There's no denying Lionel Messi's magic but is the team the best ever?
One thing that is a little perplexing about this Twitter-YouTube-Facebook-satellite TV-world wide web age in which we live is how ignorant people remain of what goes on beyond their shores in the single most globalised phenomenon on Planet Earth, the game of soccer.
It took Lionel Messi's four goals against Arsenal on Wednesday for the otherwise phenomenally well-informed, promiscuously opinionated British soccer public to figure out what everyone in Spain has known for at least two years, namely that the 22-year-old Argentine is the best player in the world by - in the humble words of Arsene Wenger - some margin.
So let's try and get ahead of this time lag problem now and bring people up to speed on just how good Barcelona FC as a whole are. First of all, is there anybody out there who disagrees with the Spanish consensus that they are the best team in the world? That they play the game in a manner more pleasing to the eye, more effectively than any other?
The fact that they won every single competition they went in for last season, collecting not a mere treble but a sextet of trophies, ought to seal the argument for all but the most jingoistic of fans. The debate simply does not merit attention. That is why the question being asked by every serious commentator in Spain now is more along the lines of the one everybody is now asking of Messi: is this Barca the best team ever?
There, at least, we have a conversation. And the honest answer has to be similar to the one we must give regarding the comparative genius of the little Argentine: it is a little too early to tell. Though I can attest that the single most impressive soccer journalist in Spain, Santiago Segurola (previously of El Pais, now of Marca, and a man old enough to have seen Brazil at their best and fanatical enough to be able to list the entire Leeds United team that won the FA Cup in 1972), believes the world has never seen a better soccer team.
I also saw that Brazil 1970 World Cup-winning team and I have to say that nothing quite lingers in the mind's eye as memorably as the brilliance exhibited by Pele, Gerson, Tostao, Jairzinho and company during that magical month in Mexico. But consistently, over the whole course of a season, I have never seen anything better than Barcelona, the 2008-09 vintage. The current lot, largely unchanged, are pretty good too (Messi is better, more complete than he was a year ago), but soccer is far too fickle for anyone to be able confidently to predict that they will end up with yet another a bag of trophies this time around.
As of now, though, there is no team in sight that plays soccer the way this lot do. Messi may not be entirely of this earth, but the deeper reason they are so good is that they have raised the concept of the team game to a new level. That Maradona's Argentina have reduced the concept to a new low is a large reason why Messi is not as effective in his national blue and white shirt as he is in Barca's claret and blue. No one retains ownership of the ball over 90 minutes longer than Barcelona (they are miles ahead of the rest of this season's Champions League teams in percentage terms). Arsenal are the possession kings of England but the only time they got a look in against Barca was when the Catalans felt they could risk taking their feet off the gas. Manchester United who, in the conventional thinking, are a more robust, less effete team than Wenger's were just as straw-clutchingly inept against Barcelona in the Champions League final last May.
What's the secret? Two basic soccer ideas, so hard to sustain game after game, that their coach, Pep Guardiola drums into them with the repetitive doggedness of a grizzled brainwasher. One is that at least one player must always, always make himself available to receive a pass in space; two, that the instant the ball is lost (to say that Barca are weak in defence is just so much tosh), players must hunt in hungry packs to get it back. The underlying philosophy that has defined Barcelona since the time that Johan Cruyff, Guardiola's mentor, was in charge is that the ball is an object of desire, that it must be pursued and preserved with the ardour of a jealous lover. Hoofing the ball up field, indulging in speculative wastefulness of any kind, is, in Guardiola's book, the ultimate sin.
The same ethic conspicuously fails to apply in Italian soccer, neither is it particularly prominently positioned in the mind of Jose Mourinho, the coach of Internazionale, who Barcelona now meet in the Champions League semifinals. The general view in England is that Messi and co will have their work cut out there; that a team that made short shrift of Chelsea in the last 16 stage of the competition will pose a far mightier test than callow Arsenal did. Perhaps. But that is assuming that Inter are now a significantly better team than they were in the autumn when Barcelona beat them, in the Champions League group stages, with commanding ease. They drew 0-0 at San Siro, with Barcelona making by far the most chances; and then Barcelona won 2-0 at home in what turned out to be an unmenacing stroll in the park. The measure of Mourinho's challenge later this month is that, for the second game, Messi stayed on the bench.
Which shows just how strong the rest of the team is, how wrong-headed it is to brand Barca a one-man band. They are ball players to a man. The first touch, all round, is exquisite; they exert total control that fraction of a second faster than ordinary soccer players. That is why they always seem to have more time than other teams, providing another reason why they are so hard to dispossess.
Gerard Pique, the big centre-half whom Sir Alex Ferguson let go for a song in the summer of 2008, has the toughness of a John Terry but an aplomb on the ball that is not a million miles away from Franz Beckenbauer or - perhaps a more just comparison - a Bobby Moore. Danny Alves is a Brazilian left-back who is even better at defending than he is at attacking. Xavi, who plays for Spain and was voted player of the competition in the last European championships, is a midfield organiser around whom coaching textbooks will be written; Andres Iniesta, who has an unmatched delicacy on the ball, would be regarded as one of the game's great dribblers, were he not obliged to withstand comparison with Messi, the greatest of them all. Pedro, a diminutive winger from the Canary Islands, has dancing feet too and Zlatan Ibrahimovic might just be the daintiest 2m forward the game has seen.
As for Thierry Henry, who is long past his best and often looked during last season's triumphs as if he was just there to make up the numbers, he has never been accused of lacking artistry on the ball.
But there is balance in the team too. There are workhorses there, like the captain, Carles Puyol, a Catalan "Psycho", a more refined, ball-friendly version of Stuart Pearce, with just as much killer grit; there is Abidal, a fast and intelligent right-back; there are the midfield mechanics, like Yaya Toure, whose lumbering bulk belies a sweet ease on the ball; or Sergio Busquets, another product of the Barca youth academy, who has guile as well as strength; and Seydou Keita, from Mali, your proverbial consummate pro, who covers the whole pitch and scores goals too, with head and boot.
What binds them all is their lust to win, their hatred of defeat, their conviction that they are the best and their admiration for their coach, Guardiola.
But above and beyond that, being close and sullen observers of the phenomenon that is Barcelona Football Club, they know that behind every great player, there is a great team.
- INDEPENDENT
