Madrid

Finally, there will be football in La Liga this weekend after the players’ union and the top two division’s clubs worked out some of their differences and the strike was called off.

Now, we can concentrate on what’s happening on the pitch rather than behind-the-scenes but once again it looks like being a two-horse race in Spain between current champions Barcelona and their eternal rivals Real Madrid.

Long gone are the days when the likes of Valencia, Atletico Madrid and Deportivo La Coruna, the only other teams apart from the two Spanish giants to triumph in the last 20 years, could contemplate upsetting the status quo.

The only time in the last seven years when anybody has eased themselves between Barca and Real was when Villarreal finished second in 2007-08.

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The four-year soap opera of Cesc Fabregas returning to his boyhood club Barcelona looks finally to be coming to an end.

It now seems pertinent to ask: what happens once he's signed on the dotted line for last season's winners of La Liga and the Champions League?

Going from being Arsenal captain to sitting on the Barca bench seems the most likely answer.

Despite his eagerness to secure his exit from the Emirates Stadium ever since Spain lifted the World Cup last summer, with the image of him donning a Barca shirt in the victory parade having haunted him for the last 12 months, most pundits in Spain believe that his price tag of around 40 million euros (£35m) will still not make him an automatic first choice at the Nou Camp.

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Ask any Spaniard who Barcelona should be most afraid of when they face Manchester United on Saturday, and the most likely answer is not Wayne Rooney or the hugely admired Ryan Giggs but the man they call Chicharito.

"Hugo Sanchez was one of the best goal scorers in Mexican football history and during his time in Madrid he was a nightmare for Barcelona. Now, the son of one of his former team-mates could be the man to beat Barcelona," wrote the Spanish football magazine Don Balon a week ago.

No regular watcher of the Premier League needs me to tell you why Barca should fear Javier Hernandez - the offspring of former Mexico striker Javier Hernandez Gutierrez - when he's on the field.

The debate in Spain about who Sir Alex Ferguson will field at Wembley sees almost every pundit believing Barca stand a better chance of beating United if the Premier League champions opt for the more conservative 4-5-1 formation, with Rooney as the sole front man to start with.

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