Aitana: Style, Substance, and a Savant's Sense of the Moment
More moments and performances that delivered yet another Ballon d'Or to yet another Barça Femení talisman.
About ten minutes before 8:00 pm local time on the evening of March 30, 2022, a jarring sensation swept through Camp Nou.
Barça Femení, reigning treble winners and to that point unbeaten and undrawn in all competitions in the 2021-22 season, were facing a second half deficit. As unsettling as the flirtation with defeat was the possibility of getting upstaged. In their maiden performance in the big house. Before a since-broken (in the same building for the same team) world record crowd for a women’s football match, 91,553. By Real fucking Madrid.
After weeks of rumors and buildup and more rumors about attendance records, the second leg of the Champions League quarterfinal - into which Barça brought a 3-1 first leg advantage - between the “eternal rivals” kicked off at a quarter-to-seven before a frenzied, hearts-bursting crowd there on behalf of an entire city.
It took less than eight minutes for the scene to descend into delirium when Mapi León’s cross from the right found the top left corner of the Madrid goal and staked Barça to an early 1-0 lead.
Sobriety was introduced into the proceedings eight minutes later when, after an Irene Paredes hand-ball just inside the box, now-World Cup hero Olga Carmona converted the penalty to draw Madrid level at a goal apiece. In a sense, this was kind of cool. A side of actual competition with our coronation.
Then the score held.
For the remainder of the first half, Barça was the better team, though not by the margin anyone expected. And they simply could not find a next goal. And so the score, that damn 1-1, just hung there.
That Madrid was within a goal of leveling the aggregate score wasn’t even a consideration. The earnest desire was simply to restart the party.
Alas, the score held until halftime, when hints of “Okay, this was cute, but let’s just do the damn thing and score already, huh?” started to waft about.
I wrote this week at Defector about a collection of performances and plays that made Aitana Bonmatí the best women’s football player on Earth. That journey, which culminated Monday night in Paris with the announcement that Aitana had won her first, and Barça’s third straight Ballon d’Or Féminin, includes a Swedish excursion, another night in Les Corts, and reaching the apex for both club…
… and country.
The editing process left some stuff on the cutting room floor. Included here are one performance and one moment of magic that, in concert, exemplify what makes Aitana an “assassin-savant” on the pitch, and another, from more than a year earlier, in which all of these pieces again fell perfectly into place.
December 21, 2022 - vs. FC Rosengård, at Camp Nou (Champions League Group Stage)
Nearly two months after Aitana’s spectacular first full 90-minute outing of the season (see the Defector piece for the particulars) after calf and thigh injuries delayed the start of her season, she and Barça host FC Rosengård in the return fixture at Camp Nou. Unlike the sides’ meeting in Malmö, there’s not much in the way of drama. A pair of Asisat Oshoala goals inside of 16 minutes - the first assisted by Aitana - and a devastating Mapi León free kick put Barça comfortably ahead, 3-0, at halftime.
The stakes (always a tricky topic with this team) are fairly low. Aitana’s commitment to exquisite execution, however, never budges.
Just after halftime, from just inside the attacking half. Clàudia Pina slides a short pass to Aitana in the middle of the pitch, about 30 yards out. Immediately upon receiving the ball, Aitana is surrounded by five defenders. The move to slice through two of them and momentarily create a bit of space near the box is highlight-worthy on its own. That, upon doing this, she’s surrounded again, again by five defenders, That the inclination here is to - it doesn’t feel like it but these words do go together here - nonchalantly slide a no-look back-heel sideways to the left to Fridolina Rolfö for the fourth in the 6-0 win?
It’s downright obscene. A moment in which it feels as though Aitana’s talent possesses her as much as she does it.
Some time ago, in declaring Alexia Putellas “the embodiment of a Barça genius,” I wrote:
“She’s as meticulous with a short, “simple” pass as she is utterly ruthless with a ball that slices open an opposing defense. Most incredibly, neither her demeanor nor her dedication to each pass, each shot, each move is impacted by the score line. She exists to exert complete and devastating control over all aspects of a game in an instinctive, almost effortless manner.”
Nearly two years on, every last syllable describing Alexia’s innate dedication to complete dominance of every moment and movement, agnostic of score, rings equally true of Aitana.
