I’ve been thinking about Barcelona-Chelsea for the last two days, including during most of the time when I was ostensibly watching the Man Utd-Arsenal match. That second game played out like an afterthought to the first game in any case, not just because it felt less vital as it was happening but because of the way it seemed to present the principles of Barça-Chelsea in a compromised and depreciated form, as if Arsenal were what happened when the mind that first imagined Barcelona had a moment to think “Oh, but…” In any case, here are a few thoughts to go with the post on Barça I wrote in the minutes after the Chelsea game.
The touchstone for this is a brilliant comment left by reader joao on that post; it’s long, but I’m quoting the whole thing, because it gets at the tension between utility and virtue in football that underlies my own feeling about this game.
You alluded to it on your post, but i think that FC Barcelona is trapped in its on rethoric of moral cause.
Unlike Real Madrid, FC Barcelona carries with him the weight of the morality it wants to embody.
Winning becomes less important, because it is important to win in the “right way”. In Madrid, winning is the ultimate goal. The club exists to win. In that view, their phisical attacks on Messi, though reprehensible, are “justified” by that higher imperitive. In Barcelona, a century of (percieved and real) persecution created a pathos of a football club that is the embodiement of a cultural demonstration. As such, form is as important as result. The utilitarian form is abandoned in favour of surrealism. The dreamed shape is the archetype.
Living with this standard is extremely difficult, in every walk of life. It is also, for lack of a better word, arrogant. Arrogant because it devalues the “loss” as a failure of morality, in the same sense that plato talks of “Beauty” as grounds for moral superiority.
That is why, as the FC Barcelona teams approach their ideological conclusion, i find myself more drawn to the concrete thinking of the Real Madrid model, and their utilitarian approach. It becomes easier to relate to a team that simply plays the game as a game, and not as philosophical panflet (though in reality doing it, by acting as propaganda of a dominant centripetal force exerced by the “Spanish” establishment as oposed to the “Catalan” independentist machinations.
This all becomes apparent in the analisis of both teams performance in the various encarnations of the European Cups.
Both had (most of) the best players ever. From the Di Stefano’s, Gento’s, Kubala’s to the Zidane’s, Ronaldinho’s and Iniesta’s, of the mordern eras, they were blessed with the biggest talent the world had to offer in terms of footballing traditions. However, in Madrid, great players were recruited with the sole objective of creating the best footballing side, with view to winning, and winning they did, specially in Europe, where the need for adaptation is greater than in the more secluded surroundings of La Liga. In Barcelona, teams are designed to be a demonstration of their philosophical motivations, and therefore, the mutating nature of the european game becomes more dificult to accept and to juggle without breaking the designed model. In their illustrious history, they won the European Cup a grand total of 2 times. Both with teams that were percieved to be “Dream Teams”. The Cruyff model, with Koeman, Stoichkov and Guardiola as center players, and the Ronaldinho side, with the mentioned brasilian, Xavi, Messi and Eto’o as the leading performers. For Barcelona, winning the title as Real Madrid won, in the Capelo years, or the Champions League with Jupp Heynkes or Vicente Del Bosque (in 2000) is a no-win, because it is a negation of its Ethos.
As such, FC Barcelona will take the scoreline of this game and accept it for what it is. A moral injustice that has a chance to be corrected in London. Such is their origin and destiny.
If you take the obligation to play the game in the “right” (i.e., attacking, flowing, intricate, “beautiful”) way as an extension of the sense of moral cause that attaches to Barcelona (and I think you can, since, as joao points out, Barça teams “are designed to be a demonstration of their philosophical motivations”) then the conflict between virtue and effectiveness that he describes here is also the key to understanding the Barça-Chelsea match. Chelsea were playing to achieve a certain result, they devised a plan that they believed would effectively achieve it, and then they executed that plan (successfully, as it turned out). Barça—though winning the game was surely uppermost in the minds of the players—were playing in a style that was haunted by an ideal, and they weren’t prepared to surrender the ideal even if it might have meant winning the match. Like a few other teams blessed with extraordinary technical ability, especially Wenger’s Arsenal, they seem to train with the assumption that if they realize the ideal, the wins will come. But implicitly, maybe even unconsciously in Barcelona’s case, it’s the ideal, and not the wins, that they’re primarily striving for.
