Beware the quiet men
Phil Ball
ESPNsoccernet.com
What makes football eternally fascinating is not so much its unpredictability (a virtue much exaggerated) but rather its ability to produce a new star every year, or at least a potential one. And of course, although potentially great footballers are all, to some extent, clones of previous great footballers - witness the way in which journalists will always talk about a rising star in terms of one whose light has dimmed ('the new Maradona') they are all nevertheless unique. They move differently, they think differently. Football imposes finite limits - eleven versus eleven for ninety minutes - but no game has ever been the same. The human condition plugs nicely into football, blessing it with its myriad possibilities.
Last season we were privileged to see the flowering of the elegant midfielder Riquelme, an allegedly great player seemingly farmed out to the margins of La Liga with Villarreal, hardly a household name. Quietly and ruthlessly he set about proving his doubters wrong by taking a club from a two-horse town to the very brink of European glory.
In several journalistic eyes, although he won no awards, he was the world's best player last season - certainly its most accomplished midfielder. But Riquelme is a quiet man, (some say a depressive one), not given to interviews, advertising, autobiographies or image rights. Ronaldinho and Frank Lampard are also fine players, but always on the public's lips. It makes commercial sense to have them at the top of the polls. No-one really gives a fig for guys like Riquelme.
And so this season he has disappeared in combat, as had Ronaldinho until he awoke from his golden slumbers this weekend against Sevilla. But the media has only been interested in the Brazilian's loss of form - hardly surprising given the fact that he's hardly had chance to catch his uptake breath since joining Barça, and has simply been knackered of late.
Riquelme, on the other hand, has slipped out of sight, playing reasonably for a stuttering Villarreal but grabbing no headlines, apart from when he announced his sudden retirement from the Argentine national side, for reasons connected to his mother's failing health. In what looked like an almost premeditated farewell, Riquelme has slunk back into the shadows where he prefers to be, earning himself a living but feeling no great obligation to continue entertaining the punters. There is no-one quite like him, but this season we will have to look elsewhere for the subtle pleasures that football can provide.
Ronaldinho will add to his repertoire of tricks, Messi will prove that he is no fly-by-night, and Atlético Madrid's Agüero may well be the season's most exciting newcomer - but these things are more or less expected to happen. No-one, at least up to the friendly between Spain and Argentina last week, had predicted that this season's true star - the guy who will earn the respect of his fellow actors but who will be unlikely to figure in the Oscars - was Andrés Iniesta.
The Barcelona midfielder has been around for a while now, since October 2002 to be precise when Van Gaal handed him his debut in a Champions League match against Bruges. So it seems that the much-vilified Dutchman got something right after all. Iniesta only made six appearances that season and eleven the next, but during the 2004-2005 campaign Rijkaard saw that the skinny lad they had picked up from Albacete at the age of twelve offered the team something else, something that Riquelme had conspicuously failed to produce for the Catalans the season before.
Iniesta made thirty-three appearances in that championship season, not all of them as first-choice - but Barça were hardly desperate for midfielders. The same could be said of last season, but Iniesta gradually emerged as the fulcrum of the side, especially when Xavi was out with a serious injury. This is the beauty of Iniesta. Whilst all around him is fireworks, he just gets on with lighting the fuse. You don't actually notice him half the time. He hangs around in a vaguely forward position in midfield, always supporting the player with the ball, always available. He often just moves the ball on, like Xavi, ensuring that possession is retained.
Jorge Valdano recently remarked of him that he embodies the concept of 'tocar y acompañar' (pass and support) - the hardest thing to do in football effectively. He looks undernourished, with skinny legs and prematurely thinning hair. He's the archetype of the quiet, nerdy kid who never got picked at school for the rough-and-tumble playground games. He looks slightly weird, like he needs to get home fast for his Gameboy fix.
In short, Barça are never going to have to worry about the negotiation of his image rights, but they should give themselves a pat on the back for having such a perceptive team of scouts, particularly the ones who were down in Albacete in 1996. You'd need to be a good reader of the game to notice him, to spot his quiet influence on the proceedings - to see his process in the eventual shape of the product.
As a player, he has no pace, little strength, and a lack of conspicuous circus tricks. Then suddenly you see it. As soon as a space opens up ahead of him, he slips into it like a wriggly worm, bending and flexing like a little elastic man. In the blink of an eye he's opened up the defence, panicked them into conceding more spaces for the attackers to exploit. His passing is quick and deadly, like De la Peña's before him. But he is more complete than the flawed Little Buddha, a player whose lack of generosity always let him down. Iniesta is there for everyone else. He rarely scores goals (for which some commentators criticise him), but he makes them a-plenty.
Against Argentina last week, he kept Luis Aragonés in a job (at least until Spain's next match in March) when he suddenly slithered forward from nowhere, slid out of the grasp of two Argentine defenders who clutched desperately at him like soap, then tricked the normally cool Ayala into committing a leg forward into the space where he least expected Iniesta to go. The resulting penalty was thumped home by Villa, and Spain went home happy, for a change. Had Iniesta not been on the bench against Sweden it might have been a different matter.
The amazing thing about Iniesta's emergence as Barcelona's new star-turn is that the champions are hardly struggling for midfielder personnel, nor searching for a system. It's of eternal credit to Rijkaard that his own management of the team's 'system' (a word rightly scoffed at by Croatia's Slaven Bilic on Wednesday night) has only ever depended on the players who have been sewn effortlessly into it, a flexi-system able to accommodate anyone willing first to conform and then to contribute - which takes us back to the opening paragraph of this piece.
All players are different. They shouldn't depend on the system. The system should rather be defined by them. Thus has it ever been with all the great sides, with the possible exception of those shaped by the forge of Helenio Herrera. But all exceptions prove the rule.
Barça have a wealth of midfield treasures, depending on how you define 'midfielder' of course - but just look at the competition Iniesta was facing; Deco, Xavi, Giuly, Motta, Ronaldinho and Messi - the latter two surely best described as creators as opposed to pure 'attackers'. Gudjohnsen can play in midfield too, but he's unlikely to need to this year. Messi and Ronaldinho are further freed to do their stuff by the likes of Iniesta, who can also tackle and intercept, such is his reading of the game. It's not quite clear from whom he's cloned, but it doesn't really matter. He's his own man.
It'll be interesting to see how he copes with the week ahead. Talk about pressure. Barcelona had a pretty tricky hurdle to jump with this weekend's game against Sevilla (which they won 3-1), but now face Chelsea in London on Wednesday and Real Madrid in the Bernabéu next Sunday. Both those sides are likely to be working in training on how to nullify the threat of the more obvious artists in Barça's line-up. But woe betide them if they ignore the little craftsman in the middle.
