Barcelona host Paris Saint-Germain on Tuesday hoping their young stars can help them vanquish the ghosts of the past and return the five-time winners to the Champions League elite.
The Catalans’ spectacular 3-2 quarter-final first leg victory in Paris was arguably their best away result in the competition in the last decade, sparking big dreams in Catalonia.
“I understand the euphoria, it is better to live with euphoria than with pessimism,” Barça coach Xavi Hernández said on Saturday.
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Xavi’s team that won at the Parc des Princes included the two youngest players to appear in the Champions League knockout stages, 16-year-old Lamine Yamal and 17-year-old Pau Cubarsi.
This fresh blood has brought new life to a team not only struggling this season, but which has been mentally weighed down by repeated failures since their last triumph in Europe in 2015.
The Catalans lifted the trophy in Berlin with current PSG coach Luis Enrique at the helm, propelled by the magical strike force of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez.
The years that followed were a series of dramatic collapses on the continent’s biggest stages and, worse, ignominious defeats in previous rounds.
Yamal and Cubarsi do not suffer from the psychological damage caused by these defeats and Xavi praised their mentality.
“(Yamal) is very calm and very mature, so measured in the sense that he copes so well with everything that happens to him, despite his young age,” Xavi said in March.
After Cubarsi shone to help Barcelona progress in the last 16 against Napoli, Xavi offered similar praise.
“He has a very well-equipped brain,” the coach said.
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“Put the ghosts aside”
Cubarsi’s composure was exactly what Barcelona lacked as they squandered a 4-1 first-leg lead to crash out in 2018 at Rome in the quarter-finals, beaten 3-0 at the capital’s Olympic Stadium Italian.
The following season they collapsed at an ecstatic Anfield, unable to protect the 3-0 advantage gained at the Camp Nou.
The remarkable 4–0 defeat in the second leg sent shockwaves through the club and led to the dismissal of manager Ernesto Valverde a few months later.
The final nail in the coffin for the majority of players remaining from Barcelona’s golden era was an 8-2 hammering of Bayern Munich in the 2020 quarters.
Many of Barcelona’s veteran stars seemed scarred by their European meltdowns and before long Messi, Suarez, Jordi Alba, Gerard Pique and company were gone.
Goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen is one of two survivors from the triumphant 2015 team, with Sergi Roberto scoring the decisive sixth goal in Barça’s 6-1 comeback against PSG in 2017.
“We have to put the ghosts aside,” the goalkeeper said in October after Barca won a hard-fought group match in Porto.
“There’s no need to put pressure on yourself… we have a different team (now).”
Bayern’s defeat left no doubt that Barcelona had fallen from the elite of the game.
Between then and now, Barcelona have collapsed twice in the group stage, ending up in the Europa League and reaching their lowest level of the 21st century.
President Joan Laporta has pledged to restore Barcelona to European football’s highest pedestal and now has the club on the brink of the last four, after four years without reaching the quarter-finals.
Critics have criticized him for failing to keep his promise to keep Messi at the club, but it is now in this role on the right of the attack that Yamal flourishes.
Laporta has also been criticized for sacrificing future TV revenue for funds to splurge on Robert Lewandowski, Jules Kounde, Raphinha and others in the summer of 2022, but they all shone against PSG, with the latter scoring twice.
By winning La Liga last season, Barcelona showed that they are improving and all that remains is to finish the work started in Paris for that progress to be evident in Europe as well.
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