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ZIDANE LAMENTS POOR FINISHING AGAINST BARCELONA

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Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane said he wanted to focus solely on football amid the political protests in Barcelona, but he was left disappointed with his side’s 0-0 La Liga draw after they failed to take their chances against Barca in Wednesday’s rescheduled Clasico.

Real dominated the game but were unable to find the net as the match between Spain’s most successful sides finished goalless for the first time in 17 years.

The draw at the Nou Camp also meant that Barca stayed top of the table on 36 points, level with Real but ahead on goal difference.

“The result feels like very little because we deserved a lot more, but football is often like that,” Zidane said after the match in which Real had 17 shots, nearly twice that of Barca’s nine. “If you create chances, you have to score them and we weren’t able to do that.”

Barca coach Ernesto Valverde recognised that his side struggled to cope with Real’s tactics.

“We weren’t able to overcome their pressure as much as we’d have liked and they caused us a few problems, we had a few chances but we lacked fluidity,” he said.

“We would have liked to have won the match because we were at home and under a little more pressure to win, but it was a very tough game. It’s very equal at the top of the table and I think it will stay that way until the end of the season.”

The match, which was postponed from Oct 26 due to political instability in Catalonia, kicked off after a pro-Catalan independence protest near the stadium left over 60 people injured.

Masked protesters set bins on fire and threw rocks and glass bottles at police, who responded with foam bullets. Local emergency services said eight people needed to be taken to hospital while Catalonia’s regional police force confirmed that 10 were arrested.

They face charges of affront to authority and causing public disorder.

These were the first violent incidents since October when Spain’s top court jailed nine Catalan separatist leaders over their role in a failed 2017 bid for independence.

AFP

Kunle Solaja is the author of landmark books on sports and journalism as well as being a multiple award-winning journalist and editor of long standing. He is easily Nigeria’s foremost soccer diarist and Africa's most capped FIFA World Cup journalist, having attended all FIFA World Cup finals from Italia ’90 to Qatar 2022. He was honoured at the Qatar 2022 World Cup by FIFA and AIPS.

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