It’s late August 2014, and the Spanish Football League spits out the fixture list for season 2014-15.

El Clasico – Real Madrid versus Barcelona – is scheduled for Round 9, Saturday October 25, at the home of the Whites, the Galacticos: the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.

Whether by the workings of the football gods or coincidence, this game happened to be the first match that Luis Suarez (serial biter, notorious bad boy, and perhaps the greatest Uruguayan to ever lace on a boot) would be eligible to play for his new club FC Barcelona, after serving his suspension for mistaking Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder for a sirloin steak in the World Cup.

I lay in bed that August night, reading the Real Madrid news articles on Google as I do two or three times a day, and my fantasy kicked into overdrive.

Being about as crazy as a supporter can be, living approximately 17,684 kilometres away from the team I grew up being fanatical about, I had dreamt of travelling to watch Real Madrid play in an official match.

El Clasico is the biggest club football game on Earth, with an average television audience of between 400 and 500 million every time they play.

This was it. My personal circumstances allowed it, I had flexible employment, and so I booked my plane tickets and started organising to make my dream come true.

I was finally going to go. No match would be bigger. No match would be better.

I flew out of Sydney at 8.30pm on Sunday October 19. I was going on my own, as on such short notice none of my friends could afford to take time off from work or leave their girlfriends, but I didn’t mind in the slightest. It was my dream, and my adventure.

I still had not even bought my ticket to the game. I was foolish in this one aspect, as I had thought that they were ludicrously overpriced online and that I could scalp one for cheaper once I got to Madrid. I got there on the Monday, with tickets having gone on sale to the general public at the stadium on the Saturday before I arrived. The lady at the stadium box office told me in perfect English that they had sold out in less than three hours. It did not surprise me.

However, there were people selling tickets everywhere. I bought one from a very enterprising gentleman for a wallet-pounding 500 euro. It wasn’t a bad seat, two bays up, in between the halfway line and the 18-yard box, but they would have sold at the box office for 150 euro and were selling online from Australia for 300 euro.

I had made an error in judgement, but there was no backing out now.

The sheer size of the Bernabeu is astounding, however on the outside it is surprisingly simple, with no shiny metal structural elements or changing light schemes that are common to many modern European stadia. However, once undertaking the tour inside, you are overwhelmed by its grandeur and elegance. Once again, it is simple, but by no means understated. The club has definitely done its work to let you know that you are in the stomach of the most celebrated and decorated stadium in world football.

The stadium tour alone takes over an hour to complete, without stopping to take photos or read anything. That is just walking through. A large part of this is owed to the size of the trophy room. Housing everything from trophies the club has won, down to the different club crests that have changed over its 112 year history, it will take you approximately 30 minutes to just wander through.

This is not due to clutter though – it was named the most successful club of the 20th century by FIFA for a reason. There are European trophies, league titles, individual player awards, even personalised boots worn by players such as David Beckham, Roberto Carlos and Zinedine Zidane. If ever in Madrid, this stadium tour is unmissable.

Back to the game.

Besides Luis Suarez’s impending return, there were many other subplots, as there always are to these games. Barcelona had won all their preceding eight matches in the league, and not even conceded a goal. Madrid, after making a stuttering start to the campaign, where they had lost 4-2 to Real Sociedad after leading 2-0 and suffered a loss to cross-city rivals Atletico Madrid, had started to regain some form.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who for those of you living under a rock, is the club’s talisman and the best player in the world, had started scoring goals for fun. In the first eight weeks of the season, Ronaldo had already scored more goals on his own than 81 of the top 91 teams in Europe. His goal sequence read as such: 1-1-3-4-1-3-2. That’s correct. Only seven games. He missed the loss at Real Sociedad and still had 15 goals to his name by Round 9.

So the stage was set. It was billed as the immovable object (Barcelona) against the unstoppable force (Madrid).

Barcelona were four points ahead of the Blancos coming into the game. In the Spanish league a draw for either of these two teams is considered a disaster for their title aspirations, so if Barca won and opened up a seven-point gap, it would be as good as game over for Real’s title tile, even as early as October.

I left my hotel early to get to the Chamartin district, the affluent financial suburb of Madrid where the Bernabeu resides, and by 2:30pm I was having a drink with the locals. There were tourists everywhere, people from Asia, Europe, and British, however I did not see any Australians. Still, I didn’t leave Sydney to see Australians. I came to see Real Madrid!

The streets around the stadium had a carnival atmosphere, with people chanting and setting off flares. My personal favourite went a little something like this: “Puta Barca, Puta Barca, Eh! Eh!” You can imagine what it meant.

