Cádiz 0-4 FC Barcelona: The win is what matters least

FC Barcelona have continued their winning form in La Liga with 4-0 victory at Cádiz, but the celebrations were muted on a day when we were reminded that sometimes things happen that are much more important than a football result.

With Barça leading 2-0, the play was held up for the best part of an hour due to a medical emergency in the crowd. The possibly of suspending the game entirely was mooted, for everyone’s minds were understandably no longer on the outcome of a football match, but eventually play resumed and Barça ended up adding two more goals to the day’s return.

That’s now 17 games away from home for Xavi and not a single defeat, which equals Zinedine Zidane’s run after he took the helm at Real Madrid in 2016. At Mallorca on October 1, the Barça could set a new all-time record.

Record set straight

Quite extraordinarily, both last season and the one before it, FC Barcelona failed to register a single victory against Cádiz. And at half-time on Saturday, with things still scoreless, there was a niggling concern that the negative run was going to continue.

With debutant Hector Bellerín making his debut as one of nine changes to the side that beat Viktoria Plzen midweek, Xavi had opted to start without the likes of Pedri, Robert Lewandowski, Ansu Fati and Ousmane Dembélé, perhaps eager to see how things panned out in the first half in the hope that he might be able to rest such key players for the upcoming trip to Bayern Munich.

Here come the goals

The aforesaid foursome were all sent out in the second half, as would be the second debutant of the night, Marcos Alonso.

Despite dominating, Barça had been unable to break the home defence in the first 45 minutes. The closest they came was with a Rafinha strike onto the post.

Fresh ideas in the second half led to the deadlock being broken quickly, although when it came, the goal came through three players who had been on from the start. Raphinha and Gavi did some tidy work down the right and the latter placed the ball perfectly for Frenkie de Jong to pop home.

Cádiz were finally broken and they’d be broken even further a few minutes later when Bellerín started the break, Raphinha threaded the ball into the danger zone and following a goal-line scuffle it was a case of who would be quickest to get on the end of the loose ball.

Who else but Lewandowski? The Pole had been reading things to perfection and there he was to claim what is already his sixth goal of the Liga season. Only André Silva with Sevilla in 2018 can match that record in his first five games for a Liga club.

Game suspended

It was then that the mood in the stadium dampened as Cádiz goalkeeper Jeremias Ledesma was seen rushing to the terraces behind him with a medikit in his hand.

Many wondered whether the game should even continue, and when it finally did, there was clearly a very different mood to the proceedings.

Barça extended their lead when Lewandowski very unselfishly relinquished an opportunity of his own for Ansu Fati to score, and then Dembélé made it four with a simple remarkable finish.

But it felt as if none of that mattered. Nobody’s mind was fully on the game any more and many of the crowd had already left the stadium.

It had been another emphatic performance from Barça, and pending what Real Madrid and Villarreal achieve tomorrow, they now sit at the top of the table. But with the spectator now being rushed to hospital, that was the place were everyone’s real thoughts were focused. And rightly so.