January 22, 2023 - vs. Real Sociedad, in Badajoz, Extremadura (Supercopa de España final)
José Mourinho has famously said that “finals are not for playing but for winning.” There are no style points. Get the win, get the hardware, get the hell outta there.
This doesn’t often come up with Barça Femení. The league’s usually won at a canter. Ditto the Copa de la Reina (barring any administrative gaffes). Hell, even the side’s first three Champions League finals saw Barça take a pair of beatings from Lyon in 2020 and 2022 and dish out one of their own to Chelsea in between. One way or the other, not much actual grinding goes on here. It’s for this very reason (plus Luis Rubiales' unwavering dedication to asshattery) that Barça’s third Supercopa de España Femenina win in the competition’s four-year history warrants mention.
I’m not going to sell you on a 3-0 game in which a heavy underdog posed little actual threat as “a grind.” At the same time, Real Sociedad - who, six weeks earlier, held a lead over Barça well into the second half in Barcelona before falling 2-1 - did a fantastic job of keeping chances at a premium.
There’s not a single comprehensive highlight package of this game but, between the ones posted by each club, I cobbled together a tally of six real chances for Barcelona:
A first half header by Geyse with neither the power nor the angle to beat the keeper.
Mariona thumping the woodwork in the 50th
Oshoala booting it off the keeper from point-blank range later in the second half
Oshoala’s 97th-minute cherry on top
The other two? A pair of Aitana strikes off of excellent passes from Geyse: a nifty lefty finish from 12 yards in the 13th, and a powerful righty strike into the bottom left from the top of the box in the 47th. And the first was almost certainly offside!
Not exactly a grind but hardly a stroll. “Tidy, professional, utilitarian, sufficient,” perhaps?
José would be proud.
Returning to Camp Nou on March 30, 2022, about ten minutes before 8:00 pm local time…
Having withstood the evening’s initial frenzy, cashed in their chance, and shepherded the game to halftime at 1-1, Real Madrid come out after the break, if not exactly on the front foot then at least with the air of aspirations to be more than wallpaper in someone else’s feature. What happens next only affirms those aspirations.
In the third minute of the second half, veteran midfielder Claudia Zornoza collects the ball in the Barça half, dribbles to the edge of the center circle and, spotting Sandra Paños about ten yards off of her line, uncorks a picture-perfect 42-yard chip that beats the Barça keeper.
It doesn’t sound like much, but the next four minutes are sheer agony for culés. Madrid have not only taken the lead, trimming the aggregate advantage to 3-2, but have done so in a manner so outrageous that it’s seemingly dented this Barça death machine’s impenetrable mystique.
Don't tell me that, after everything, the season’s first loss is coming, on this night, in this building. Like this. To them.
Surely, playing in Europe’s largest stadium, in front of literally more people than any women’s side (save for their opponents on the night) ever has, with the weight of stratospheric expectations to not simply win but also dominate and entertain, will knock a person back on their heels.
Though Barça hadn’t played especially poorly in the first 50 minutes, none of their cavalcade of superstars had grabbed the game by the throat and made it their own. Hell, even their opening goal, joyous as it was, was a serendipitous accident.
Enter Aitana.
Lost a bit these days amid a four-in-twenty-minute Barça barrage that included a filthy strike from Claudia Pina and the goal that absolutely had to come for the person most responsible for the magnitude of that night, Alexia, and perhaps undermined a bit by the campaign’s unceremonious end against Lyon in the final, is the moment in which Aitana stepped into the void and put the train back on the tracks.
In that sketchy, anxious moment, it’s Aitana who says “Hell no. Not like this,” when, in the 52nd, she receives a pass up the middle from Jenni Hermoso, drives into the box, cuts in on her left, and viciously buries a low, lefty finish into the bottom right.
I cannot imagine the sheer ecstasy of this moment for a Barça lifer - a person of genuine, admirable substance - for whom this dream was not even possible at any previous point in history. I can recall the “everything’s gonna be alright” exhale and the party it reignited, which culminated in (combining my three favorite descriptions of the evening) “a fucking bonkers can’t feel my face religious experience.”
While that moment didn’t factor into the 2023 Ballon d’Or voting, it offered all anyone needs to know about Aitana: a perfect inflection point for a perfect night, authored perfectly by a talismanic superstar who answers every call for the imperious, era-defining side she’s come to embody.
Remind you of anyone?