At 3:30pm, the team bus arrived at the stadium. The hysteria was crazy, I had never seen anything like it. Police escorts, television helicopters above, and people in apartment buildings hanging off their balconies surrounding the stadium. Once the team bus drove into the depths of the stadium, the sense that showtime was near descended upon the crowd, and the masses began moving for the gates.

Once inside, I was truly overwhelmed by the sheer passion of the supporters. 80,000 blue seats were hidden underneath oceans of white jerseys, all chanting with the the match still over half an hour away. I am no multilingual expert, but through talents I picked up as a toddler I imitated the simple chants and joined in. Spanish was fun, especially as a Madridista exalting Real Madrid and disgracing Barcelona.

The cheer when the Real Madrid team came onto the pitch to warm up made my spine tingle. The jeers and boos when Barcelona came out to warm up was just as palpable. I could see the humour when the stadium sprinklers turned on on the half of the field where the Barcelona squad was warming up (although I don’t think I would have found it as comedic had the circumstances been reversed). It was the home team’s way of letting the enemy know that they had had enough time to warm up, and to not get too comfortable.

The naming of the team lists was predictable, massive cheers for our heroes clad in white, and boos and whistles for the Catalan rivals. However, only here did it dawn on me just how much Ronaldo is idolised and made to feel like Real Madrid is not only his team, but his club. While the rest of the team lists were read in numerical order starting at 1 and moving up, CR7’s name was left until last.

It allowed him to have the biggest cheer. The stadium announcer first read his number, 7, and then said his first name, Cristiano, and the crowd responded with a stadium-rumbling “Ronaldooooo!”

It was then I realised how much he was loved and looked up to, and I truly believed that those rumours linking him with a return to Manchester United were folly.

At 5pm, with all the formalities out of the way, it was showtime.

After just three minutes, the returning biter Luis Suarez sent in a dangerous cross from the right, and Neymar put it in the bottom corner.

I had watched hundreds of Real Madrid games back home, and two of those I remember clearly – a 6-2 humiliation, and a 5-0 drubbing, both at the hands of these very opponents. My heart was in my throat. All I could do at that stage was pray to God that I had not flown all this way to see Real Madrid get pumped. I cannot remember how many times I did the sign of the cross. We had not even had a touch of the ball, and they were already 1-0 up.

However, I am proud to say, the entire stadium got behind the team and within 10 minutes we had started to level out the match, with Toni Kroos and Luka Modric, our two central midfielders, starting to sway the game in our favour. It was still on a knife’s edge though.

Karim Benzema, our unsung French hero playing at the top of the eleven, had a goal denied by the woodwork. Then it was back up the other end, and our eternal thorn in the proverbial, Leo Messi, had two almost certain goals stopped by Iker Casillas.

The shot-stopper, our captain who had endured the most turbulent 18 months of his career, was back! He truly kept us in the game, because if they had scored there, it was finished as a contest. 2-0 down against Barcelona is impossible to come back from. Andres Iniesta was majestic that first 20 minutes – as a Barca player, he impressed me the most.

That survival spurred us on to attack harder. We kept building pressure, until just after the half-hour mark, Marcelo, the Brazilian left back, went to send in a low cross in the box, and a sliding Gerard Pique caught it with his hand. The referee was right there, and pointed to the spot.

Cometh the hour, Cometh the man. Up steps Ronaldo, chest puffed, swaggering confidently. You just knew he was going to score the penalty. 1-1.

The rest of the first half ebbed and flowed back and forth, and the ref blew the half-time whistle sending both teams into the dressing room all square.

If only we knew what Carlo Ancelotti said to the lads at half time, because the team that came out for the second half was rampant. It only took three minutes after the restart for Pepe, the Portuguese centre back, to head home from a corner. The stadium went crazy. We were ahead for the first time in the game, but as the players marched back to their own half, they knew it was only job half done.

Barcelona still attacked, however in an unusual Barcelona way. They weren’t their slick attacking selves, and this was due to the dominance of our midfield pairing Kroos and Modric. They set the rhythm of the match, controlling the tempo.

Soon enough, Madrid had broken again. In a typical fast break, Isco (playing the game of his life), stole the ball on the sideline near the halfway line after a mix-up between Iniesta and Javier Mascherano, and released Ronaldo, who galloped into the penalty area to tee up Benzema and seal the game.

The stadium erupted, and from then on, Real simply put on an exhibition to see out the match. There could have been more goals scored, however I was joyous to see the team win and when the final whistle went, it was a party.

Leaving the stadium was like stepping out of the frying pan into the fire. The supporters outside had already swarmed all the nearby bars and restaurants, and you could hear chants going off everywhere. I knew that catching a train right now would be a nightmare, so I stuck around at one of the supporters’ bars and revelled in the atmosphere.

I knew this was a once in a lifetime experience, and I made the most of it.

Hala Madrid!