the last time he didn’t score. “A killer,” Mallorca coach Javi Aguirre had called him in the hours before they met, and he knew.
“There’s no dignity in defeat: they all hurt,” he said 24 hours later. It was late on Saturday at Son Moix, and his team had taken more shots than Barcelona, but had been beaten. Because if they had 13, Lewandowski had one — and that was enough.
Cutting inside, he bent a finish as perfectly placed as it was unfussy, excellence made to look easy. And that was pretty much that, the only goal. If he had led them in and benefited from the team having a good night before – Barcelona had scored four, four, three, four, three in their previous five league games and put five past Viktoria Plzen – now he had seen them through a bad one. “Lewandowski, the Zahori,” AS called him.
A water diviner, basically. Some sort of mystic, he had found an oasis in the desert, Santi Giménez wrote, “and when you’re dying of thirst and find water, you’ll believe in anything”. Even in Barcelona. This, one headline had it, was “Lewy’s Law”. No wonder Sport and Mundo Deportivo thought they could go one better than Thomas Müller.
They were wrong. So very, very wrong.
You may remember the delighted look on the Bayern midfielder’s face, all pleased with himself when he told the press: “We call him Lewangoalski . . . geddit, LewanGOALski” — a line full of fondness and so bad it was good. This Sunday, Sport splashed their front cover with Goalandowski, while Mundo Deportivo went for Lethaldowski — a pair of lines so bad they were just bad. And yet if they lacked the charm, warmth, or imagination of the original — and did they ever — it was understandable.
This was Lewandowski’s ninth in seven league games — he is three ahead of Borja Iglesias, having not taken any penalties to Iglesias’s three — and his 12th in nine games over all.
Online Reporter