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A few seasons ago a Barca vs Sevilla game finished at 2am.dazdon said:
When the world's silliest-looking man arrived at Barcelona, soul-glow hair shimmering, hands waggling out that ridiculous thumb-and-little-finger gesture, teeth and gums scaring little children, many feared a disaster. Ronaldinho, they said, was trouble - and not because the Camp Nou plugholes were blocked with curly black hair, three freaky metres long.
Off the pitch, Ronaldinho has a reputation for loving the high life (which, let's face it, explains why he chose Barcelona over Manchester). But while being a creature of the night may be a good thing considering his devastating looks, it doesn't exactly put minds at rest. Barça fans feared that rather than catching up on his generous requirement of beauty sleep, Ronaldinho would be out scoring until well after midnight.
And they were right, too - in the small hours of Tuesday night-Wednesday morning, Ronaldinho was doing exactly that. Live. In full view of 80,000 hankie-holding culés. But this time no one minded, for Ronaldinho wasn't on the town; he was on the Camp Nou pitch, collecting the ball inside his own half, then storming forward, hair bouncing about comically, beating José Luis Martí and Francisco Casquero before thrashing an incredible 30-yarder past Antonio Notario which crashed off the bar, onto the turf and back up into the roof of the net. The Camp Nou went wild.
It was the goal of the season (already) and it was 1.30 a.m.
Really, it was. You see, international week threatened to leave Barcelona rather thin, so president Joan Laporta asked Sevilla's José María del Nido to play on Tuesday - as Real Madrid and Villarreal did. Laporta claims Del Nido initially agreed, but the Sevilla president - who is Jesús Gil's lawyer - denied it and insisted on "playing by the rules".
The game, he announced, had to be played on Wednesday, to which Laporta, who as home president chooses the kick-off time, replied: "OK, we'll play on Wednesday."
"Five minutes into Wednesday."
Sevilla were furious but Laporta, sensing a dastardly plan to play a weakened Barcelona and irritated by what he saw as a broken promise, remained firm, announcing that kick-off would indeed be at 00.05.
He then placated fans by promising a special night: Barça opened their (really rather good) museum until midnight, employed a new match-day announcer - which was a bit harsh on the guy who used to leave the special boo-inducing pause after Luis Figo's name. They also laid on music from three tenors, albeit not the three tenors (Plácido Domingo is a Madrid fan), what looked suspiciously like a sixth-form Performing Arts version of Cats, complete with really rubbish costumes, and the Barça Toons - life sized cartoon characters fooling about the pitch (insert your own punch-line here). Then there were 25,000 free bags of Doritos with salsa, 40,000 Gazpachos, 30,000 Actimel yogurts, 100,000 KitKats, chorizo, and endless Bimbos (that's a bread, by the way).
"Barcelona have opened a melon with this", ranted Sevilla manager Joaquín Caparrós, helpfully explaining his Toshack-esque mangled metaphor: "In other words, it's a dangerous precedent. Besides, Gazpacho can repeat on you if you eat it at night. This is a clown's act." President del Nido added with the self-importance classic of Andalucían snobs: "It's a shame that our league has to bow before people who have only just arrived. And instead of Gazpacho and chorizo, we'd give them Serrano ham and prawns." Captain Pablo Alfaro agreed, but clearly forgot Ronaldinho's face, describing the timing as "the ultimate in stupidity".
Surprise, surprise, the Madrid press joined in, dubbing the match: "Football in the piss-up hours." They searched for sound bites and found Osasuna president Patxi Izco (relevance, none) decrying a "mickey-take" and Depor coach Javier Irureta fearing her indoors. "If I went out at midnight my wife would think I was cheating on her."
For all the whinging, the event was a success. Alright, so Barcelona could only manage a 1-1 draw (Sevilla are looking good), Luis Enrique joined the game's other two start-a-fight-in-an-empty-house usual suspects, Javi Navarro and Pablo Alfaro, in a bit of a "melee," and keeper Víctor Valdés gave his umpteenth display of charging off his line with all the impeccable timing and opportunism of John Drummond.
But 80,237 packed in to see a wonder goal, prompting grinning Sevilla winger José Antonio Reyes to describe the Camp Nou as "the biggest disco in the world" and Ronaldinho as "spec-tac-u-lar!" Catalan daily Sport - as opposed to The Daily Sport, which is really quite different - hurrahed a "historic full house in the small hours" and lauded Laporta's "strength on a matter of principle". Meanwhile, El Mundo Deportivo editor Santi Nolla cooed: "people left the stadium floating, kids only started to yawn back in the car ... the atmosphere was so good you'd think they'd won."
But if the painful punning in Barcelona hinged on 'dreams'; in Madrid it was 'nightmares'. The capital's press tetchily dubbed the free food a "third world soup kitchen, with pushing and shoving and even biting - it was like Iraq", pointed out (quite rightly) that a Wednesday night kick-off would have only cost Ricardo Quaresma from the Dutchman-free side that finally played, and have kindly developed a sudden consideration for Barça's fans and the hardships they faced. And for their own failure to reach deadline with a midnight start, of course, Marca ran a pseudo report, headlined: "We can't bring you this because of the capricious Barça president" and replaced the players' ratings and scores with a question mark.
Over in AS, though, a bigger concern was the lack of telly coverage. While the Catalan press and Barça blamed the TV company for "unilaterally" refusing to show the match, AS ran a whole raft of aggressive articles attacking Barça for "failing to fulfill" the contract.
Which may, just, have something to do with AS being part of the Audiovisual group who own the rights.