Real Madrid brought to their knees by Barcelona

The clasico started with Sergio Busquets producing a drag-back that left Gareth Bale going past him like a cartoon character off a cliff after four seconds and ended with Luis Suarez sitting Keylor Navas down and gently lifting the ball into the net after 74 minutes: Real Madrid's goalkeeper, like his team-mates, on his knees and at Barcelona's mercy.

Two images that encapsulated this match and these teams and between which lay dozens of images more, revealing portraits of the clasico, like little glimpses of the truth. Andres Iniesta’s ovation from the Bernabeu and the first goal, say. Or the second, or the third. Or maybe even the fifth goal that never was.

It was 4-0 and it would end that way but still Barcelona attacked, Gerard Pique particularly. He described being whistled at the Bernabeu as a "symphony" and was desperate for it to close with a rousing finale, conducting the orchestra to a crescendo, cymbals crashing triumphantly. Instead, it closed with more whistles. Not for him this time but for them, Madrid's supporters attacking their players and president. They had armed the masses; now their weapons were turned upon them. Before the game, fans had held aloft white cards for a huge mosaic; at the end they used them as makeshift tissues for a panolada, that classic hanky-waving Spanish protest.

Two minutes earlier, alone in the area, Pique had watched Munir shoot wide. “Next time leave it to me,” he joked later; at the time, he wasn’t laughing. That the Madrid fans were angry, calling for the president’s head (but not, despite reports, that of Rafa Benitez) and whistling their own players, was a measure of how comprehensively their team had been beaten by their greatest rivals and how hard it was to witness this again; that Pique was angry was a measure of it too. That disappointment at only winning 4-0, was momentarily shared by some cules, and that one Madrid-supporting columnist even gloated “next time, sunshine”, ultimately only deepened the humiliation.

A Barcelona soci who loves to wind up their rivals, who encouraged team-mates to take a lap of honour after the European Super Cup, “so they can see us in Madrid” and who has been whistled during Spain games because of a joke cracked at the expense of a footballer from Portugal and a singer from Colombia, Pique more than anyone wanted to score and he, perhaps more than anyone, knows the significance of a clasico manita or little hand, the symbolism of a result Barcelona achieved in 1974, 1994 and 2010 - the night he raised his hand, a goal for each finger. He knows that five would have been historic.

There weren't five, but four was historic too. Four goals. At the Bernabeu. Against a Madrid side that had a fortnight to prepare and every player available, Bale, Ronaldo, Benzema, Ramos and Modric all excused international duty. With Neymar flying back from Brazil just two days before, with Rakitic not fully fit and Iniesta carrying a knock. With Javier Mascherano carried off in the first half and without Leo Messi. It was eloquent that he could come on and enjoy watching an hour, not have to rescue his team, strolling but still too quick, getting more touches in 33 minutes than any of Madrid's creative players got in 90: more than Ronaldo, Bale, Benzema, James or Isco.

"They were better than us in everything," Emilio Butragueno said. Asked about his line-up, if it even was his line-up, Rafa Benitez admitted: "It didn't work." There was not much else he could say, he added. Not this time.

“We must be doing something right if Atletico didn’t put four past us,” he had snapped after he was criticised for his approach in the Madrid derby, the “unlike under Ancelotti” going without saying.

But now Barcelona had put four past them. “The numbers are spectacular,” he has said repeatedly. But they are not: 12 weeks in, Madrid have fewer points at this stage than at any time in a decade.

When he arrived, he was like the step-father they didn’t want and most still don’t. Nor, frankly, does he much want them.

Real Madrid is Benitez's club, or it was. Not any more, or perhaps that should say: not yet. As one of his former players put it this weekend: "This did not look like a Benitez team at all."

Sergio Ramos was in the wrong place at the wrong time almost all the time. Benzema was just not there. Something has happened to Toni Kroos, a picture of indolence. Danilo was calamitous again. Bale and Ronaldo were irrelevant.

Luka Modric, perhaps the only player with a truly collective conscience, admitted that they were "not on the pitch", "not a team" and noted: "It's not the first time it has happened."

Which they were not and it is not. By contrast, this weekend Diego Simeone praised how Suarez, Neymar and Messi work together: "It is lovely to see," he said. Iniesta had talked about Barcelona "being themselves"; Madrid do not know what "themselves" is.

"This tastes like heavenly glory: it will go down in history," Luis Enrique said afterwards. What was once unthinkable is becoming familiar - in the last six years

Barcelona have beaten Madrid 6-2, 5-0 and now 4-0; they have won more than twice as many major titles; their league record at the Bernabeu over the last decade reads played 10, won five, aggregate score 22-18; and they knocked Madrid out of the Champions League too, winning 2-0 here - but that did not diminish the impact of this result. Not least because it did not diminish the nature of the performance.

When they look back, the headlines will still be there. “What a drubbing! A great match, a hammering, a humiliation,” said the cover of Sport. “A going over,” cheered El Mundo Deportivo. “Bravo, Barcelona!” ran el Periodico. AS’s cover said “Barcelona led Madrid a dance”; Marca’s cover said: “A ruinous Madrid succumb to Barcelona’s demolition”; El Pais’s cover said: “Barcelona humiliate Madrid”, and La Razon’s cover didn’t say anything, which kind of said it all. And although when they look back a raised hand will not, in the end, be the image, there will be others; moments that encapsulated their superiority, right from Busquets’s drag-back just four seconds in.

There’s the first goal, after just 10 minutes: the product of a move involving every outfield player touching the ball, 37 passes and almost two minutes, interrupted only by a single attempted clearance from Madrid, Ramos heading the ball out, ready for 20 more passes involving nine players and a perfect finish. There’s the second goal: an individual error from Modric which is in fact a systematic one, the Croat left un-warned and unassisted as Suarez closes in behind him, applying the kind of pressure Madrid never did.

Modric’s team-mates are miles away, the midfield utterly unoccupied, when Suarez takes it off him, Iniesta producing a sublime touch - just one of dozens - to maintain possession before scooping into Neymar’s path. And there’s Neymar leaving Danilo behind and finding Suarez, cleared off the line by Marcelo: the game’s best move.

There’s the hankies waving and the chants for Florentino Perez to resign while he, the president who said “I don’t know” when he was asked why he had sacked Ancelotti, shrugs down in the directors’ box as if to say “What am I supposed to do?”. Hiring a sporting director would be a start. Or the images that cameras kept capturing: Ronaldo grimacing and Benitez on the bench, writing something in his notebook.

“Shit,” presumably.

There’s the third goal: the touch from Neymar, the world’s best player over the last two months, and the finish from Iniesta, his first goal in more than 600 days, which was also scored here, in that astonishing 4-3.

There was another backheel from Neymar too, this time for Messi. There’s the celebration of the third on the touchline with Messi, still in his tracksuit, waiting to return, grinning in disbelief at the destruction unfolding before him, and the Bernabeu’s ovation for Iniesta, who Luis Enrique described as “world heritage”

- recognition of his brilliance but, like the ovation for Ronaldinho 10 years ago, also a punishment for their own players. Oh, and there’s a flying slide tackle from Iniesta too.

That one was clean; these ones weren't. There are Ramos's catalogue and the wild hack from Isco on Neymar, a picture of impotence that the fans cheered, conscious that most of the other players could not even be bothered to do that. There's Busquets being, well, Busquets: that drag-back was just the start. Of everything. There's Messi running away from three players to help create the fourth and the fact that the man who provides the final assist is Jordi Alba, the left-back. And then there's Suarez, ending it all. Navas and Real Madrid on their knees, at Barcelona's mercy. Where they had been from the beginning. Guardian News and Media