Barcelona vs Tottenham: Kyle Walker-Peters hauls himself from Camp Nou’s imposing jaws

The Camp Nou is one of those stadiums that doesn’t really look like it should be able to support its own weight. It’s not just the size, but the steepness: the endless layers piled atop each other like a collapsible lampshade, seats upon seats upon seats, almost casting the pitch into shadow. For the spectator, it’s a vista like no other. For the player perched at the very base of the bowl, it must feel a bit like drowning.

That’s probably how Kyle Walker-Peters felt as he lay flat on the turf a few feet from his own goal, staring up at the night sky, the harsh lights, the thousands of contorted faces delighting in his anguish.

Ousmane Dembele had just scored for Barcelona. Walker-Peters was the man he had just robbed on the halfway line following a Tottenham corner. The clock showed six minutes. And for a player making his Champions League debut in perhaps the most imposing venue in the sport, for once the old cliche about wanting the ground to open up and swallow him didn’t apply. From where he was lying, it probably felt like it already had.

What does a young footballer dream of the night before he makes his Champions League debut at the Camp Nou? Perhaps just the normal stuff: the modern athlete is a pretty implacable sort of character, as they go. Mauricio Pochettino wants his players to be fearless, imperturbable, balanced. Every game is the Champions League. Every stadium is the Camp Nou. Here, you could see it in Pochettino himself, stalking his technical area with the sort of affected dispassion that suggested he couldn’t care less where he was.

But the shadow of Barcelona isn’t like the shadow cast by any other team. For the generation who came of football-watching age when Pep Guardiola and Lionel Messi and Xavi and Andres Iniesta were remaking the game in their image, Barcelona weren’t just any other superclub, they were Ground Zero. Virtually every young footballer on the planet has played as them on Fifa, scrolled through the names on the roster, wondered aloud why Paulinho always seemed to be in the preset first XI.

So here’s the question. Even at a relatively sparse Camp Nou, even with seven first-team regulars rested, even with Messi on the bench: when you’re a 21-year-old third-choice right-back with just 12 minutes of Premier League action under your belt all season, can you possibly sit on the team bus the Camp Nou looms into the foreground, and pretend this is just any other game?

Perhaps not. You could sense a skittishness to Walker-Peters in those early stages, the uncertain movements of a player so furiously trying to suppress his emotions that he’s barely able to do anything else. Perhaps the most arresting thing in those early minutes here was how often he seemed to be falling over. He fell over trying to turn. He fell over trying to pass the ball. He fell over trying to intercept the ball. It was almost as if the magnitude of the occasion had temporarily cut the nerves running from his brain to his body, and the only thing keeping him upright was pure, coursing adrenaline.

He’s only 5ft 8in, and there were times when he looked like a lost child in a vast green garden. After the humiliation of the goal, a couple of his Tottenham team-mates had walked over to offer their consolation, but you can bet he didn’t hear a word. A few minutes later, he was booked for a clumsy foul on Philippe Coutinho. On Twitter, Spurs fans were beseeching Pochettino to take him off and bring on Eric Dier. The clock showed 19 minutes.

But Pochettino didn’t move a muscle. He simply kept pacing up and down that technical area, betraying the casual impassiveness of a man standing outside the Cineworld toilets waiting for his wife to emerge: the discarded popcorn crunching underneath his feet, Marvel plot holes running through his mind. He suspected, as did everyone, that if were to drag Walker-Peters off now, he ran the risk of destroying him, perhaps for good. Young footballers can survive injuries, suspensions, even scandal. They rarely survive being turned into a punchline.

And around the half-hour mark, something strange happened. Moussa Sissoko dropped a little deeper to help him out, and eventually Walker-Peters stopped screwing up. He stopped looking out of place. He made the odd intrepid dart down the right flank. He remembered his job, remembered the game-plan, remembered there was a game still to be won. He even managed to make a medium-to-high-difficulty, left-footed, off-balance pass without falling over. No Tottenham player had more touches in the first half. PSV Eindhoven had gone 1-0 up at the San Siro. Things were looking up.

Then, around 10 minutes into the second half, Walker-Peters was flat out on the turf again. Only this time, there was no time to stop and admire the view. He had just appeared out of nowhere and dived full-length to pull off a brilliant block, just as Coutinho looked certain to put Barcelona 2-0 up. The ball was still in play. And so were Tottenham.

Walker-Peters was substituted not long after that. Erik Lamela replaced him as Tottenham shifted to a more attacking setup. With the coast clear, Ernesto Valverde now felt it was safe to bring on Messi, now the threat of a career-ending KWP-inspired humiliation had passed. And yet as Tottenham battled their way to a 1-1 draw, Walker-Peters could sit in contentment on the bench, in the knowledge that on the biggest night of his career, his redemption was complete. Cost a goal, saved a goal. As a ledger for your Champions League debut, you’d probably take that.

“You need to trust young players,” Pochettino said on the eve of this game. “We don’t have doubts about Kyle. To play in Camp Nou will make him strong, stronger than before. He will be a success, for sure.” And time will tell whether Pochettino’s words bear out, whether Walker-Peters can edge aside Kieran Trippier and Serge Aurier and forge a gilded career at the top level.

But one thing is for certain: his chances are a good deal better now than if Pochettino had subbed him after half an hour. At full-time, as Tottenham’s qualification was confirmed, he took to the field with his elated team-mates and applauded the travelling Spurs fans penned in right at the top of the stadium, six tiers up. They shook their fists at him, and he shook his back at them. And you suspect that for a few fleeting seconds, it was the most beautiful view he had ever seen in his life.