Perhaps the rumors of Real Madrid's demise were greatly exaggerated. It was easy to look at the club's ongoing war of the words with La Liga president Javier Tebas, as well as the two domestic losses that left the club six points behind Barcelona heading into Sunday's first Clásico of the season, and come to the conclusion that Real was a club searching for solid ground. However, it was apparently just as foolishly easy to forget that Real Madrid has a lot of good soccer players. Sunday's match, a tense affair that ended with a late Kylian Mbappé winner and a scoreline of 2-1 to the visitors from the Spanish capital, was a good reminder that Real Madrid is never dead until it is dead.

Real is more than capable of beating Barcelona on any given Clásico. That doesn't make the ask any easier, but as Paris Saint-Germain showed midweek, Barcelona isn't unbeatable, and it's not a surprise that José Mourinho, one of the biggest tormentors of the blaugrana, figured out a way to negate Barcelona's strengths and prey on its weaknesses. Despite Barcelona's possession advantage (62-38 percent) and shot supremacy (18 to 10) on Sunday, and despite Mbappé's opener, which was as much lucky as good, this was a sturdy performance from Real Madrid, and one that could serve as a blueprint for how to attack Barcelona the rest of the season.

Mourinho himself said it best after the match, specifically pointing to the work that Aurélien Tchouaméni, Jude Bellingham, and Eduardo Camavinga put in from the midfield. The Special One said that he told Camavinga as he was substituting on in the 80th minute that Tchouaméni was covering the backline and so the other midfielders had to attack into the space left behind by Barcelona's offensively minded midfield:

I told Camavinga that Tchouaméni will stay low and protect the defense, and you will attack SPACE.

It's difficult for any attackers to attack space against Barcelona, the only solution is to do it with your MIDFIELDERS.

When your attackers do it, Barca's defense is prepared and coached for that, and your attackers end up being offside, or the pass ends up being cut by Joan Garcia.

The solution is to use midfielders like Camavinga and Bellingham to break that line, and it worked.

(I had to leave Madrid Zone's capitalization intact; I wouldn't want us to FORGET THINGS related to their aggregation style.)

In practice, this put a lot of pressure on Tchouaméni and the Real backline to control Barcelona's otherworldly attackers. However, Mourinho wisely ceded possession so that most of the clashes between Barcelona and the Real defense came from slower-paced plays, negating the terrifying, high speed counter-attacking threat that Barcelona has shown under Hansi Flick. Even when Barcelona did get those chances, Tchouaméni was unbelievably in snuffing them out; Barcelona's only goal came from Bernardo Silva losing Pedro outside the box, and the Barcelona playmaker found Raphinha for a nutmeg goal through Bellingham's legs. In the slower build-ups, it was up to the backline, and Marc Cucurella especially was a wall, constantly frustrating Lamine Yamal into bad decisions and worse dribbles.

With that covered and Barcelona either dribbling or shooting into one or more Real defenders, Mourinho's men could do exactly what he said: Run and expose the Barcelona backline that is often the weakest part of the side. Both Real goals came from such moves. For the first, Silva found Cucurella all alone on the left flank, and the Spaniard hit a perfect backline-skipping pass to Yan Diomandé. The Ivorian cut the ball across but mishit it to Barcelona center back Gerard Martín. Unfortunately for Barcelona, though he was in position to clear the ball, Martín panicked under the pressure of the Real attack, and he either mishit or simply didn't see Mbappé right next to him: his attempted clearance went directly to the Frenchman, who deflected it in for his 99th goal for Real.

The second goal involved no luck whatsoever. Barcelona lost the ball in Real's half, and Bellingham pulled off a ridiculous bit of skill first to protect the ball and then to hit a perfect backheel drag to Camavinga. The Frenchman then played a long-range give-and-go with Arda Güler. Credit to Güler for hitting a perfect ball as Camavinga did exactly what Mourinho said to do and attacked into SPACE, but this goal came from the divine touch Camavinga laid on the ball, getting Pau Cubarsí, the other Barcelona center back, to whiff horribly. One cutback across to an onrushing Mbappé later, and Real's no. 10 had his 100th goal for the club, and Real Madrid had its signature win of the young season.

Before this past week, Barcelona looked like the best team in Europe, but both PSG and Real have shown that the defensive issues from the last few years under Flick remain; they have only been masked by an increase in production from a truly fearsome attack. If teams can weather those attacks and slow them down, then Barcelona is ripe for the picking. Sure, not every team has a Tchouaméni to block the attacks, or a Camavinga-Bellingham duo to shuttle the ball up with brutal force, or even an Mbappé to finish two of his three shot attempts. But Real has those, and while Barcelona might be better built to win La Liga thanks to its suffocating style, the victors showed on Sunday that it has just as much talent and ability to beat any team in the world, even away from home.

While I could point to this being much more of a must-win for Real than Barcelona—a Barca win or even a draw would have tilted the title race squarely in its favor, but now Real is only three points back—it was a Clásico, and those are all must-wins in the eyes of everyone involved. Mourinho understands that the points matter more than the style, but unlike some of his uglier performances in the early 2010s, this was not a melee. Sure, Real played conservatively to choke the oxygen out of Barcelona's vaunted attack, but there was no fear in going the other way, and thanks to some luck and some individual master class performances, Real Madrid walked into a hostile Camp Nou and walked out with a deserved three points. Not bad for a club in crisis.