First Defeat

At the same time as Real Madrid defeated AC Milan 3–1 at the Bernabéu Stadium, another Champions League Group Stage match at Barcelona's Camp Nou had also come to an end.

The bright red scoreboard at the stadium displayed an unbelievable score.

0–2. By international convention, the home team was listed first and the away team second.

It was a score no one had been able to believe before the match—not only because Barcelona had been unstoppable so far this season, but also because their opponents were not very strong.

Barcelona had been winning match after match this season, but recently they seemed to have fallen under a spell of bad luck. First, they had been held to a goalless draw away from home by Mourinho's Inter Milan in the first round of the Champions League Group Stage. Then they had been held to another goalless draw by Valencia in La Liga.

When Barcelona had been held to a draw by Valencia, godfather Cruyff had defended the team in his column. He had stated that there was an axiom in football: it was impossible to win every match. Therefore, when you could not win a match, what you had to do was avoid losing it.

Cruyff believed that Barcelona had been playing away from home against both Inter Milan and Valencia, and had encountered numerous unfavorable factors that had prevented them from winning. But the team had still done well, because at the very least, they had not lost.

Yet who could have imagined that immediately afterward, in the third round of the Champions League Group Stage, Barcelona would lose 0–2 at home to Russia's Kazan Rubin before the eyes of a hundred thousand spectators, suffering their first defeat of the new season?

It was absolutely a result that made