Barcelona crumble in Champions League again in six-goal draw with Inter amid beautiful chaos - The Warm-Up

As a special treat because we've been such wonderful girls and boys, the Champions League has let us have one of its ridiculous knockout games early this year. Barcelona 3-3 Inter looks very silly written down, and was even sillier to watch unfolding, as the home team - who needed a win - went into the game with a big arrow pointing at their vulnerable underside.

There are probably circumstances where Gerard Pique and Eric García, with a five-thousand-year-old Sergio Busquets in front of them, is the right combination of footballers. We could imagine passing a pleasant evening in their company, playing Scrabble, drinking wine. But against Lautaro Martinez? Against a side that are probably going to try and break quickly? Let nobody say that Xavi lacks courage.

Injuries at least explains Pique's return to the side. And a manager knows, when turning to the veterans, that while the years may have taken what pace they once possessed, their game intelligence will only have sharpened. Xavi will have trusted Pique to know what's going on around him, and known that his captain would never find himself leaving the ball and doing a big "nothing to worry about here, lads" arm gesture while Nico Barella wanders in behind him to break the game apart.

Frenkie de Jong came on after Inter took the lead, and Barcelona immediately looked better, but by that point the game had descended into attack v defence, pressure against breakaways, shredded nerves against muddled heads, and nothing much was making sense. That now includes the group table, which has Barcelona in third place and almost certainly heading for the Europa League. We contrast this with La Liga, where Barcelona sit on top, unbeaten, having conceded just one goal all season, and we conclude that football is a strange thing that we do not understand.

Another thing we don't understand: the intricacies of high finance. Still, we're pretty certain that a key part of Barcelona's projected future - that is, the future they've been mortgaging for the sake of the present - involved reaching the latter stages of the Champions League. Of course, there's no accounting for groups of death, and perhaps Viktoria Plzen (played four, lost four, conceded 16) will do them a favour in Milan. But you have to wonder if this is all going to end up with another lever.

Hey, maybe Manchester United will try and buy Frenkie de Jong again. That'll be fun. In the meantime, Barcelona will have mere days to regroup. It's Real Madrid at the weekend. Now, they really can play on the break.

Your mileage may vary. But in the Warm-Up's ever so humble opinion, Napoli are the most glitteringly, appallingly alluring team in European football.

It's not just the history. In fact, and with all due respect to Maradona, it's not even primarily the history. Rather, it's the way that, season after season, they start their campaign playing the sweetest, sexiest football on the planet, and end it watching somebody else win the league. Icarus survives the fall, Icarus swims back to shore, and Icarus thinks: yeah, let's give the wax another shot.

So, you know, pinch of salt. But once again, and perhaps more so than ever, Napoli look great. Last night they put four past Ajax, which secured their place in the Champions League last 16 and took them to 17 goals scored for the group. And that's with games to come against Rangers, who can't defend, and Liverpool, who can't defend. The record for a single group stage is held by PSG, who got 25 in 2017/18. Napoli are on the pace.

And this wasn't just any four. Sure, Ajax will probably find some defensive errors when they go back over the tape, and Daley Blind is destined to spend the rest of his days convinced that Victor Osimhen is about to appear from nowhere and plant a custard pie in his face. But for the first two goals, Napoli looked irresistible. Sharp parts moving in wicked harmony; defensive structures left in tiny ribbons. Three points ahead of Milan, eight ahead of Inter, a frankly hilarious 10 ahead of Juventus. It's happening. It's happening again.

Unless! This isn't any ordinary season. This is a season with a World Cup in the middle of it, and any projection from now until May must shape itself around Qatar 2022. But Nigeria haven't qualified, and neither have Georgia. Osmihen's getting a month off, and so is Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The same goes for Stanislav Lobotka, Leo Ostigard, Elif Elmas… and, of course, every Italian, though that goes for the rest of Serie A as well.

But on balance, we reckon Napoli are going to come out of the World Cup better rested than their immediate challengers in the league, and in a position to put the frighteners on whoever they get in the last 16. And they're so good to watch. Once again, we're ready to be heartbroken.

Liverpool are back! Maybe! Sort of! We don't really know! A strange result here, an underwhelming performance there, and then suddenly, just when the crisis starts to feel existential, they put together an absolute hammering. Whatever else you might say about Liverpool's season, it's a pretty good bit.

Unless you're on the other end of it, that is. Rangers did at least get their goal, to ensure they won't exit the competition without managing a single positive statistic. And they do retain an outside chance of pinching the Europa League spot. But ultimately, they got Bournemouth'd.

There comes a point in a big, big win where a football match starts to uncouple from reality. It is easy enough to attribute a 3-0 or a 4-0 to the prowess of the winning team, but once you start drifting into your sixes, your sevens, it all gets a little hard to read. To what extent are we talking about Liverpool playing well in a way that matters, in a way that isn't just Rangers dissolving into a cloud of angry nothingness? What does this result say to the future, to next Sunday's game against Manchester City? Would 3-0 and a clean sheet have been somehow better, while also obviously being nowhere near as good?

On balance, you suspect Jurgen Klopp will take the injection of adrenaline and delirium over anything more prosaic. It's how he rolls. Particularly since Mo Salah suddenly looked his old self again. You know what they say about great goalscorers. They all struggle from time to time, but once they get one five-minute hat-trick, they'll be off and running.

Simon Mignolet is the finest goalkeeper in Europe, and it isn't even close. Four games played, zero goals conceded, and approximately a million saves made. Against Atletico, he even pulled out the old face save, the very definition of suffering for one's art.

As a result of all this heroism, Club Brugge have made it through the group stage and into the knockouts. And if you predicted that before the season kicked off, no you didn't.

If you're in the market for another reason to be worried/disgusted/furious about the upcoming World Cup, allow us to direct you towards Ben Gilbert's Blizzard piece, which has been picked up by the Guardian. You may remember that this winter's tournament is supposed to be "the first carbon-neutral World Cup in history". Well…

"Given the manpower and disruption involved in delivering a World Cup in the Gulf desert peninsula, there have to be questions about how achievable this is. In June 2021, FIFA produced a report suggesting 3.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide will be produced during the tournament. That’s more than what some countries release in a year and 1.5m tonnes more than the total produced at Russia 2018."

Gilbert puts his questions to Professor Simon Chadwick, who notes that "this might be a net zero carbon event" in itself, but is cautious about the broader picture. "As a micro moment, it’s very easy to achieve that net zero ambition and it’s very easy to emphasise your credentials but it still doesn’t alter the fact that Qatar will have degraded the natural environment by preparing for the tournament and by its ongoing revenue generation and extraction of liquefied natural gas. One moment in time does not mark you out as a champion of the environment."

Today, in ideas we wish we'd had, and also in ideas we'd never have pulled off so perfectly, here is Twitter user @bryansgunn with his re-imagination of Hollywood classics for a British audience.

The Europa (Conference) League! Once again, we've got more football than a reasonable person could ever hope to ingest. Arsenal are off to the Arctic circle to play Bodø/Glimt, Manchester United welcome Omonia Nicosia to Old Trafford, and West Ham host Anderlecht.