Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 26

Barca is Munich-bound

I am happily disconnected much of the time from modern comms at present but have wondered down to the village cafe mindful that my silence post El Classico might be misinterpreted.

Barca lost because Guardiola got his starting line-up wrong and he is missing Villa.

Now, I rarely make football predictions as you know but today is one of those exceptions. Barca will beat Chelsea with a sufficient margin to go through to Munich. Guradiola has told us his players are going to win. Oh, yes, and Pique is back.

A dampener at Stamford Bridge

I had twittered my expectation of  ballet in the mud. Well, it turned out  less than that,  this latest encounter between FC Barcelona and Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.

It was for sure wet, damp and cold sitting with a group of Barca fans just to the right behind the goal at the visitor’s end-the kind of conditions that remind one that watching even the best  team in the world live sometimes involves a large degree of masochism.

Just a yard and a line of stewards separated us from the nearest home supporters which meant the usual exchange of mutual provocation. The Chelsea fans chanted about Barca being cheats. We began  by chanting our tribute to Andrew Iniesta, and ended calling Didier Drogba the biggest cheat of them all.

By then cules had been  plunged into temporary stunned silence when Drogba mercilessly snatched  a goal in extra time thanks to a move laid on a plate by a rare Messi  mistake. Cause and effect summed up the game really.

From the opening whistle,  Barca appeared to play the way that had made them champions, possessing  the ball, and finessing it in a series of perfectly  executed passes . I use the word ‘appeared’ with intent. The holding operation seemed to be eternal. But it was evident pretty soon that the ball for much of the time was not going anywhere other than a series of backward and lateral  moves that increasingly seemed less inspirational than sterile. Chelsea tactics cried out for early substitutions by Guardiola which came too late. When the goal came it simply underlined the effectiveness of Chelsea’s defence, and simplicity of counterattack.

Sure, last might’s stats suggest a different narrative,  with Barca  dominating the control of the ball for most of the match and  with the most chances of  goal. But it was a team that  proved largely ineffective in front of goal, after counter-attacking laboriously. The  culprits  in Barca’s team  included Alex Sanchez and Cesc Fabregas, who squandered chances that would have otherwise sealed last night their club’s access to the Champion’s final.

So now  we have to wait till next Tuesday to see Guardiola’s boys prove their real worth, at a Camp Nou were English dreams have been as easily shattered as they have been realised.

I have to say I did not enjoy last night’s  game-and I don’t blame it on the weather. I was simply bored by Barca and frustrated by Drogba. The only consolation is that the game  acted as something of a  catharsis for Chelsea fans who since 2009 have thought only of grudge and revenge. By the end of last night’s game there was far less abuse that when FC Barcelona faced a Chelsea team moulded by Mourinho and I saw emblems being exchanged by rival fans at the end.

Something tells me that if Mourinho had been  in charge at Stamford Bridge last night, there would have been more hostility in the stadium and Barca would have been provoked into playing with more spirit. Bring on El Classico on Saturday. But right now I can’t wait to welcome Chelsea to the Camp Nou on Tuesday. Rest assured the result is going to be very different, with or without Drogba.

Alves and the Grudge match

Good chemistry in today’s Guardian newspaper between Sid Lowe one of the doyenes of Spanish football reporting, and Dani Alves, one of the most entertaining and talented players of La Liga .

With the British media- including the Guardian’s own new story-focusing on Chelsea’s desire for revenge over the alleged injustice of that Iniesta goal at Stamford Bridge three years ago, the Alves interview provides some refreshing reminders of what football should be about.

As Alves points out,  that Iniesta goal, far from representing an enduring injustice, should be seen in the more generous context of FC Barcelona’s  transformation under Pep Guardiola into one of the great teams of all time. It marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented tournament success for the club during which Barca’s popuilarity around the world increased because of the way they played.

Alves  a player whose numerous assists have helped Messi scored many of his goals for the club, genuinely enjoys the game and believes that a good team has a duty to entertain as well as win. Grudges are held by bad players, and worse losers.

Messi & Ronaldo: A study in contrasts

Anyone yet to be convinced of the value of Lionel Messi to the world of football need to have gone no further than watching him react to the  two goals he scored against Levante last night.

The first had him picking him up the ball from inside the goal and running back to the centre of the pitch with an attitude of total selflessness and determination. Barca had been trailing, 0-1 down. They still needed to win to have any possibility of keeping open the race for  La Liga.

The second showed him in more  familiar pose- pointing to the skies in gratitude, before drawing in the rest of the team in a collective embrace-one for all, all for one.