So how important is winning, and how does it relate to the aesthetic appreciation of football? I sympathize with the frustration of joao and some of the other commenters with the abstruseness of the “moral cause” approach to style. After all, the competitive aspect is the principle around which the entire game is organized; it’s what makes it a game, what creates the conflict that in turn creates its capacity for drama, and treating it as a matter of no importance always seems, to me at least, to miss the point. I’ve been accused of “wanking off to Messi” more than most people, I think, but even for me, there are times when the cultivated appreciation of style (think of the air of superiority to the scoreline that generally accompanies the repetition of that Danny Blanchflower quote) threatens to become absurd.
Yes, it matters that the players are trying to win, and to say that it doesn’t is actually to take away a great deal of the depth and intensity available to the watcher of football: the thrill of seeing Scotland’s courage when, in their utterly unlovely way, they beat France in Paris, the pain of seeing Croatia and then Turkey lose in Euro 2008, the joy of seeing a late, improbable goal. As great as a span of deft passing or a balletic goal can be in a vacuum, that larger competitive narrative still decides much, maybe most, of our emotional response to the game. For a team to complicate that state of things with a primary commitment to style, rather than allowing style to emerge naturally out of competitive conflict, can seem almost decadent, and the simplicity of the “do what will work” approach exemplified by Chelsea can feel more fundamental and more honest. You play the game as it exists, you don’t enforce some morally pure revision of it that only exists in your mind.
Or don’t you? A few months ago I wrote a pair of posts exploring the term “the beautiful game” and explaining my understand of it. In the first, I argued that football’s capacity for beauty was an extension of its capacity for ugliness, that it was because the game was so frequently incoherent that its moments of sudden coherence were so arresting. In the second, I argued that what ultimately made football beautiful was that the rules—that is, the form of the game—were willing to let in so much of that confusion and arbitrariness when most sports seemed designed to keep them out. It made football a better analogue for life that tragedy and absurdity had their place on the pitch, and the fact that, on the pitch, those forces could occasionally be overcome meant that passages of play could become eloquently, and almost astonishingly, meaningful. That, in turn, led to the sense that there are right ways and wrong ways to play the game:
It’s clear, for instance, that football is unique among major sports in the extent to which its fans believe that there are good and bad ways to play it. Certain styles of play in every sport accumulate a vague air of moral authority, but these are usually based in some idea of efficacy or tactical soundness; the overwhelming consensus in favor of attacking football, on the other hand, has nothing to do with winning and even causes footballers and football fans to disavow the importance of winning with an astonishing regularity. Danny Blanchflower is its conscience, not Vince Lombardi. What positive, attacking football has in its favor is not that it works more effectively than defensive football but that it sets itself sharply against dullness and randomness and creates opportunities for players to impose a perceptible shape on the game. Defensive, “negative” football, by contrast, tends to work in concert with the natural entropy of the game and to lend itself to long stretches of uncertainty and stalemate.
The rules of football could be changed in such a way that those forces would have less purchase on the game—even something as simple as restarting the clock at regular intervals would probably have this effect. But to do so would be to reduce the joy that accompanies football’s moments of beauty and also to change the meaning of those moments.
You don’t have to agree with the specific terminology here to see the argument that, because the game is so precariously situated between creative and entropic states of being, the players are always, in a sense, playing against the game as well as against each other; they’re required to lift it up to the plane on which it makes sense. I think you could say that this is a large part of the special genius of the sport: that unlike, say, tennis, which is simply a beautifully constructed game and always possesses a kind of sculptural logic, soccer is only a great game for the spectator when the players make a great game out of it. Their task includes a creative obligation that’s only partly fulfilled by their participation in the competitive form of the game. A great player in the NFL—even someone like Barry Sanders, who regularly did things I’ve never seen another human being even try—is essentially great because he performs his specific function better than anyone else and gives his team a better chance to win. A great soccer player—Zidane, say—is great because, in addition to that accomplishment, he lifts a new understanding out of the flow of play and says “football can be like this.”
