Barcelona 3 Manchester United 1.

[Karl]

Barcelona 3 Manchester United 1. How can a game between the champions of England, the legendary ManU, and the champions of Spain, the equally esteemed Barca, possibly turn out to be a mismatch?

But such was the superiority of Barca, such the increasing tameness of ManU’s response, that the word drowns out one’s attempt to resist it. If Barcelona was playing soccer, then what was ManU playing, because there certainly did seem to be a fundamental difference in what each team’s players did with the ball.

When Barca was in possession the ball stayed mostly on the ground, mostly nursed and cuddled and prodded and yes, sometimes, caressed, by Barcelona feet. The caressing came, mostly, from the sublime Lionel Messi.

This is the point at which one can always expect a baying interruption from those irritating macho types whose troublesome hormones demand that they mock those words, that they insist, as Italy’s Claudio Gentile once famously did, that soccer is not a game for ballerinas, and that, as they sing the praises of red-blooded soccer, they are also proving that any less robust style -- the classic Brazil, or Barca for instance -- lacks the super-necessary physicality.

The argument is, of course, pathetic. Neither Brazil nor Barca lacks a strong physical presence, and no one is saying that you can play top class soccer without that. What Barca was saying - shouting - on Saturday was that physicality is merely the foundation, a given, in fact, to which the unique soccer skills must be carefully added . . . to produce a game that is recognizably soccer and not merely a test of strength and stamina and machismo, a game in which the skills and artistry of soccer are paramount, a game in which those qualities are what you notice, a game in which the physical element is always secondary, always the means, not the end.

I shouldn’t say always -- we know there’s no such word in soccer. There are bound to be occasions when muscle alone suffices, but for a team determined to play skillful soccer, those occasions will be infrequent.

A team such as Barcelona, in other words. How many times on Saturday did we see the Catalans powerfully belting the ball any-old-where, or committing crudely physical fouls? Or even simply running frenetically about, as though determined to prove that they have that current coaching solve-all, a high work rate (another physical measure, incidentally, not necessarily connected to any known soccer skill)?

This is not to say that ManU were guilty of all those gaucheries -- merely to point out that they were a lot closer to them than Barcelona. Why would that be?

We can start to probe ManU’s ineffective performance by casting an eye over the starting line up -- where what strikes one immediately is the lack of brain-power in midfield. Muscle, yes, from Michael Carrick -- and work rate, yes, from the non-stop Park Ji-Sung -- -- and speed and trickiness, yes, from Antonio Valencia. Which left the brainwork to the 37-year-old Ryan Giggs -- a role that he comprehensively flunked, partly because he looked his age, but mostly, I think, because it was beyond him in the first place. Giggs is yet another of those good players whom the Brits turn into great players -- simply on the strength of performances within the English league.

You also know that buried in the selection process by which that midfield came about was the perceived need for at least one ball-winner, those rugged, hard-tackling midfielders so typical of the English game. Enter Carrick.

Which was something of a joke. To win the ball you need to be able to tackle, or to move quickly enough to pull off interceptions. So, seriously, one has to wonder just what sort of scouting report Alex Ferguson was working on when he decided to rely on Carrick, Park and Valencia to first win the ball and then to hold on to it when confronted with an opposing midfield that is notorious for its dizzying passing patterns and its tenacious and skillful possession.

Pause for a momentary glimpse of the stats: Possession - Barca 63 percent, ManU 37 percent.

Enough said? No, not at all -- because there is possession that is nothing more than repeated lateral and backward passes, easy passes, that accomplish little other than to improve the stats -- and there is possession with purpose, attacking purpose. If that factor can be built into the stats, if the stats are re-named Attacking Possession, or if we could have -- which I have not seen -- the “Possession in the Attacking Third” stat -- Barca’s advantage would be even more overwhelming.