What a contrast with his rival for the Pichichi, Ronaldo who last night rescued  Real Madrid from perdition at the hands of Clemente’s Sporting. For ever strutting his stuff, like a pumped up peacock, and for ever glancing at his team mates as if they were a mirror, reflecting his glory.

Two football stars of our modern times- one an example , the other a prima donna.

Why we need La Cantera

Easter weekend had been watching two local youth teams battling it out  on the outskirts of a very typical English provincial town. I have deliberately resisted naming the teams or the town as I would not want their reputations  unfairly tarnished.

Suffice it to say that I was shocked by the poor quality of football played compared  to similar level games I have seen played in villages and towns across Spain, and I blame this on poor coaching and facilities rather than the lack of any potential talent- although it was hard to spot any budding genius.

Both teams had tall lumbering players  in defence,  kicking long balls. Their colleagues dribbled balls they seemed incapable of controlling when not passing up similar routes 66's. They pressed and fought but so much energy was wasted by fouls or poor positioning. Fluidity and imaginative play were absent. My heart went out to my friend's son who spent most of the first half in a lone striker's position without once receiving the ball and eventually being substituted. Noone had suggested he should track before or help te development of play in mid-field. I could think of nothing better to do than give him a couple of old tapes I had of FC Barcelona before whispering- "Get your dad to convert them to DVD's, then have a look at how they move positions, how they hold the ball, how they pass it, how they inspire each other ".

I suppose this is not advice that Spain's current head of government Mariano Rajoy much cares for. Just the other day he said that Spain had to get used to having less sports stadiums and more austerity. And yet if Spanish football  is as good as it is it is because of the considerable investment that has been made over the last two decades in training and developing good footballers  from childhood through to  young manhood.

Within the present La Liga, it is FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao that provide the best examples of what can be achieved by developing home grown talent. I don't know if Barca will clinch La Liga or indeed win any trophies this season, but just how brilliant are the products of the club's Cantera was very much in evidence in the game against Getafe earlier this week.

By contrast over at Real Madrid, it is still star foreign signings that hold the key to success or failure in the Mourinho  era- which is not to belittle the quality of their play, simply its self-evident disfunctionality at times, not to mention its lack of soul.  If Messi plays inctictively, Ronaldo still looks as if he is being activated by a computer.even when humiliating Atletico de Madrid.

When thugs meet poets

 

There is something sadly somewhat predictable about some English sports page headlines this morning focusing on Lampard's apparent statement that Chelsea has "some unfinished business" to take care of when it meets FC Barcelona in two weeks time.

In fact my recollection is that Lampard was interviewed  by an English TV journalist after the match against Benfica last night who used the phrase in his question, prompting an even  less literate response.

But the phrase stands as a necessary myth capable of fuelling the base instinct each previously humiliated fan has for revenge. It should be seen in the same context as Mourinho telling journalists , after Real  Madrid had also qualified for the semis, to expect a Champion's League final between FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich.  But here Mourinho  said what he said knowing that he would be understood as saying that referees would be against Real Madrid and Chelsea and in favour of FC Barcelona.

Thus in one fell swoop, international football's agent provocateur set about playing one of his characteristic  build-up mind games for which we have known him since his days at Chelsea- was it not Mourinho, while at Chelsea, that claimed that Iniesta's winning goal should have been disallowed?- appealing to the base instincts of Real Madrid as well as Chelsea fans.

This kind of stuff- I can't think of a better word to grace it with-is really a rather tedious distraction from the fact that FC Barcelona should get to the finals on its own merit. Chelsea were lucky to win last night. For most of the match  they seemed disorganised and demotivated, with Benfica easily outshining them in terms of skill and entertainment.

Much as some Chelsea fans might fantasise "finishing off the business " by physically destroying Barca – as if football was just a thug's game- they have a side that will have to find more than just virility to deal with Pep Guardiola's team of crafstsmen and poets in motion.

Ibra, Messi, and the art of bullfighting

 

As I savoured the memory of last night's Barca Champions League victory over AC Milan this  morning's surf landed me by pure chance on the Italian club's supporters' website Forza Rosseneri.

It was an old page, now slightly  dated but which nonetheless gave one an insight into the shortcomings of a club that once claimed, not without justification, to be the best in Europe. Alongside  flashing advertisements showing semi-naked models promising that more would be revealed, the club's CEO Adriano Galliani paid tribute to club owner Silvio Berlusconi- "These 26 years with Berlusconi are the best years of our lives."

Not a man short of superlatives, Galliani also raised Zlatan Ibrahimovic to the pantheon of football Gods:" Ibra's goals are always something special. He's fantastic … Extraordinary! "Galliani gushed.

