:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/23511643/181572155.0.jpg)
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. It's the line everybody knows from the movie just about everybody wishes hadn't been made, and it's been used by so many people in so many places it mostly plays as stale parody. But still. We had thought we were done with this topic. At least for a little while. Unfortunately, the talkative nature of others and the there's nothing to talk about aside from Steven Gerrard's injections nature of the international break left us little choice.
So. Pepe Reina and Barcelona. Though at least this time around it's not Reina himself suggesting he'd been ready to stay and fight for Liverpool this season and been kept in the dark about the club's plans to both bring in a new goalkeeper and then to send him out on loan. And it's not his father contradicting him by saying Reina had in fact planned to head to Barcelona all along but had those plans fall through when Victor Valdes decided to stay on another year before heading to Monaco.
This time out, it's Barcelona making noise about the possibility Reina's future could include a return to the club whose youth system he came up through alongside Valdes, though vice-president Josep Bartomeu did more than just confirm Reina was a target. He also confirmed that Borussia Monchengladbach's Marc-Andre ter Stegen, aka pretty much everybody's next greatest goalkeeper in the history of ever, was on the radar. And moreover that they only plan to buy one new 'keeper and not two as some had speculated.
"We are looking for a goalkeeper," said Bartomeu in an interview on Catalan radio station RAC1. "We started looking when [Valdes] told us that he didn’t want to renew his contract. The plan is to announce who will be our new goalkeeper in January, when Valdes makes his exit official. Ter Stegen and Reina are among the few candidates still on our list but we intend to sign just one goalkeeper and not two, [but Reina is] on the list and we haven’t ruled him out."
January, then. In January, all this talk about just what's going to happen down the road for Pepe Reina will stop. Unless Barcelona announce another Catalan bank has given them the cash to splash on ter Stegen, in which case things get even worse. Though given Barcelona in recent years don't tend to like to splash the cash on anything back of midfield, there just might be a chance.