Gaspart fans flames by blaming Figo for provoking crowd

That the Barcelona-Real Madrid game on Saturday night should have been eclipsed by the torrent of hatred pouring from the Camp Nou faithful on to the head of Luis Figo was not such a great surprise. Especially after the other former Barça star in the Real team, the not quite so detested Ronaldo, bowed out of the game at the last minute with what was reported to be an attack of flu.

In the absence of goals and anything much in the way of decent football to cheer, as is often the case in games that generate huge expectations, it was also not entirely surprising that a significant sector of the Barcelona fans should have seized the opportunity provided by Figo's insistence on taking all his team's corners to pelt the Portuguese winger with missiles of every shape and size. Plastic bottles, sandwiches and oranges predominated, but there was also a bottle of whisky and – according to Real Madrid players – a billiard ball and a knife.

Given the sheer impossibility at one point in the second half of the insanely brave Figo managing to make it to the corner flag, it was hardly surprising that the referee should have ordered the players off the pitch and suspended play for 10 minutes.

But what really was surprising, what was truly amazing and perhaps even unprecedented in football's inglorious annals, was the reaction of the Barcelona president, Joan Gaspart, after the match. Far from condemning the behaviour of his team's moronic fans (all the more moronic as their actions halted the game at a time when Barcelona seemed to be closing in for the kill), far from apologising, he blamed it all on Luis Figo!

This was what Gaspart said: "Our public have suffered an unnecessary provocation. Their reaction was a response to a provocation. And I do not accept people coming to my home to provoke... I am not happy that on top of that it's us who come out looking like the bad guys."

If Gaspart, generally known as the most rabid of Barça fans, had made his remark immediately upon the final whistle blowing, in the heat of the frustration he must have felt at his team's failure to win a match they clearly dominated and in which one perfectly legitimate goal was disallowed, then one might, perhaps, just, have excused him. But he said what he said half an hour after the game, following a meeting with his directors. Blaming Figo for the crowd's attempts to inflict grievous bodily harm on him was Gaspart's measured, pondered and considered response.

Figo himself, who is as ice-cool by temperament as Gaspart is over-heated, responded to the news of what Gaspart had said with a wry: "I don't know if he was joking or what." But, Figo added: "Few people take seriously what he says. And I don't believe that right now he is doing the club he leads any great service." As to the suggestion that he might have helped out by asking someone else to take the corners, Figo was quite categorical that there was a principle here that he had no intention of undermining. "It would be nuts to imagine I wasn't going to take the corners because of pressure from the crowd. The coach asked me to take them and that's what I did."