Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid achieved their first ever win at Camp Nou in the all-important first leg of 25/26 UCL quarter finals this week.
A Julian Alvarez freekick and a Sorloth goal has now offered a 2-goal advantage for the Rojiblancos as Barcelona will need to find a response on Tuesday, in the third game between both sides in the last 10 days.
It’s perhaps the biggest challenge Hansi Flick will face in his Barca tenure till now.
After winning 8 finals already, a Champions League trophy with Barca will put the German in conversation with the likes of Pep Guardiola, Ronald Koeman, Luis Enrique and Xavi.
A turnaround in the second leg is certainly not unthinkable as Flick and Barcelona almost managed it during the Copa Del Rey semi final second leg against Atletico itself after going down 4-0 in the first.
Hence, before the match at Metropolitano, there is only word doing the rounds among Barca fans on social media – Remontada.
Spanish for ‘comeback’, the word remontada has been heavily used by their rivals Real Madrid, who have a rich history of overcoming first-leg deficits in the last 10 years.
But this time, there’s a strange looking edit of Barca players and manager accompanying the messages.
The edits shows the likes of Hansi Flick, Lamine Yamal, Marcus Rashford and more in black goggles, black t-shirt and using a white wired earphone.
The photos also show a news ticker at the bottom which reads ‘FC Barcelona has never beaten Atletico Madrid in UCL over 2 legs’.
As it turns out, this is a LeBron James meme which spawned from one of NBA’s greatest comebacks ever seen.
The original pic is of LeBron when he was with Cleveland Cavaliers.
The NBA legend wore the exact ensemble while doing an interview after the Cavs were 3-1 down in a best-of-seven series to clinch the 2016 NBA finals.
Here, the news ticker read ‘no team in NBA Finals history has come back from trailing 3-1’.
Cavaliers were up against Golden State Warriors, perhaps the greatest basketball team ever and with the help of LeBron, they won all 3 games to win the championship.
The meme gets circulated among fans of NBA teams before a game which requires a comeback and it seems Barca supporters are borrowing the same energy.
Perhaps Yamal will need to bring the same LeBron style MVP performance if Barcelona are to make a comeback.
