After Madrid’s season, Barcelona must win the Copa del Rey

Barcelona play the Spanish Cup final on Saturday against Alaves. And if the mood in the city this week is any gauge then they are on a hiding to nothing – win and they have merely put some lipstick on their pig of a season. Lose and the world falls in on them.

They have dominated the Copa del Rey over the years, winning it more than any other team, 28 times. But it’s a trophy that counts more some seasons than others. Context is everything.

Jose Mourinho won it in his first year at Madrid and it was huge because it was Real Madrid’s first trophy for three years because it was won beating Barcelona in the final.

This year the stars don’t quite line-up that way for Luis Enrique. Barcelona are up against mid-table opponents. Alaves finished 9th 35 points behind Barça in the table. And there will be little desire for a post-victory parade. The ticker tape is still being swept from the streets of Madrid after their recent league title celebrations and next weekend they could make history if they beat Juventus in Cardiff. ‘It’s not enough to succeed; one’s rivals must also fail’ as Somerset Maugham or Genghis Khan or Gore Vidal once said (depending on which internet quotes website you prefer). That truism always fits the Real Madrid-Barcelona dynamic.

This week in Barcelona cup fever has been conspicuous by its absence. The original demand for tickets meant the club had to hold a lottery style draw to decide which members would take up the allocation. But some who were lucky in the draw have since returned their tickets and it seems they may be as many as 25,000 Alaves fans in Madrid some without tickets while as few as 13,000 could make the trip from Barcelona.

As well as being the week in which Madrid won the league it’s also been the week in which former Barcelona president Sandro Rosell was arrested as part of a money-laundering investigation and Leo Messi’s 21-month suspended prison sentence was upheld on appeal.

The lights being shone on Rosell do not reflect well on his former vice-president and now number one Josep Bartomeu who must stand trial this summer for alleged fraud over the transfer of Neymar.

And all this plays out against the backdrop of Messi’s still unsigned new contract. At the end of next season he will be free to walk away from the club for nothing. It remains an unlikely scenario but one that can still be entertained courtesy of the board’s failure to persuade him to make a symbolic commitment to the club.

Those same board members also stand accused, with some justification, of failing to properly honour the players who won Barcelona’s first European Cup at Wembley 25 years ago, last week.

With so many dark clouds hanging over the club you have to wonder if the players could even catch some of the despondency and actually lose the game.

Alaves beat Barça 2-1 at the Camp Nou last September and Barcelona will be missing suspended pair Luis Suarez and Sergio Roberto.

Mauricio Pellegrino’s underdogs will have Real Madrid’s new 30m-euro defender Theo Hernandez in their team. He will join Zinedine Zidane next season after Madrid agreed to pay his parent club Atletico Madrid’s buy-out clause.

Pellegrino himself could be off with Watford and Crystal Palace among the club’s watching the ambitious 45-year-old who played briefly alongside Luis Enrique at Barcelona.

It will definitely be a goodbye for the Barcelona coach – as he brings his three-year tenure to an end in a stadium – the Vicente Calderon – that is also taking one final bow.

Perhaps if Barcelona are looking for a leader in all this malaise, Gerard Pique is their man.

On Monday when Real Madrid celebrated the title full-back Dani Carvajal took the microphone and shouted: ‘Pique cabrón saluda al campeón’ – Pique you bastard, salute the Champions’. It’s a standard ballad of title celebrations parties, and as chief social-media tormentor of Madrid, Pique was an obvious target.

Instead of fuelling the flames of controversy when asked about it, he just said: ‘He [Carvajal] has no reason to apologise. It was a moment of euphoria. Sometimes one says it, and another time it's someone else saying it.’

That’s the spirit. Graciously turning over a new page, where hopefully for Barcelona a new chapter awaits. Beating Alaves will not exactly be the dawning of a new world. But if they do so in style, and the win comes before an upbeat first press conference for new coach in-waiting Ernest Valverde next week then there will at least be light on the horizon.