Barca’s fall a lesson for all
It was possible to be saddened yet slightly relieved as everything unravelled for Barcelona this past week. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet shut down just as you pondered one more plateful. It might, ultimately, be for the best.
Primarily, after all the enjoyment they have given us, you felt for Pep as the jacket came off on Tuesday night and he gave himself over, for possibly the first and last time, to the undignified business of panic.
Whoever weaves his jumpers can hardly ever hope to shake the brand’s association with disappointment.
Leo too had our sympathy. As despair gradually rounded his shoulders, you would, if you could, have rooted down the back of the couch to give him back whatever invisible controller usually makes the football behave as he wants. And has defenders dive in, panting, at his convenience.
But there was also a small, illicit thrill every time an orgy of gives, goes, and tika-taka touches wound up, inevitably, at the feet of a perplexed Dani Alves, who invariably rejected as an impotent obscenity the callow option of crossing and instead swung the ball back to the very point where the move had begun and begin again.
Slowly, the realisation dawned that there might yet be a genome or two to tweak in the evolution of football.
It was like wrapping up a video game only to discover there was yet a hidden level to conquer. One where you couldn’t hold down two buttons to turn on Messi’s turbo.
Which was no harm. Because, for some time, we wondered if Guardiola had moulded Cruyff’s blueprint — itself a refinement of Micels’ credo — into the perfect football template. That in slurping this heady cocktail of touch, bravery, geometry and endurance, Barcelona had gulped the elixir to everlasting success.
The Catalan version of natural selection seemed to have mutated a master race of elfin, one-touch automatons that would pour out of La Masia for ever more; pressing, passing, swivelling their hips and, whatever the band played, killing you softly with their beautiful song.
Pep’s vision was a frightening one; a future without defenders or forwards, just a relentless whirlwind of immaculate, iron-lunged midfielders, taking the ball from you in six seconds then teasing you for 60 passes.
If this was to be the future of football, what would be left for the rest of us? Speaking on behalf of larger galoots everywhere, what use could our people possibly serve? Would the Dunners and the Quinnys soon be extinct; evolved from the species? We’ve heard often in recent times that the supremacy of Barcelona and Spain is a triumph for the little guy. The little guy on the street. Was, then, Chelsea’s defiance, and to a lesser extent Madrid’s in La Liga, a reprieve for the big guy, the big guy slouched at the street corner? The owner of hips that don’t lie.
Maybe not, but it might, at least prevent one dinosaur dying out completely; the traditional centre forward.
Because we can’t write Tuesday off as a one-time system malfunction since that’s three journeys now Barca have been held up behind a parked bus at Champions League semi-final junction. And, let’s face it, they had Tom Henning Ovrebo’s unprecedented tolerance for handball to thank for overtaking a fourth.
Even as they hold us in thrall, we can acknowledge part of football’s beauty lies in its physicality. Possession is just a conduit and you can’t, yet, eliminate risk entirely. Sometimes, you might have to put the ball up for grabs, contest it, get across the front post or hold off your man at the back, climb majestically, bundle it home, ally physique to technique.
Might a Llorente have given Alves a viable crossing option and, in turn, drawn Chelsea out to cut off the supply? Of course we saw on Wednesday, with Mario Gomez, the pros and cons of employing such an outdated beast. No matter how good your big man’s feet are, for a big man, those feet are still stationed that bit further away from the brain. So Tito Vilanova might arrive at a different solution. It’s just comforting to find there’s still, even in Catalonia, some work in progress. And that there might yet be hope — and use — for the rest of us.
