Camp Nou braces for Pep Guardiola’s homecoming
Friday’s draw, which paired the two favourites for this year’s competition, brought something many blaugrana fans and pundits had been equally wanting and fearing.
Guardiola the player was a loved homegrown midfielder. Pep the coach guided the team to 14 trophies in four seasons.
“Everyone knows how special it is for me and for my staff,” Guardiola said on Friday. “Barca was our life. But in the end, it’s only a game of football.”
For those involved on May 6, it will mean much more.
Although Barca were playing the Catalan city derby against Espanyol on Saturday afternoon, the first 10 pages of local sports paper Mundo Deportivo focused on the previous day’s draw.
“The return of Pep Guardiola to the Camp Nou will be special,” wrote MD’s Francesc Aguilar. “He is returning home to the club where he remains a member, and has done everything except sit on the opposition bench.
“It will be a reunion with the players with whom he won everything. There will be rivalry, but also affection.”
Those mixed feelings have already been evident. There remain some around the Camp Nou who wonder how Pep could twice, as both player and coach, have left ‘his’ club so abruptly.
The return is uncomfortable for the current Barca board, given their continuing enmity with previous president Joan Laporta, who remains a friend of Guardiola. The reaction of those players who won so much under Pep, especially Messi, will also be fascinating. Seven of the likely XI for the first leg remain from 2011/12, however Luis Enrique’s current team has a very different identity.
Tiki-taka symbol Xavi Hernandez has been displaced by the more athletic Ivan Rakitic in midfield. Messi is no longer the ‘false nine’ around which the attack revolves, but part of a ‘trident’ alongside Neymar and Suarez.
Saturday’s Mundo Deportivo had a ‘10 reasons for optimism’ feature, with ‘well-worked tactical alternatives to try and surprise’ at number five. “Luis Enrique’s Barca are different in their chameleon-like capacity to adapt to different types of games,” wrote Javier Gascon. “Plan A, passing possession football, has not disappeared. But it alternates with more direct play, and even sometimes sitting back, waiting for Messi, Suarez and Neymar on the counter-attack. It all works to surprise.”
Luis Enrique’s more practical, less dazzling, style is still not fully accepted by all Barca fans. But after Saturday’s 2-0 win at Espanyol, they remain on course to match the achievement of Guardiola’s first season as coach and win a La Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League treble. Enrique knows however that he cannot compete for the purists’ vote with his former teammate.
“Pep is best because he has won a lot of trophies, his way of playing attractive football, and because he is my friend,” Luis Enrique said. “My friends are always the best.”
That was said with a characteristic fixed grin, and the super-competitive Asturian will be focused on winning at all costs next month.
“The tie will go in favour of Enrique if it becomes an emotional battle, because he’s much less passionate than Guardiola,” said Barca-watcher Ramon Besa in El Pais, in the most perceptive comment about the return.
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