Well, I don't know if Berlusconi saw in his team's defeat last night a mirror of his own political and allegedly private misfortunes, but there is surely something in this AC Milan's ultimate capitulation before a superior FC Barcelona that echoes the decline and fall of the former  Italian prime-minister.

This Milan's potential has been overhyped and nowhere more so than in the figure of Ibrahimovic, a player whose departure from FC Barcelona Pep Guardiola did well to encourage. For all his towering presence on the pitch, the Swede was outshone by Barca's little big men, not least by Messi.

Whatever Ibrahimovic's  qualities, they pale in comparison  to that of Marco van Basten, one of the key figures of that truly great Milan side that emerged in the late 1980's after Berlusconi has bought the club and saved it from bankruptcy, appointing Arrigo Sacchi as manager. The Rossoneri flourished thanks to the Dutch trio- Gullit, Rijkaard, and  van Basten.

 "After watching him for a while, you will be amazed with his all round skills and his big body frame twisted and turned inside the box, fooling the best of the defenders with such ease, and his ability to turn the slimmest chance into a goal made him one of the most deadliest striker of all time," "Van Basten the divine!" wrote Dianni Brera, one of the greatest Italian football journalists. And that  was no hyperbole.

Last night it was the impish Messi that managed to fool and weave his way through Milan's defence, his talent given freer rein than in the first leg at San Siro thanks to Guardiola  risking a three-man defence and widening the field of play with Cuenca and Alves helping move the ball forward on each wing.

This was a game in which the quality and endurance of Guardiola's boys (how that Iniesta  goal must have put the fear of God into Chelsea, like a bad dream revisited!) won through. In the final stages of the game, Barca still managed to show themselves Lord of the  rings, their one touch football 'in the round'  leaving their opponent looking increasing ragged by comparison. The sound of oles resonating around the Camp Nou –ironically in a region of Spain that has banned bullfighting- conjured up the inevitable image of a skillful torero who in the final stages of the faena has humiliated the fiercest of fighting animals to the point of rendition.

Guardiola, Bielsa, and Maradona

Two  images stand out from from last night's game between FC Barcelona  and Athletic Bilbao whose final score failed to undermine  Real Madrid's increasingly unassailable leadership at the top of La Liga.

The first has the two 'misters' Pep Guardiola and Marcelo Bielsa, like the philosophers of football that they are , directing their pupils as if the nature of existence itself was being defined there and then . It is a study in contrasts- Guardiola intense and ephemeral as an El Greco saint, Bielsa 'El Loco' , a cross between General Peron in mid-speach and a  a caged lion- that belies a unity of vision, a shared belief in how football can and should be played. .

The second is  that of  the   suggestion of emotion that just for an instant seems to take hold of  Lionel Messi as he walks out on to the Camp Nou and sees  a huge banner unfurled in tribute to him. This is  not just the moment when Barca fans acknowledged his goal-scoring prowess- more goals than another players in the club's history. It is also a signal that finally the time had come for Messi to take charge, to show himself capable of  leadership .

Guardiola and Bielsa share a belief in endeavour and aestheticism. They make their players work hard but imaginatively . They  believe a in a fluid, passing game, in working the  ball up the pitch, in preference to thumping it. Each have moulded a team into a collective belief system.

Messi has to prove that he can  not only inspire FC Barcelona, but also lead Argentina to a World Cup victory. That should settle once and fall the debate as to whether or not he is better than Maradona  who first arrived at Barcelona as a young player nearly thiry years ago.

Maradona's two years  in the Catalan capital during the early 1980's were overshadowed by the protracted verbal war beween Barca's then manager, the Argentine  Cesar Menotti and Athletic 's Javier Clemente over football,  and a punch-up in the final between the two clubs in the Copa del Rey.

It's good to see FC Barcelona and Athletic respecting each other more these days, and Messi  increasingly showing greater maturity than Maradona ever had.

Herrera, Guardiola, & the catenaccio

 

During his time  as manager of FC Barcelona, Helenio  Herrera made a name for himself for a number of reasons. I would like to name just two.

The first was as a very good psychologist. He was disdainful of other managers who failed to engage with their players and to bring about a real change in their attitude to the game. Herrera claimed to be able to look into the  heads  and heart of each of his players, and to be able to turn this to the  team's best advantage. The was a touch of a sorcerer in him . In fact he encouraged superstition as long as he could control  it. He used to tap Luisito  Suarez's  wine glass when he wasn't looking because the player was convinced that a small spill meant that he would score a goal.

Herrera was also an extraordinary tactician. While at  Barca he experimented with some innovative attacking football.  He never saw any contradiction between the football he played at Barcelona and the catenaccio,the system he promoted in Italy whereby the sweeper stays behind the defence, with the rest of the team marking man to man and the letting the opposition attack . In Herrera's view, the catenaccio got a bad reputation as being synonymous with a defensive style of football only because it was misused  by others. In his system, he always insisted, while the centre-backs in front of the sweeper were markers, the fullbacks had to attack.

