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Lionel Messi’s word choice was telling.
Perhaps he has started to develop a little resistance to Barcelona’s capacity for self-immolation over the last few weeks. The club has, after all, spent most of 2020 lurching and bouncing from one drama to another, almost all of them of the team’s own making.
There was the abysmal handling of the dismissal of Ernesto Valverde, the coach; the unnecessarily public and eventually unsuccessful courting of Xavi Hernández as his replacement; the spat between Eric Abidal, the sporting director, and Messi over the former’s allegation that the players had conspired in Valverde’s demise.