Rage against the Lamine: Real Madrid revel in clásico win after cheap talk | Sid Lowe

“As long as I win they can’t say anything,” Lamine Yamal said once, but this time he didn’t win and they were coming for him. They said he spoke too much; they replied that, yeah, they would see him outside; they told him talk is cheap. And that was just the players: there was more from the preachers in their pulpits, men who never lose.

On the eve of the clásico, the teenager who claims he left fear behind in Mataró suggested that Real Madrid rob and moan, or so it goes. He also offered a reminder that the last time he had been at the Santiago Bernabéu – a kid with blaugrana braces, a glint in his eye and a right foot they didn’t know he had – he beat them 4-0. But that was then and this was now. And, an adult now, exactly a year on, he was beaten back. He knew, they told him so.

When the final whistle went on a wild, intense 262nd clásico that was a little like old times, Lamine Yamal walked towards Dani Carvajal, hand out. Instead of taking it, Madrid’s captain did the old jibber-jabber gesture. It had been hard enough keeping up with everything that happened in the 105 minutes that went before, a match of 38 shots, three goals scored and three more disallowed; now it was impossible.

Suddenly there were players everywhere, racing in and out of sight and piling in, police pulling people apart. In the middle of the melee, Thibaut Courtois was accepting the invitation to continue this down the tunnel. Vinícius was being held back, him telling someone else they talk to much. Raphinha was running to stop his countryman, Antonio Rüdiger there too. “It was like when we young,” Aurélien Tchouaméni said.

In April, Tchouaméni had written: “They celebrate our defeats like we will never win again. We’ll be back.” Madrid had just lost a clásico Copa del Rey final 3-2 in extra time, a collective breakdown greeting the final whistle, ice cubes flying. A fortnight later, they were beaten again. In four clásicos, Madrid had lost four times, league, cup and Super Cup going to their rivals. They had conceded four, five, three and four. But there is always tomorrow and it turned out Tchouaméni was right.

Dani Carvajal doesn’t miss the opportunity to taunt Lamine Yamal after the final whistle. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

Last season Madrid had not won any. Fourteen times they were defeated: Lille, Milan, Liverpool, Athletic, Espanyol, Betis, Atlético, Valencia and Arsenal all beat them. There wasn’t a single win against a truly big side. Carlo Ancelotti went and was replaced by Alonso but it continued. Madrid won five games at the Club World Cup, signs of a structure emerging, an idea, but then came Paris Saint Germain.

That belongs to last season, Alonso said. But the next season, his season, started with six wins in a row until Atlético came and put five past them. It was all well and good beating Oviedo, Mallorca and Osasuna but what about the big teams? Now at last they had beaten one of them too. And it wasn’t just that Madrid won, it was the way they won.

Barcelona had players out: Joan García, Gavi, Dani Olmo, Robert Lewandowski and Andreas Christensen were all missing. So too Raphinha, whose significance may at least be fully recognised in absentia. Others weren’t fully fit, Jules Koundé and Lamine Yamal among them. On the bench they had five players who hadn’t started a league game, two more who had started only once; two 17-year-olds, four 18-year-olds and two who are 19. And a centre-back, Ronald Araújo, who ended it up front again. Even their manager was missing, Flick suspended and stuck in a radio cabin. Marcus Sorg, his assistant, has been on the touchline three times: he has lost all of them.

Much is made of Barcelona’s vulnerable high line, but they did not attack well on Sunday. Of all the things that were said to Lamine Yamal on Sunday, perhaps the most telling came from Vinícius during the game, taunting the teenager by telling him: “You’re all backwards passes.” As for that backline, more porous than before with Iñigo Martínez leaving, the pressure on passers dropping and the timing off, Levante made six clear chances against them, Rayo five, Sevilla five, Girona three. Last year they caught Kylian Mbappé offside eight times in an open clásico; yet, lost amid the defeats, was that in the last meeting he got a hat-trick, Madrid always likely to get opportunities now.

