Three up inside forty-eight minutes
Barcelona needed five minutes at the Estadi Ciutat de Valencia. Xavi Espart finished the opening move, Lamine Yamal added a second on nineteen minutes, and when Yamal converted a penalty three minutes into the second half the afternoon looked closed. Three goals, forty-eight minutes, nothing on the board for Levante.
Yamal’s two goals arrived twenty-nine minutes apart, one either side of the interval. The penalty was his second of the game and Barcelona’s third of an afternoon in which they had spent very little energy.
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Levante found something late
Ivan Romero pulled one back on seventy-nine minutes. Roger Brugue got the second nine minutes after that, and suddenly a home crowd that had watched a 3-0 deficit build up for most of the afternoon had a scoreline worth shouting about.
Karim Adeyemi ended the argument. Three minutes into stoppage time he scored Barcelona’s fourth, and the eleven minutes Levante had spent building a comeback disappeared in a single move.
The bit that will get replayed
Four goals away from home reads well enough. Conceding twice in the last eleven minutes from 3-0 up reads rather less well, and that passage is the one Barcelona’s staff will be looking at rather than the two Yamal took so calmly. A game that was managed for eighty minutes stopped being managed for the final ten.
Levante take nothing from it beyond the discovery that they can hurt this Barcelona side when they push bodies forward. Two goals in nine minutes against a team that had conceded none in the previous seventy is not a small thing, even when the final score says otherwise.
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