Antoine Griezmann had watched the best and wanted to do what they do. And so, when the ball came to him just to the right side of the area 50 minutes into his Camp Nou debut for Barcelona, he did. Pausing for a moment, he looked up and curled it into the corner, bending past the goalkeeper’s hand and in by the post. If the shot was familiar, the foot wasn’t. “I see Messi do it in training and I copied him,” the Frenchman said afterwards. Beaten in Bilbao on the opening night, Barcelona had been 1-0 down to Betis, darkness descending, doubts deepening, judgments served and sentences signed, but now he’d scored twice to lead them into the light. All the pressure, gone. And a little more emulation to come.

When he scored the first, sliding in to volley Sergi Roberto’s delivery, Griezmann had clenched his fists, booted the ball into the air, and headed back to the centre, letting it out and urging them on. He’d promised a special celebration for his first Camp Nou goal, saying he had a surprise for them, but with the game in the balance the time wasn’t right, not yet; when he got his second, 2-1 up, on course for a victory which changed everything, it was. “If I have to say sorry, I’ll do it on the pitch,” he’d insisted at his presentation, aware that he hadn’t exactly arrived with everyone’s blessing. By 10.15pm on Sunday night he’d done that, forgiveness granted fast. Time to fulfil a promise. He’d been planning this for a while.

“I can’t do it alone,” Griezmann said after two goals and an assist had given Barcelona a 5-2 win, after a performance in which, without Messi, Luis Suárez or Ousmane Dembélé, without Neymar either, he had taken centre stage and taken responsibility too, and he couldn’t do this alone either. Aviv Levy Shoshan was standing in the corner at the north end in a blue bib, holding a small metal container. Griezmann knew where to find him and, as he headed over, Aviv took the lid off and poured the contents into the striker’s hands. Hundreds of tiny red and blue stars, Barcelona confetti. Griezmann stood before the fans, and the cameras, and tossed them in the air, opening his arms wide, red and blue falling round him like purple rain.

It was nowhere near his best celebration – that will forever be the day he leapt over the advertising boards and climbed behind the wheel of a car parked on the running track at Anoeta, teammates excitedly piling in, waving and grinning like they’d just won Family Fortunes – but that was the front pages done. It also meant something. “How nice it is to score at the Camp Nou. Thanks for your support, culés. May our colours shine!” he tweeted. Obsessed with the NBA, inspiration had come from his real idol: LeBron James – the man he’d likened Messi to when he arrived, and the man he had previously compared with Cristiano Ronaldo. “I liked his ritual and wanted to imitate it,” he said.

The routine ran like this: before games, LeBron would dust his hands with chalk and then, standing in front of the fans, throw it in the air in a cloud of white, like the puff of smoke from a magician. It became a signature move, iconic, part of the pre-match liturgy, a signal that it was time.

LeBron said he didn’t really know why it became what it became, but he saw that it got everyone going and last night it got everyone going too. Not least Griezmann himself. If the cover of El Mundo Deportivo went for “Festival Griezmann”, Sport led on “Take off”. Inside, Marca led on “Barcelona have a new hero”. “In Griezmann’s hands,” said AS. “It’s a special day for Griezmann,” Ernesto Valverde said.

He needed it. They all did. This is not the first time that Griezmann has copied LeBron. In 2018 he filmed a documentary, produced by Gerard Piqué’s company and called The Decision, in which he agonises over whether or not to join Barcelona from Atlético, just as LeBron had done when he left Cleveland for Miami. LeBron went; Griezmann didn’t at first, although everything was set so that he could a year later for €120m. The delay didn’t please everyone; some didn’t like the documentary and felt Griezmann had played Barcelona, insistent that he shouldn’t be given a second chance. How could they sign someone who’d turned them down – and made a TV show about it? Some supporters were unimpressed; some in the squad were too. Even after he arrived, there was the hint of rejection in the way Barcelona pursued Neymar, in the way Messi and Suárez would like the Brazilian back.

At his presentation, Griezmann said he could win them over with assists. If that was a recognition of hierarchy, an awareness of the care with which he may need to tread, Sunday’s comment about copying Messi probably is too. And, unpacked, it poses questions which remain. This performance was hugely important, a release, but it doesn’t resolve them; the context will not always be the same. How does Griezmann fit with Messi and Suárez? Where does he fit with them? And if Neymar does come, what then? That felt unlikely here – inevitably, more wondered ‘what for?’ than before – but it’s no guarantee. How will he respond when it’s not on him? When he doesn’t have the same freedom, his natural spaces off the front or the right likely occupied by the man he called “football’s LeBron”? Will he lead? Will he be allowed to?

