Guardiolacan prove his point
That’s how good Barcelona have been since Pep Guardiola took over. In nearly three seasons Barcelona have established themselves as the biggest club in the world and won tens of millions of new fans. But these achievements have been earned with relentless hard work and right now we are watching a team that has been pushed beyond its limits.
When Barcelona destroyed Madrid at the Bernabeu last December, it was almost impossible to see how Madrid could ever beat them. The match had more in common with a bullfight than a true sporting event, it was only the semblance of a contest. Barcelona’s toreros were too fast, too nimble, too clever. Not only could Madrid not open them up, they couldn’t even get near the ball. The frustration reduced them to kicks and howls of impotent rage.
What changed between then and now? Barcelona played 32 games in 16 weeks. Every game with the same approach, attacking relentlessly from the front, chasing and pressing and closing down. Being the best team in the world week after week is a physical and psychological grind.
Barcelona kept winning, but every victory whittled a little more off them. On Saturday, we saw the toreros weren’t quite fast enough to dodge and weave through Madrid’s determined press. The bull, sensing weakness, moved in to crush them.
Madrid have played only four fewer games than Barcelona since losing to them in December, but their squad has been built for energy, resilience and strength. The team they fielded at Camp Nou contained six players over six feet tall, and where Barcelona’s side included veterans like Xavi and Puyol and rookies like Tello and Thiago, Madrid’s 11 were all men in the prime of their careers.
This Madrid team plays the Mourinho power football we’ve seen winning trophies at Porto, Chelsea and Inter. Big, strong guys who know their jobs, playing for each other, carrying out their orders to the letter.
It’s simple, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Mourinho isn’t interested in revolutionising the game. He only wants to win.
Guardiola is more ambitious. With some of his decisions over the last few weeks, he seems dangerously close to the point where ambition shades into hubris.
He says his ideal is 11 midfielders, no specialists. Everyone playing the same way all over the pitch. This reasoning leads him to the bold idea of playing Javier Mascherano, a five foot eight inch defensive midfielder, at centre-back.
Anyone who would sweep away tradition should consider whether there might be some deeper wisdom embedded in these conventions, whether they might represent the accumulation of the lessons of decades of experience, whether they might be there for a reason. Those who say the perfect team would consist of 11 midfielders should think about why it is that specialist positions evolved.
For instance, the received wisdom is that it helps to have central defenders who are a little bit taller than the average player. The reason why was illustrated in the first minute of Barcelona’s game against Chelsea, when little Mascherano was caught out by a high ball and almost let Didier Drogba in to score.
Of course, you could argue that this only happened once and that Mascherano has not, in fact, been caught out by many high balls. But there is more to playing centre-half than heading away high balls.
Are we really saying all the time central defenders spend training to become central defenders is effectively wasted, since any good player should immediately be able to pick up the demands of another position even if he originally trained to play somewhere else?
Edmund Burke, a hero to conservatives for more than 200 years, is probably not one of Guardiola’s favourite philosophers. A fierce critic of the French revolution and the chaotic social upheaval it produced, Burke wrote of tradition, which he called “prejudice“, that “it is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit.”
Burke is arguing that automatic habits of thought help focus the mind in moments of crisis, leading to swift action rather than ineffectual dithering. He could easily have been talking about football.
Specifically, he could have been talking about Chelsea’s goal against Barcelona last Wednesday night.
Frank Lampard robbed Lionel Messi and passed diagonally left to Ramires. Mascherano’s automatic response in such a situation is to tear towards the man in possession like a homing missile. This is what he has grown up doing as a defence-shielding midfielder, it’s what he has been trained to do.
Too late, he remembered he was playing centre-half, and his job was to make sure Drogba was not unmarked at the far post. He scrambled to change direction, but the ball was already on its way to Drogba, who bundled it in to win the match for Chelsea.
Seeing a predictable mess like this unfold raises questions about Guardiola’s judgment. He is in danger of becoming the coach who had a forward that scored 60+ goals in a season and still didn’t win a major title. Is it not a little too ambitious to think you can redefine how the game is played? Wouldn’t it be better just to keep it simple and focus on winning, like Mourinho? The answer is emphatically no. Mourinho is a great coach, but if all coaches were like him, the game would soon be as calcified and ritualistic as the bullfight. We need innovators like Guardiola to keep pushing the boundaries. There is something of the mad scientist about him and his ambition to prove everything we thought we knew about the game is false is certainly hubristic, but wondering whether that hubris will get its comeuppance keeps us watching. If Barcelona can summon the energy to defeat Chelsea they will have more than three weeks to prepare for the final. Win that, and Guardiola will have proved his point.