I was thinking last night about Herrera  aboard the good ship Bar & Co (the best football bar in London)  as I watched Pep Guardiola's Barca battling with AC Milian in the Champion's League quarter finals first leg at  San Siro.

Guardiola   knows a thing or two about psychology. Who can forget the famous Gladiator video he showed before the  Champions League final in Rome in May 2009? And it is Guardiola   who has been instrumental in ensuring that Messi's genius flourishes at Barca.

Guardiola  has also developed a team  whose  form of play is now held up as an example of a new dawn in football. From school kids to Alex Ferguson, much of the football world seems to be seeing   how best to emulate Barca.

And yet last night Barca  found themselves frustrated and out manaoevered by an AC Milan team that Herrera would have been proud of.  Ok, we also saw what should have been a clear penalty on Alexis, and there were a couple of other near Barca misses.

But Milan also created chances on the counter-attack while ensuring for most of the match that Barca's possession in the mid-field rarely progressed into anything resembling a  lethal choreography.  I know that Budha suggests that the best way to deal with a wall is to get round it. But  you also need to try and find more effective ways through it. Barca's main weakness became only to evident as the first half progressed. Milan crowded  the central highway down the middle of the pitch  , with Alves the only real wide player in the initial line-up chosen by Guardiola.

He could have done with Abidal (almost certainly unavailable now for the rest of the season as a result of his liver transplant) . Pujol is a tough defender and a good header, but he simply does not have the speed down the wing.  Pedro does,  but he was only brought into the game  belatedly along with Tello. The much needed extra fire power nearly clinched it but that seemed to sum up Barca's whole game of failed expectation.

The second-leg will prove a real challenge for Guardiola.I suspect that whoever prevails in the second  leg will eventually go through to the finals- against Bayern Munich. Barca needs to spill a bit of wine in the coming days.

Football notes, courtesy of Unamumo

In his excellent sports column  in Tuesday's El Pais, the incisive Martin Girard draws on the latest book by Alfredo Relaño  to remind us how the divergent histories of Real Madrid and FC Barcelona have forged the identity of both clubs. It a subject close to my heart and I expand on it  at some length in my new  book La Roja: A Journey through Spanish Football  which is due out very soon .

 Relaño notes that Carlos Padros, the founder of Real Madrid, was abandoned by his club during the Franco years , died a destitute man, with not one club official turning up at his burial. While Padros was imprisoned  by anti-Franco forces during the Spanish Civil War and was subjected to a 'mock' execution, simply because he was a one-time businessman, he seems to have also been  discriminated against again after the war because he was not as pro-regime as Real Madrid's  president  President Santiago Bernabeu, and had been born in Catalonia.

By comparison, the founder of FC Barcelona, Hans Gamper, while of Swiss origin, identified his club closely with Catalonia and democracy from the outset, to the point that he had to briefly go into exile during the dictatorship  of General Primo de Rivera when the Madrid government denied him any access to his club.

Gamper ended up committing suicide after the Great Depression. While this appears to have been the reason why his name never graced a stadium , the club did name a trophy after him and to this day remains honoured as one FC Barcelona's founding fathers in the official museum and history.

"The difference in which Padros and Gamper have been treated reflects the different ways that each club sees itself, "reflects Relaño , "While  Madrid only values its victories, Barca has a more profound and sentimental relationship with itself, its love goes beyond any sense of achievement."

I was thinking on this last night watching Real Madrid's graceless performance against Villareal that included Mourinho and two of his players  getting red cards. The expulsions that involved Mourinho putting on a particularly graceless  performance, came in the final stages of a game that had Real Madrid at 1-1 and risking a defeat that would have narrowed even more the lead it has over Barca in La Liga.

Once again Mourinho showed, as he did last season, that while he may have come to personify the sharper edge of a culture that has driven Real Madrid to great trophies in the past, he is also a  bad loser. Contrast this with Mourinho's nemesis Pep Guardiola who has been telling the media, without any bitterness,  for days that he doesn't expect to win La Liga while his team shows no signs of losing its reputation as the best in the world.

Well  I had a dream him about Guardiola  the other day. Pep was in the middle of the Bernabeu surrounded by screaming Mourinhos and Ultra Surs shouting abuse when he stood his ground and made a speech that almost seemed to paraphrase  Unamuno's defiant lecture in Salamanca at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. "You may win, because you have and know how to use more than enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince, you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to be noble and to play a football  others can love and respect."