Here, he did. Injured, Messi and Suárez sat in the front row with their sons watching him. And the rest. As Sport’s headline had it, led by Griezmann, they watched Barcelona take off. They saw the enthusiasm, the optimism return. They saw Barcelona press, high and hard, in a way they hadn’t for months. They saw brilliant goals – both of Betis’s were tasty too, although they probably didn’t find the fact that they were scored by Fekir and Moron as funny as we do – and good news all over the pitch. Not just Griezmann but Sergio Busquets and Sergi Roberto, Gerard Piqué playing his 500th game, seven homegrown players, Carles Pérez scoring on his debut, coolly sliding the ball in. And Ansu Fati.

“What were you doing at 16?” someone asked on Sunday. Pretending to be 18, mostly. Ansu was running on the Camp Nou pitch, eyes wide, high-fiving people, smiling – the youngest Barcelona debutant for almost 80 years and the second youngest ever.

Ansu arrived in Herrera, Seville, aged three, from Guinea Bissau. Barcelona signed him from Sevilla aged 11. A broken leg saw him miss six months. He’d never even played in the B team before and had trained just three times with the first team. And yet here he was: at 16 years, nine months and 25 days. He hadn’t eaten and hadn’t slept, his dad told Cadena Ser radio. When he said he was joining the first team, the family thought he was joking. But now 10 of them sat in the Camp Nou, watching him run on. And if he looked overwhelmed then, as if this wasn’t really happening, once he got there he played. And how. Quick, assured, willing. “Daring,” Valverde called him. One run and shot almost saw him begin with a goal, joy accompanying every move, like all was right with the world. And at the end, he didn’t want to let go. “I stayed out on the pitch because I couldn’t believe it and I wanted to enjoy the moment,” he admitted. When eventually he headed inside, Messi was waiting to embrace him.

“I can die a happy man,” his dad said.

Talking points

• “Anecdótico,” Julen Lopetegui called it, and he was right. But still, two weeks into the season, his Sevilla side are top. Along with Atlético Madrid, they’re the only team in Spain to have won both games. This time, it was 1-0 at recently-promoted Granada, whose manager Diego Martínez insisted: “We looked them in the eye.” They did too, but there’s something about Sevilla. Not perfect, not yet, but maybe something is building.

• Gareth Southgate watched the cricket in his hotel and then headed south to Leganés, taking up his seat in the directors’ box with a notebook in hand, and watching another assured performance from Kieran Trippier and another 1-0 win for Atlético. Southgate will be back often. And why not? While Leganés might not be that lovely, this is a great excuse to see Spain and a player who has impressed so far. Trippier began the move from which João Félix provided a very neat assist for Vitolo to get the winner late in the second half – just when Atlético were starting to struggle. “We’re not the ‘people’s team’ any more because we have a stadium like that and we spent €126m on a player, but morally, emotionally, we still are,” said Diego Simeone.

• Celta are fun. Valencia aren’t. There’s a crisis coming.

• “Back to the past,” the headline on the cover of Marca said after Real Madrid fielded a side made up entirely of players who were there at least three years ago, despite having spent €300m this summer. Oh, and after Real Madrid looked much like they did last year: lots of the ball but too few real chances. Those that did come were wasted. James and Bale, the two men Zidane wanted out, were back in the team and everyone looked the other way, whistled (or, more to the point, didn’t whistle), and acted like none of that stuff had ever happened. Yet despite them, and them alone, seeming to take it in turns to take shots in the first half, the inevitable didn’t happen. No narrative here. Instead, Madrid slipped, Valladolid grew and while Karim Benzema scored the opener, Sergi Guardiola got an impressive and possibly deserved equaliser with a couple of minutes left at the Bernabéu. The move started with Madrid losing possession. “We should have just hoofed it,” Zidane moaned.

• Speaking of record-breaking kids: Martin Odegaard scored for Real Sociedad.

• 0-1, 2-1 (and those two were penalties), 0-0, 1-1, 1-0, 1-1. 0-0, 0-1, 0-1 … it wasn’t just Griezmann and Barcelona who needed that on Sunday; pretty much everyone else did too. A pretty dull weekend finally got a game to rescue it. Goals scored in open play at the Camp Nou: seven. Goals scored in open play in all the other games: nine. “We lacked football,” José Bordalás said after Getafe’s 1-1 draw with Athletic; “it wasn’t a game of excessive chances,” said Athletic’s Gaizka Garitano. Which summed it up quite nicely. As for Osasuna-Eibar, that was “unsmokeable”, they said.

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Granada 0–1 Sevilla, Levante 2–1 Villarreal, Osasuna 0–0 Eibar, Madrid 1–1 Valladolid, Celta 1–0 Valencia, Getafe 1–1 Athletic, Alavés 0–0 Espanyol, Mallorca 0–1 Real Sociedad, Leganés 0–1 Atlético, Barcelona 5–2 Betis.

Photograph: Rodrigo Jimenez/EFE