They had waited 111 days for Espanyol to win, 174 days for Barcelona to lose and 9,800 days – 27 years, give or take a few leap years and some ropey maths – for Espanyol to win and Barcelona to lose in the same Camp Nou match. They'd been hanging around since the start of footballing time, some 29,140 days ago, for the team at the top of the Spanish league to lose to the team from the bottom at home and they had waited increasingly impatiently for a hint of a real title race, inventing one when it stubbornly refused to materialise.
Saturday night's Catalan derby at the Camp Nou, then, would be the most uneven contest in history. Even the Bible couldn't match it – at least David had a catapult and a stone. For Espanyol, taking on Barcelona was, according to one preview, like "fighting King Kong with a teaspoon". The team that hadn't won since early November – one that had employed more coaches than it had secured victories – against the team that had not lost since August. The unbeatable against the incapable. Hell, Samuel Eto'o alone had scored more than the whole Espanyol team.
As Barcelona and Espanyol came down the tunnel, past the chapel on the right and emerged on to the pitch, accompanied by the former president of the Catalan Generalitat, 42 points and an abyss separated the two sides – the biggest gap in history. Barcelona were going to send Espanyol down, fans sang "A Segunda Oé!" (the equivalent of a "going down" chant) and banners were emblazoned with huge 2s, Boixos Nois parading around like glamour girls at the boxing. Espanyol did not have a hope in hell. It was impossible. Only nothing is impossible. Or, as the idiots at Adidas would have it, impossible is nothing – especially when you have a deity on your side.
Because while Revelations described God as having a head and hair that were white like wool, eyes like blazing fire, feet akin to bronze glowing in a furnace, a face like the sun, and a voice like the sound of rushing waters, he is in fact a pint-sized parrot with a long tail and fancy feathers. At least according to AS, he is. "God," declared the paper on Sunday morning, "is a parakeet" – the nickname given to Espanyol. "It's time to stop that atheist bus campaign," raved the Barça-bashing blasphemer-in-chief Tomás Guash, "because it's been proven: miracles happen, God exists and he supports Espanyol."
You'd think the Almighty had better things to do – even if supporting Espanyol would be better than supporting some of the other things people have claimed He supports through the centuries – and anyway it wasn't so much that God supports Espanyol as the Little Buddha plays for them. Not very often these days, but he does. Short, bald and rather round, on Saturday evening Iván de la Peña finally returned to the starting line-up after a season racked with injury and lo did he perform a miracle. It might have taken him a little longer than the class act with the perfect teeth and nice smell, who by the seventh day had already created the heavens and the earth and had his feet up in front of the telly, but it was a miracle nonetheless.
With the clock ticking down, De la Peña sat on the bench clutching an ice-pack to his head, a glazed look on his eyes. It was all too much to take in. He had been the miracle worker at the heart of a derby that might not have been the "fuck of the century", when 18 mad seconds saw Espanyol deny Barcelona the league title, but it was certainly the shag of the year; a game that gave Espanyol hope and screwed Barcelona at the same time, combining with Real Madrid's 6–1 thrashing of Betis to cut Barcelona's lead at the top to seven points, making it look like there might, just, be a genuine title race after all as Barcelona start a weensy wobble.
De la Peña had cracked King Kong right between the eyes with that spoon. Having not scored in 1,114 days, and in 11,656 days on earth never got one with his head, he did both, nodding in the first and clipping home the coolest of chips for the second. He had got the opposition's midfielder sent off. And, a picture of grace, vision, and precision, he had led his side to an utterly implausible victory in a mad, unbelievable derby that had pretty much everything, except much football. He had floored a giant and resurrected the dead. In two cities.
Not that it was all his own work. As far as the Barcelona press were concerned, they had lost thanks to the referee Delgado Ferreiro, who lost the plot and dished out 14 yellows, plus a ludicrous red for Seydou Keita well before half-time and who completely failed to control Espanyol's aggressive approach, Thierry Henry insisting that it would have been "a different match, 11 against 11" and Eto'o complaining that the "the only way teams can beat us is the way that Espanyol played today and even then they can only do it if they get a ref like they got tonight".
Espanyol were an aggressive, sneaky bunch of hatchet men, flying into tackles, screeching up to the ref, and rolling round the floor, killing the game. The world's most pointless invention – that electric stretcher-car type thing – was in play more often than the ball was. By the end of the match, there had been only 49 minutes, despite eight minutes being added on. When the fourth official held up the board at the end of the first half, it said five. It could just as easily have said 15. But if Espanyol were nasty, they were also extremely impressive. Going down to 10 men might have been decisive but, in coach Pep Guardiola's own words, Barcelona had created, "very, very, very little with 11" – and that was down to the visitors. Breaking with the trend of teams parking the bus, Espanyol left themselves an outlet with De la Peña, kept the ball and pressured Barcelona's back four, trying to force mistakes.
Succeeding, too. Because if the ref helped out, Barcelona obligingly fell into Espanyol's cleverly laid trap. Guardiola decided the best way to chase the victory was to take off Henry and Eto'o, and play Sergio Busquets up front; Xavi Hernández never got going; Messi never escaped; the defence looked uncomfortable; and Dani Alves's crossing, for once, was poor. Not as poor, though, as the goalkeeper Víctor Valdés.
Reminding reporters of the keeper's match-saving stops against Betis afterwards, Eto'o insisted: "Valdés has two bollocks." If so, he dropped one of them. Didn't just drop it in fact – dropped it, ran after it, tripped up, skidded across the floor and careered into a pile of precariously placed tins of paint to the sound of a kazoo and crashing cymbals, not for the first time reigniting a title race by delivering the perfect pass to the opposition's most dangerous player, allowing De la Peña to get the second and destroy any chance of a comeback.
As the ball hit the net, there was light. Light for Madrid, who suddenly see a genuine chance of winning the league, and light for Espanyol, who climbed off the bottom. Winless in 14 and beaten nine times without De la Peña, Espanyol had lost only once in seven with him. After 3½ months without a win, and without the Little Buddha in midfield, he returned and they beat their biggest rivals. Espanyol are born again.
Results: Deportivo La Coruña 1-1 Valencia; Getafe 1-1 Athletic Bilbao; Mallorca 1-0 Racing Santander; Osasuna 2-0 Numancia; Recreativo 1-1 Almería; Valladolid 1-3 Málaga; Barcelona 1-2 Espanyol, Real Madrid 6-1 Real Betis, Sevilla 1-0 Atlético Madrid, Villarreal 2-1 Sporting Gijón