The failings of ManU’s banal midfield are brutally revealed by the contrast with what went on in Barca’s midfield. Who was Barca’s ball-winner? Did they need one? Maybe it was Sergio Busquets, perhaps the least skilled of the Barca squad, but he was never called upon to exert any physical presence, it simply wasn’t necessary for a team that has Xavi and Andres Iniesta buzzing around in the crucial area. You can, should you feel so inclined, sit back and admire the phenomenal work rate of those two players ... but it is more than likely that their superb ability to keep the ball rolling smoothly along the grass, their passing skill and accuracy -- their playmaking ability, the very ability that went missing in the ManU midfield -- is what will dazzle you. As it should.

In particular, that bit about the ball being kept on the ground. It is a banal observation that Barca is “not a big team.” Its three key players -- Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta -- are comparative midgets. Confronting them, at the heart of the ManU defense, stood two imposing center backs, Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic, both 6-foot-2 tall. Yet that huge height advantage, considered so important for English Premier League play, counted for nothing on Saturday. Barca kept the ball where it surely belongs in soccer -- on the ground. The build-up to all three goals was on the ground, two of the scoring shots were ground balls. Only David Villa’s curling shot for the third goal was airborne.

You could say that Barca plays to its strength -- that it gets the best out of its wee players by keeping the ball on the ground. Possibly -- though it is much more intriguing to view things the other way round. What if the vision of a style, of a quick-moving ground-based game, came first? What if it was that vision that allowed those three wonderful players to develop? Players who, without Barca’s devotion to the ground game, might well, given the current obsession with size, have been rejected as “too small”?

[Rudi]

Nuff said. Who in Jamaica worships size again?

[Karl]

Yes...but all other things being equal - go for the bigger!
Size for size sake is just as stupid as youth for youth sake. It is best option that must always rule.

[Karl]

The Barcelona Way -- Part 2

The Barcelona Way -- Part 2 by Paul Gardner, May 30th, 2011 8:16PM

By Paul Gardner

The day before last Saturday’s Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United, an irritating article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which told us that we -- meaning, one gathers, almost everyone except the authors -- don't know what we're watching: “But here is something most people don't know about Barcelona: Unlike every other famous soccer team in the world that thrives on possession and ball control, they do something unique during matches. They run as if their bikini briefs are on fire.”

This far from original observation was backed up by a totally unconvincing stat which held that, during its six knockout-round games in the Champions League, Barca’s players had run a total of 390 miles, while its opponents had run “only” 380 miles, a difference of a mere 3 percent, surely not statistically significant, but which was then built up into a claim that Barca’s “central weapon, and perhaps its defining strength, is what happens when the other team does get its cleats on the ball ...” In other words, Barca’s strength is defense.

In the sense that attack is the best form of defense, that may well be true. But only if, as with Barcelona, the attack is sustained, intelligent, skillful. Are we supposed to ignore the beauty that involves while we tick off, from our handy list of coaching essentials, work rate and tackles?

But those are the sort of observations, backed up by bad stats, or by badly interpreted stats, that occur so easily to people who seem intent on downplaying the skillful side of the game. People to whom the success of a team like Barcelona will remain a mystery -- and evidently an annoyance -- unless it can be explained in puerile defensive terms.

What Barcelona has been doing these past few years is to emphasize that in soccer it is a mistake to even think that offense and defense are separate compartments of the game. The two are intertwined in almost every move of the game, a mutual reliance that involves the inevitable problem: to bolster one aspect is to deprive the other. It is the abiding curse of the modern game that it is now enveloped in a cloying mist of cautious play brought about by an overemphasis on defense.

Barca, for sure, has its defensive qualities. Separating them out from the team’s overall attacking style is not an easy -- nor necessarily a useful -- exercise. To acclaim them as the bedrock of Barcelona’s style and of its success is simply fatuous.

Equally absurd -- and another of the carefully constructed coaching myths, most of them designed to underline the importance of coaching -- is the idea that star players are somehow damaging to a team, that star players are always selfish, that a team is better off with out them.

