IT will be remembered as one of the sport’s greatest games.
Barcelona 6, Paris Saint-Germain 1.
The tension. The drama. The mother of all comebacks at Camp Nou.
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Neymar’s brilliance, Sergi Roberto’s 95th-minute volley, the wide-eyed celebrations that followed this spellbinding Barca performance.
Somewhere, buried beneath all those red and blue shirts was Luis Enrique.
Barcelona’s coach, their Champions League-winning manager in 2015, is walking away from all this at the end of the season.
The pressures, the intolerable demands of managing one of world football’s super clubs, has done for him.
It gets them all in the end.
Pep Guardiola lasted four seasons before announcing in front of Barcelona’s tearful players that he needed to take a sabbatical — in New York.
No amount of mountain biking in the Catalunya peaks can convince Enrique to stay.
At the end of the season, after Barca have contested the Copa Del Rey final, or maybe another Champions League final, he will ride into the distance. The job, managing the expectations of the club’s tens of millions of supporters around the world, is a suffer fest.
Carlo Ancelotti once described the pressures of managing Chelsea, with Roman Abramovich barking down the phone every five minutes, as “intolerable”.
Barcelona, somehow, is a level beyond that.
Coaching them has become a short-term job with outrageous, unrealistic expectations.
They begin every season with the pressure of trying to finish ahead of Real Madrid and stopping them adding to their record of 32 La Liga titles.
Barcelona, with 24 titles, are a point ahead of Real before Sunday’s trip to Deportivo La Coruna.
Then there is the European Cup, the challenge to win it every year and close the gap between the two biggest clubs in Spanish football.
Zinedine Zidane had only been in the job four months when Real Madrid won the European Cup for the 11th time in 2016.
Enrique also won it — Barcelona’s fifth — in his first season. At every turn there is tension. With three games a week, with commitments to La Liga, the Copa del Rey and Champions League, it is relentless.
A sizeable number of the Catalan media are Barcelona supporters, quizzing managers with terrace intensity and dinner table passion six times a week.
That endless news cycle scrambles even the moat astute minds.
Messi or Ronaldo? Who is bigger - Barca or Real? Who will be fired first - Enrique or Zizou?
Then there are the players, with one of the most powerful dressing rooms in the history of the sport dictating tactics.
It polices itself most of the time, with Andres Iniesta, Gerard Pique and Lionel Messi making sure that they continue to meet their own exceptional standards.
To keep that spirit alive following the retirement of captain Carles Puyol in 2014 and Xavi a year later is an achievement in itself.
Enrique, who had spells coaching Roma and Celta Vigo before returning to Barcelona, has done that.
This is not an easy dressing room to manage.
Keeping Messi, Neymar, Luis Suarez and the rest of the gang fresh and motivated presents its own unique challenges.
The best-paid players in the world pretty much get off scott-free whenever Barcelona lose a game.
After their 4-0 defeat at PSG in the first leg, a section of Barca supporters chanting their support for Enrique in the following home game against Legates were drowned out by whistles.
It was very different on Wednesday, with the whole stadium erupting after Roberto’s improbable strike took them through to the quarter-final.
The players celebrated with a some beers in the dressing room, cracking open a few bottles of Estrella to toast this incredible triumph.
That superhuman victory shredded nerves, placing everybody involved with Barca under enormous stress and scrutiny.
Whatever the pressure, it is still the greatest job on earth.
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The Arsenal winger is not an obvious leader but at least he had the courage to speak his mind after their 5-1 defeat against Bayern Munich.
It shows courage and maturity, a quality very few Arsenal players seem to have these days.
Walcott, who slammed the ball into David Alaba’s chest when things were getting heated at the Emirates, spoke passionately and honestly about the issues facing the club.
It did nothing to change the result but at least it showed one of the players was hurting.
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They are frightened little men, afraid of the consequences if they dare to open their mouths.
That is the Arsenal way, with everybody — manager, chief executive and players — protecting their own little piece of turf.
Some of them should be put out to grass.
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