Before the match, Real Betis’s manager had to apologise for his admiration for Barça. After beating them, Barcelona’s players spoke of their admiration for him

In the final moments before the first half began on Sunday afternoon, Real Betis’s manager, Quique Setién, approached Barcelona midfielder Sergio Busquets and asked him for his shirt. He wanted to frame it, he said. Busquets nodded and smiled, so Setién thanked him and headed out towards the bench at the Camp Nou. As he went, he also had a word with Lionel Messi, whose shirt already hangs on his wall, alongside that of Luka Modric. Messi was returning to action after three weeks out with a broken arm, today of all days, and Setién sidled up to him, greeting him fondly.

“I’d have waited a bit longer, not taken any risks,” he grinned. “I couldn’t,” Messi replied; sitting out was driving him up the wall and he was desperate to play.

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A few days earlier, Setién had told Catalan newspaper El Periódico that he would have cut off his little finger to have worked with Johan Cruyff when he was a player and admitted that he’s admired Barcelona for years; they had changed his life and his view of the game. A chess fan who has played both Kasparov and Karpov, he also described Messi as the queen, “the piece that does everything well.” And a couple of days before that, in another interview with RAC1 radio, he said that his centre-back Marc Bartra must have done “something wrong” to have ended up with him at the Benito Villamarín instead of still being at Barcelona, where he had begun his career and played for six years. Betis, in short, couldn’t really compete.

Put it all together, and it might have looked like a classic case of mind games. That’s one view of it, anyway. Another view, and the one held in Seville where some fans were furious, was that he had shown a lack of respect to his own club.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Quique Setién, left, outwitted Barcelona manager Ernesto Valverde. Photograph: Bagu Blanco/BPI/REX/Shutterstock

Both views were wrong. Setién’s admiration is genuine. For good and bad, he is a believer, an unapologetic puritan. Yet while he believes there is something deeper than the result, he also believes in the result.

He played this way successfully at Lugo, Las Palmas, and with Betis, taking them back into Europe, and for all the admiration he was going to the Camp Nou to compete. If most foresaw another defeat – Betis began the weekend 14th, having lost more than they’ve won and scored just eight league goals all season – one member of his coaching staff was convinced that they would be 2-0 up by half-time.

He was right. Setién, meanwhile, was wrong. Wrong to say what he did about Bartra, maybe, and wrong in what he said. “I know I’ve put my foot in it. I understand that my words can be seen as a lack of respect and of course that was not my intention,” he tweeted on Thursday. “Humbly, I ask for forgiveness to everyone at Real Betis. I’m sorry.”

You get the feeling his apology will have been accepted by now. After all, if his words had annoyed, it also turned out that Bartra is playing for the better team now. Well, on Sunday he was, anyway. If the final minutes before the first half began had seen Setién asking for Busquets’ shirt, the final minutes before the second half began saw Luis Suárez and Messi sat silently on the stairs in the tunnel with the look of men who could not understand what was going on.

What was going on was that Barcelona were being taken to pieces. One word used in the Betis dressing room for the first half is antológico – a performance to go down in history. They were 2-0 up but it could have been more. By the time Junior scored the first after 18 minutes, taking a wonderful pass from William Carvalho and turning Sergi Roberto to finish by the near post, Gerard Piqué had already stopped Giovani Lo Celso while Joaquín had shot over. Between that and the moment Joaquín scored after half an hour, Marc-Andre Ter Stegen had made a superb save by the other post. And then Loren Morón put one just wide and so did Cristian Tello. By half-time, Betis had taken seven shots, and had as much of the ball as Barcelona.

Eleven Sports (@ElevenSports_UK) | GOAL! |



Real Betis are 2-0 up at the Camp Nou! 😯



37-year-old Joaquin, hadn't scored against Barcelona since the 04/05 season, he's just ended that dry spell! pic.twitter.com/7cO6xIe8QU

When Joaquín scored the second, standing alone on the penalty spot, he was one of six Betis players in the Barcelona area. All over the pitch, they seemed to outnumber Barcelona, pressing high, going man to man and then dashing past their opponents, and unstoppable tide. “A green and white hurricane,” El Mundo Deportivo called them. It was, said the cover of Sport, a “lesson.” “They played a risky style, with lots of people ahead of the ball and not many behind it, and we didn’t deal with it well,” Ernesto Valverde said.

