“Put the training back a couple of hours every day,” screamed one Catalan radio journalist as he commentated on Barcelona’s early opener, scored by Ousmane Dembele, in the Nou Camp press box on Tuesday night.
The France winger had slept in on Sunday, turning up for training two hours late. Just as his team-mates were leaving the club’s Joan Gamper training ground, he was arriving.
He really is good enough for them to be currently making light of behaviour that in a player of lesser talent would have already have seen him pushed irreversibly towards the exit.
Barca go into the knockout stages of this season’s Champions League feeling a lot more confident than they did last season because, as this match showed, they aren’t just about Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez this season.
Last year with Dembele still not up and running on the pitch and with Philippe Coutinho Champions League cup-tied it meant that any team able to stifle Messi and Suarez had a chance of overcoming them, just as Roma did in the quarter-finals.
But Dembele’s flair for the extraordinary, the unpredictable, gives them something extra.
When Neymar left the club in 2017 coach Ernesto Valverde insisted that Dembele be the priority signing over Coutinho. When it seemed that the club only had time to bring in one player before the season started he wanted Dembele more than the Liverpool player because he felt his side would lack pace and penetration post-Neymar.
Dembele provided that in the seventh minute against Tottenham – it was the ninth match running he had set-up or scored one of Barcelona’s goals.
His name was chanted by the Nou Camp after his goal, not for the first time this season. They demand fantasy football and he provides it. His relationship with the supporters currently seems better than with his coach and team-mates.
There is a level of exasperation from both the dressing room and the manager over Dembele’s failure to grasp the enormity of the club he is at and the responsibility that goes with it.
They despaired last season when he rejected the club’s idea of a club chef helping him prepare his meals at home while he was injured because there were concerns he was falling back into the fast-food eating habits of the pals that have joined him in Catalonia.
And they struggle with his inability to do the basics – such as turn up for training.
The club have lurched in the last few weeks from one position to another very different one.
At times they have looked like allowing a negative campaign to build momentum, one that would justify his sale at a loss in January or next summer. At other times they have moved to protect their investment amid criticism they were driving down his price and giving him no chance to succeed.
He is a very young 21-year-old, in Barcelona without a family framework, unable to speak Spanish or Catalan and yet to find his place in a dressing room in which he fits neither in the homegrown nor the South American cliques.
Barcelona will not be changing training times to accommodate their sleepy forward. He will have to change.
But performances like the one he produced in the first half against Tottenham will help convince them they have to help him change.
His raw, uncoachable quality is too precious to allow to slip away.