Playing like this, especially. This was a start as well as an end in itself. “In the future we’re going to need a lot of what we did today,” Alonso said. They put the ball in the net five times – three ruled out for offside – missed a penalty, took 23 shots and scored twice, the surprise that it was only that many. Mbappé got one, from just right of the centre again, the doubt about he and Vinícius occupying the same, left-sided spaces allayed. Bellingham got the other. “A tap-in,” he said afterwards, speaking in Spanish. “People say it’s easy but it’s about how I understand the game.” Wojciech Szczesny made nine saves.

For an hour or so, Madrid went for Barcelona, chances happening quicker than you could note them down. They pressed all the way to Szczesny; from his feet and those of the full-backs, the ball tended to be given back to them. They didn’t let Pedri play, Eduardo Camavinga taking particular responsibility. Bellingham was superb, scoring one, setting up the other with a wonderful turn and pass, and forcing the penalty.

Jude Bellingham scored one and assisted the other in Real Madrid’s 2-1 win. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

If intermittent, Vinícius went at Koundé, described in one paper as “defending like a security guard at the Louvre” – although attention was drawn more to the Brazilian’s furious reaction to being substituted, stomping off and straight down the tunnel on 71 minutes shouting “I’ll leave the team”.

That was about the time that the pace dropped and Barcelona took control. But while Pedri led and Lamine Yamal came inside, little really came of it. “We didn’t suffer much,” Carvajal insisted. And if a glorious pass from Lamine should have set up Koundé, who miscontrolled on his chest, and if Carvajal took a risk barging over Araújo, the better chances remained Madrid’s. All the way to the moment when Lamine’s right hand was left hanging there, defeated.

It had started with the YouTuber Ibai Llanos suggesting Porcinos were the Kings League’s Real Madrid, but it wasn’t going to end there. Lamine, an 18-year-old sitting with a bunch of mates in a streamer’s studio previewing a seven-a-side league for influencers and celebrities – silliness and shit-stirring as standard – laughed and replied: “Yeah, they rob, they moan”. That was followed, as the storm started, by an Instagram post of him at the Bernabéu last year: he stands blurred, defeated fans in sharp focus behind him. The message was clear: he was not about to back down.

It was like Lamine. Heavy is the head that wears the crown but he likes taking the pressure for himself, performing his own coronation after every goal. It’s not bragging if you can back it up, as Muhammad Ali said, and no one seemed to mind when he put Adrien Rabiot in checkmate. Not everyone saw the funny side this time, those who live by confrontation and noise handing out lessons in ethics and etiquette, a single line soon the centre of everything. In the pre-match press conference, when Alonso was asked about it for the fourth time despite not saying anything to the first three, dismissing talk of extra motivation what with it being a clásico, he replied: “This again?”

Twenty-four hours later, victory secured and asked about it again, Madrid’s manager rightly noted: “I don’t want to take the focus from what truly matters,” but fear not: everyone else would do that. “I’m the one who caused all this fuss,” Llanos lamented. Frenkie de Jong called the fallout “exaggerated”, insisted that Lamine hadn’t explicitly said Madrid were robbers, and that Carvajal could always call him rather than make gestures on the pitch. As for Tchouaméni, he smiled and said: “I like it. It’s only words; there’s no bad intentions. If he wants to talk, no problem.”

Between them, they had cut through the bullshit, only it wasn’t just bullshit any more. It was there and it mattered to some. “Talk is cheap,” Bellingham wrote on Instagram when it was all over, Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” accompanying his post. Madrid had been waiting to win at last and waiting for Lamine too, fans and players. Now he had lost as they could speak, the roar that little louder, the release that little greater. The rivalry even, something like it used to be. And what, the former Madrid midfielder Guti asked, is this game without a ruckus? “In those years back then, it all happened,” Alonso said. “It’s football, it’s the clásico.”