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LATE DRAMA. The linesman ruled it out, but VAR has given it!



Barcelona score a wonderful team goal! 👏 pic.twitter.com/av3q6Rsx8g

Messi and Suárez got up and headed out for the second half. Barcelona reacted, and the game went wild. At 0-2, Joaquín was withdrawn to a standing ovation. Messi made it 1-2 with a penalty, but almost immediately Ter Stegen dropped Lo Celso’s shot to make it 1-3. Arturo Vidal made it 2-3, laid on by Messi. Ivan Rakitic was sent off. Sergio Canales slid in Betis’s fourth. And with a couple of minutes left, Messi made it 4-3.

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IT'S FOUR FOR REAL BETIS. 😮



Sergi Canales makes it 4-2 at the Camp Nou. pic.twitter.com/f13Zv1c3qd

Betis, though, had made it; at the whistle, they ran from the bench, celebrating. “They deserved it,” Piqué said. “We were brave in every sense,” Joaquín insisted, “we produced a wonderful performance: having the ball, creating lots of chances, and taking them too, which is what has been lacking this season.”

“It’s been a long time since we saw a team treat Barcelona like this, using their own weapons against them,” wrote Santi Giménez in AS. That idea was shared: after the game it was suggested that Betis’s way was Barcelona’s way. “They’ve been doing this for 25 years, laying a path; we’re just apprentices, trying to consolidate an idea,” Setién said.

This is the first time that Betis have won at the Camp Nou in 21 years – back when even Joaquín hadn’t made his debut and Finidi George was the star. Barcelona hadn’t conceded four at home in 15 years and had gone 26 months without losing a league game there, all the way back to Alavés in September 2016. Since then, they had played 42 leagues games, 13 in the Champions League and seven in the cup, and lost none of them. The only defeat had been Madrid in the Super Cup. Now, Betis had done it – and done it their way. “This is the perfect place to strengthen our ideas,” Junior said.

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“This will give us a boost”, Joaquín added. It is one they need. Not just because of their league position but also because of the style. There’s something about the style and the single-minded, inflexible commitment to it; about the tendency to infuse it with a moral quality; and about the fact that philosophy and identity are invariably on the agenda, that means criticism is even more pointed when it comes. Then there’s the suspicion that, even if it’s pretty, it’s not so practical; in fact, it’s foolish, wilfully reckless. That it might be fine against some teams but that you might as well sign your death warrant as play like that against the biggest.

And yet in the last 10 years – in the last 14 months, in his case – there is only one manager who has won at the Bernabéu and the Camp Nou and it’s Setién. Not even Diego Simeone has done that. His Betis have also won at the Sánchez Pizjuán, where they scored five. Oh, and at San Siro.

At Seville airport, a handful of Betis fans had gathered to welcome their team back. Setién arrived smiling. In his bag, was Sergio Busquets’ shirt, signed. “For Quique,” it said, “with affection and admiration for the way you see football.”

Talking points

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Atlético Madrid’s Uruguayan defender Diego Godín celebrates scoring. Photograph: Curto de la Torre/AFP/Getty Images

• Monday morning, a blank screen. You could start with the 2-2, the 3-2, the 4-2 or the 4-3, with Espanyol going from joint top to fifth in 20 minutes or Sevilla climbing four places with a single sumptuous touch. With Valencia winning as many games in four days as they had all season, Alavés still in the Champions League places and Santi Solari still in a job. Villarreal’s Javi Calleja is too, just about, after Nicola Sansone’s shot tore through the air in Vallecas. You could start with that moment from Karim Benzema, turning all Dennis Bergkamp, or Celta creating the perfect goal.

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Touch, turn, finish. 💥



Karim Benzema, that was beautiful - he's put Real Madrid in front. 😍 pic.twitter.com/EQT0exqG1e

• You could certainly start with the man who couldn’t walk, broken but not beaten, scoring the winner in added time, lying there in the rain, a totem of his team. “Football’s not fair,” said Iñaki Williams after Diego Godín scored that goal in injury time – his, mostly – to give Atlético Madrid a 3-2 win over Athletic Club Bilbao on Saturday night, but it’s fun. In the ‘boring, uncompetitive’ league where just four points separate the top six and eight separate the top 12, there were 33 goals this weekend.