Lionel Messi's beauty takes on Chelsea's beast
The meaning of the phrase Total Football has become a little blurred, but in Barcelona they like to believe that they are keeping alive the vision of Rinus Michels. The Dutchman espoused a kind of magical liberalism in the Netherlands in the 1960s before taking his sporting ideals to Catalonia and a club that embodied a region's defiance against the oppression of the ailing Franco regime.
Those ideals have been carried into the 21st century, in which Barcelona epitomise the values of a vibrant, hip, fun-loving city, with the torch passed on from Michels via Johan Cruyff to Pep Guardiola, the club's latest coach. Cruyff is the link between the eras, having followed Michels to Barcelona from Ajax and having coached Guardiola, an integral member of his much-vaunted “Dream Team” who won four successive Primera Liga titles in the early 1990s and the club's first European Cup, at Wembley in 1992.
Barcelona represent everything that is good about the game. They play beautiful football, with quality oozing from the fantastic feet of Xavi Hernández, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi, all graduates of the Cantera Barcelonista, the club's phenomenally successful youth academy. The club are owned by their supporters, another Utopian vision, and, having historically renounced shirt sponsorship, they now bear the name of Unicef on their shirts. In a game that often seems to have been devoured by greed, Barcelona stick out like a sore thumb. They are truly a class act.
It is not difficult to portray them as the good guys as they head to Stamford Bridge to face Chelsea, a club built on the wealth and whims of Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire whose impatience and short-termism has undermined his alleged wish to create a team that performs like “Barcelona in blue shirts”.
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A colour-blind spectator would not have much difficulty in distinguishing the teams tonight. The Chelsea players, with a few exceptions, are the hulking colossuses, eager to fizz the ball around at pace and force the kind of high tempo that will allow them to overwhelm their opponents. The Barcelona players, again with a few exceptions, are the little guys who caress the ball and look to devastate their opponents with speed of thought and speed of footwork.
It is a clash of cultures, one that has been more heavily pronounced by the flurry of complaints from the Barcelona camp since the first leg, a frustrating 0-0 draw at the Nou Camp eight days ago. According to Xavi, the Barcelona captain on the night: “We played football. They did not play anything at all. In England they talk about fair play so much. It's a shame that they don't put that into practice on the pitch. There was no fair play from Chelsea at all.”
Yet what is fair play? If it is playing with the kind of reckless abandon that Real Madrid showed as they were subjected to a stunning 6-2 defeat by Barcelona at the Bernabéu on Saturday evening, Guus Hiddink and his Chelsea players will make no apologies for giving it a miss once more tonight. Instead they will play to their strengths, working to a sound tactical game plan that looks to exploit their physical superiority while trying to neutralise the obvious threats posed by Barcelona, such as the trickery of Messi and the incisive passing of Xavi and Iniesta.
Perish the thought that Chelsea's roundheads should prevail against the cavaliers from Catalonia. If they do, we will hear the usual complaints about negative and rough-house tactics or, to borrow a favourite phrase of the Spanish press, “anti- football”. This is the antithesis of Total Football, as espoused by Michels and Cruyff and modified by Frank Rijkaard and Guardiola, Barcelona's previous and present coaches, under whom the phrase has come simply to mean football played with a liberal sprinkling of fantasy.
The whining is the one aspect that rankles when it comes to Barcelona's devotion to the beautiful game. As with Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, there is an assumption that they have a divine right to play their football and that opponents should not be allowed to stop them, even if they do so within the laws of the game. It is a lovely thought, but it is an approach that can appear flawed when opponents are capable of performing with the tactical discipline that Chelsea, with only the odd slip, showed at the Nou Camp and that Manchester United exhibited in beating Barcelona 1-0 over two legs in last season's semi-final.
In an ideal world, everyone would play beautiful football, but even the late, great Michels acknowledged that it could not always be thus. One of his most famous soundbites is that “professional football is something like war; whoever behaves too properly is lost.” It is a line from which he tried to distance himself because it did not fit in with his wider philosophy about how the game should be played, but it showed that even the architect of Total Football was willing to be pragmatic and, presumably, that there had to be an iron fist inside the velvet glove.
Do Barcelona, for all their glorious talent, have what it takes to overcome opponents who are bigger, stronger, more experienced and presumably more committed to a destructive game plan? It would be great for the game if they could, reiterating, after Spain's success in the European Championship finals last summer, that skill and artistry can conquer all. But if it is Chelsea who march through to the final in Rome on May 27, do not be taken in by the recriminations that will inevitably follow from Barcelona.
A great football man once opined that the perfect team is the one that “finds the balance between creative players and those with destructive powers, and between defence, construction and attack”. Barcelona's players may be surprised to hear this, but the man in question was Michels.
