Barcelona set to give returning Robson warmest of welcomes

Spanish club keen to atone for treatment of former coach as Newcastle visit Nou Camp in the Champions' League

When Newcastle United run out on to the Nou Camp turf tomorrow night there will be a good number of Barcelona fans quietly hoping that Sir Bobby Robson's team win.

Partly it's that people feel a nostalgic affection for Robson, as well as a lingering guilt for having treated him so unjustly during most of the year that he was in charge at Barça. But mostly it's do with the distaste that the club president Joan Gaspart and, to a lesser extent, the coach Louis van Gaal inspire. Anything that will accelerate Gaspart's demise is welcome, even defeat in the Champions' League, according to this twisted but (among Barça fans) far from unusual way of thinking.

Santi Nolla, the editor of Barcelona's biggest sports newspaper Mundo Deportivo, acknowledged the prevalence of this particular strain of madness when he wrote last week: "Here what people are interested in is that things go wrong... Here there are Barça supporters who want Barça to lose so that everything goes up in smoke."

If things do go up in smoke the first victim will be Van Gaal. The general view among Barça-watchers is that Gaspart, rather than fall on his sword, will sacrifice the man he controversially reappointed as coach in the summer. It would be ironic if Robson, by beating Van Gaal's team tomorrow night, ended up being the agent of the Dutchman's destruction.

But Robson is neither spiteful nor small-minded and such an outcome would be far from his thoughts. If anything, sympathy will be the dominant emotion as he contemplates the predicament of the man who took his place after Barça booted him upstairs following a remarkably successful 1996-97 season at the club. Robson knows exactly what Van Gaal is going through because, with even less reason, the fans and large sectors of the Catalan media spent the whole of the time that he was coach baying for him to go.

Things are going badly for Van Gaal irrespective of the fact that his team have won nine European games in a row, and will match a Champions' League record held only by Milan if they beat Newcastle tomorrow. Barcelona fans have a tendency, when offered a choice, to accentuate the negative. What consumes them, therefore, is not success in Europe but the fact that their team are mid-table in the Spanish league and have made their worst start in 23 years.

Robson's Barça – complete with Ronaldo, who Robson himself brought to the club – won the Spanish Cup, the Spanish Super Cup, the European Cup-Winners' Cup and came runners-up in the league, having spent virtually the whole season in first or second place. But still the club faithful insisted on labelling Robson, a man with half a century at the top of the professional game, a footballing ignoramus.

"Before he'd even got off the plane they were mistreating him," recalls Josep Mussons, the Barcelona vice-president during Robson's time. "The problem originated from the fact that Robson was the man chosen to replace Johan Cruyff. Whoever had come after Cruyff, had it been Saint Peter himself, he would have been badly received."

Mussons speaks no English and Robson speaks next to no Spanish (let alone Catalan) yet the now retired Barça vice-president considers the Englishman to be one of the finest individuals he has ever met. "He is un señor [a gentleman] from head to toe," says Mussons. "An extraordinary man who one feels pleasure and pride in describing as a friend. He won three titles, but that's the least of it. He deserves our admiration and respect for the way he is as a man." Which is why Mussons says he deeply regrets the abuse – the constant criticism, the cruel jokes in the press, the sea of white handkerchiefs at the Nou Camp – he had to endure. "I feel shame that people here failed to rise to the occasion, failed so badly to treat him the way he deserved."

Nolla, the Mundo Deportivo editor, agreed in a telephone conversation that Robson had been a victim of unfortunate timing. "With distance and the passage of time people have understood that the brutal treatment he received on his arrival was a function of the Cruyff thing, that in truth he was a successful manager," Nolla said. "The way he is remembered now, and I think will always be remembered, is as a quality human being: loyal, decent, simpatico. Above all I would say that Barcelona supporters have come to regard him with genuine fondness."

No one regards him with greater affection than Miquel Matas, the man who got to know him best during his time at Barça. Matas, a hotel and restaurant owner in Sitges, the coastal town where Robson lived, still stays in touch with Robson. In fact, he hopes to have lunch with him tomorrow, before the game. "I was with him playing golf," Matas recalls, "when he received the telephone call when he found out he'd been sacked as Barcelona coach. And the call was not even from someone at the club, but from a third party. Someone in Sweden. Can you believe it? But what struck me was that he wasn't so much angry as sad."

And yet, as Matas notes, Robson never rose to the bait, never accepted the invitations he would receive from the press in the ensuing months to speak badly of Barça. "He had too much class for that. His attitude was always that he was grateful to have had the chance to work in the world's best club." It was an attitude he managed to convey to the general public, a large reason why, as Matas sees it, the prevailing attitude of Barcelona fans towards Robson today is so warm and admiring. "The club have never had, and maybe never will have, a coach who was as fine a man as Bobby Robson," Matas says.

Mussons not only concurs with that opinion, he believes it is the duty of Barcelona to make special arrangements to honour him on his return to the Nou Camp tomorrow. "A ceremony of sorts ought to be held so that we may in part – only in part, I say – make amends for our dreadful behaviour when he was here. If he were to go out on to the centre of the pitch, for example, before the game he would receive an ovation the likes of which has rarely been heard at the Nou Camp.

"People feel guilt, you see, at the way they treated him. They would like to atone for the error of their ways. I can say for sure that of the 100,000 members Barça has 90 per cent would be prepared to say their mea culpas to him today. With everything he had to put up with, not one word of complaint, not one reproach. There was a reason why they made him a sir in England. They knew what they were doing over there. We should follow their example. He should receive an award. Catalonia should also honour him."