Barcelona Vs. Real Madrid: Ronaldo Scores Clasico Winner

UPDATE: Real Madrid 2-1 FC Barcelona, Final Score

We have live game coverage in our Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, 2012 El Clasico StoryStream. For more on the two teams, head over to Real Madrid blog Managing Madrid and FC Barcelona blog Barca Blaugranes.

We have live game coverage in our Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, 2012 El Clasico StoryStream. For more on the two teams, head over to Real Madrid blog Managing Madrid and FC Barcelona blog Barca Blaugranes.

We have live game coverage in our Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, 2012 El Clasico StoryStream. For more on the two teams, head over to Real Madrid blog Managing Madrid and FC Barcelona blog Barca Blaugranes.

Saturday’s El Clasico will be brilliant. It could be the best 90 minutes of football we see all season and it will matter a lot for bragging rights, but it will not determine the league champion. That’s going to be Real Madrid, regardless of the result of the Camp Nou.

We’ll have pre-game and live game coverage in our Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, 2012 El Clasico StoryStream. For more on the two teams, head over to Real Madrid blog Managing Madrid and FC Barcelona blog Barca Blaugranes.

Talk of big clubs being in crisis is almost always annoying. On the one hand, and as Andi Thomas wrote in these pages some time ago, there is the depressing way in which it confirms the monopoly (or duopoly, or quadropoly) of the big to the expense of the small (Arsenal’s midseason ‘CRISIS!’ pales in comparison, for example, with that which has defined Plymouth Argyle this season). On the other, perhaps less dispiriting but nonetheless irksome, hand, there is the way in which exaggerating any and every difficulty into the caps-lock language of CRISIS elides the rather pleasing nuances inherent to a season’s ups and downs.

Neither Barcelona nor Real Madrid (who meet in a potentially league deciding Clasico at the Camp Nou on Saturday night) are in CRISIS! (or even crisis), obviously. But both Spanish giants approach this most pivotal of fixtures on the back of defeats (answers on a postcard if you know the last time that happened) and that places the game in an interesting, if not critical, context.

Both teams are coming off of surprising away losses in the UEFA Champions League semifinal. Perhaps both were caught looking ahead to this game, though it’s more likely that Chelsea and Bayern Munich are just very good teams. In any event, the players will not all be fully rested like they have been for previous Clasicos because neither manager was in a position where they could rest their star players in the run-up to the game.

The game kicks off at 2:00 p.m. ET from Camp Nou in Barcelona, Catalonia on Saturday.