Barca is the greatest example we have right now of a team that plays as a team, as a tightly knit unit that knows how to play -- simultaneously -- offense and defense. It is also a team that has a collection of superb individual stars. Including, of course, the greatest individual player to be seen in today’s game, Lionel Messi.

Analyzing Messi is like dissecting Mozart or Rembrandt or Tolstoy -- the results are always unsatisfactory, always counter-productive, for they leave us with something so much less impressive than what we started with. Is it helpful, or in any way rewarding to separate Messi into a sequence of muscular movements, of lightning synaptic connections? Or to make him sound like a coaching manual, nothing but a collection of tactical platitudes, which will inevitably end up praising him because he does his defensive duties, because he tracks back?

If it is agreed that Messi is a soccer genius -- and this seems now to be the widely held opinion -- then any sort of materialistic analysis is not going to bring understanding. Genius does not abide by the accepted guidelines, the usual measuring sticks, the standard scientific norms. Speaking of Messi, his coach Pep Guardiola said, somewhat tautologically, “I think his genius is impossible to describe. That’s why he is a genius.” Which is more or less what the 19th century essayist William Hazlitt had in mind with his “rules and models destroy genius and art.”

The message is that Messi, the superstar on this wonderful Barcelona team, should be left alone to do what he instinctively does. But genius in soccer cannot be an isolated talent, it can only flourish in the group, in the team. A fact that gives the macho brigade yet another opening to downgrade skill as they claim that the star’s life is made easy by others who are doing “the dirty work” for him -- a phrase clearly meant to position the star as an effete Little Lord Fauntleroy and the “workers” as brave heroes who should really be getting the praise.

That is another coaching shibboleth utterly laid to waste by Barcelona. Who are the “workers” on Barca, these industrious slaves whose only purpose is to spend all their time feeding the ball to Messi? Xavi and Iniesta, maybe? Oh, come on -- two players who, while not in the Messi class, have considerable claim to dwell among the second tier of soccer geniuses. Where was this “dirty work” anyway, in a game during which Barcelona committed only five fouls?

ManU’s Alex Ferguson, right after he had seen his champion team made to look very ordinary indeed, praised Barcelona as the best team he’s ever faced in all his long coaching career (it began back in 1974) and gave us, in five monosyllabic words, a terse but all-embracing comment on their style: “They play the right way ...”

One can hear a certain wistfulness in that praise, a regretful look back by Ferguson to the glory days of Scottish soccer, the soccer he must recall from his boyhood or from the tales told by his elders of the traditional Scottish soccer of highly skilled attacking players and an on-the-ground, short-passing style. That was the right way, but as far as the Scots are concerned, it has sadly faded away, to be nothing more than a romantic memory.

But not for Ferguson -- there’s no doubt that his ManU teams have always been more skilled than the average English team, have always included a greater emphasis on talented attacking players.

Ferguson’s teams undoubtedly try to play soccer the right way, but within a hostile environment he has had to compromise to live with the traditional thud-and-blunder requirements of the English domestic game.

Last Saturday, Ferguson saw -- well, suffered, I suppose -- the beautiful, majestic power of Barcelona. “They do mesmerize you with their passing,” he said. He praised Barca’s style laconically, but with real feeling. This was “the right way.”

So where do we go from here? A more skilled, closer-to-Barca, ManU? Possibly. A much wider attempt by coaches everywhere to adopt Barca’s style -- which has shown that it is not only a delight to the eye, but is a winner, too? Alas, that seems doubtful -- the dead mass of conventional coaching opinion and what passes for original thinking within the profession will find proof, yet again, either that the Barca way doesn’t really work, or that it is a fluke, and we shall be back to the glutinous platitudes of the coaching manuals, the very ones that ... “destroy genius and art.”

No one is saying that playing “the right way” is the easy approach. It is, in fact, the greatest of soccer’s challenges and, as such, it is the only worthwhile one. Ferguson says he is ready for it. How many other coaches will follow his lead?