But again, all this has to happen within a competitive framework that can’t simply be dismissed in favor of intellectual beauties. The two words in the term “beautiful game” are always struggling against each other in some ways, but they have to coexist. That’s why, for me, the necessary dream is to find a team that resolves the tension, that plays beautifully and coherently and defeats both the chaos of the game and all the studs-up, 10-men-behind-the-ball bullies who try to stop it. Every so often a team like that comes along—recently, Spain at Euro 2008, Arsenal at their peak under Wenger—but most teams that have that potential wind up in the Holland ’74 category: inspired sides who thrilled everyone that saw them but couldn’t quite take the crown. Those failures, for all that there’s often something wonderful even in the manner of their failure, are ultimately fuel for the belief that playing attractive football is a quixotic task—in other words, that reality is cynical.
After the first clasico this year, when Barça managed to score those late goals despite the assault on Messi that Real had waged all game—for me, maybe the best moment in football all year—I thought they were the rare team that could actually achieve that marriage of style and effectiveness, that could prove that grace and joy can knock four goals past thuggishness. After the Chelsea game, I thought that maybe they weren’t. I knew that everyone would rush to their defense and blame Chelsea. But Chelsea is just a fact of the world. Barça are the team that have the chance to be something really special, and if they’re going to be it, they’ll have to accomplish that destiny in the world as it actually exists. Virtue in football is a choice, and it’s not up to Chelsea to clear a path for them, and it’s not up to us to protect them. If they can’t do it, if they partly or wholly fall short of the ideal, then in my opinion we ought to say where they fell short as well as where they didn’t. Barcelona matters; there are things that matter more.
Anyway, that’s why I was in the mood to be hard on them after the Chelsea match, and that’s what I think is at stake at Stamford Bridge. For all sorts of reasons that transcend this season, it’s the biggest match of this season so far.
Read More: Barcelona, Chelsea, Football as Philosophy
by Brian Phillips · April 30, 2009
second leg against chelsea is a massive game. this is really the opportunity for this team to prove that they can take this attacking, attractive style of play and actually do something with it as opposed to falling into that holland ’74 category of teams that came, amazed, but didn’t conquer.
i think that at one end the spectrum of our season is the clasico at camp nou where were attacked attacked attacked (19 shots to their 6) and they did was attack messi. hell eto’o even missed a penalty but scored later and then messi added another in the 90th. that is still the best and most important moment of this season for me – sure beating valladolid and almeria by five and six goals is impressive but those games don’t have anywhere near the significance of that first clasico or, getting to my next point, the 0-0 against chelsea.
this is the other end of the spectrum. we attacked and attacked and attacked (19 shots to their 3, 7 fouls to their 20) but got nothing in the end. i was pissed at how chelsea played after the game but after a few days’ thought i’ve come to terms with it i guess. chelsea came with a scheme and they executed it flawlessly, and at times, easily. we didn’t adapt, we kept trying to piss into the wind, and that is where we failed. lowest point of the season for me, just so disappointed with the result. obviously chelsea are going to have to attack eventually in london, but that doesn’t mean we can go in with the same mindset and the same old modus operandi, pep needs to figure something out. this is his first real big test as a manager – previously, his players have been able to either leap over or knock down any walls that were in their way, but we have seen that chelsea is an infinitely tall, impenetrable wall, with only one tiny door with one tiny keyhole to get through.
thinking about it more and more i’m losing confidence in pep because we’ve been able to play this way all season and get away with it. the second leg will be a totally different game, however, and i just hope that pep brings something new and effective to the table.
Brian,
Can i just say how honored i feel right now? I have no words…
Responding to your post, i think this is just an example of the underlying tension between form and function, that is at the core of every manifestation of human action, be it artistic, political or other.
Football, and its immediate and intense emotional environment, gives this debate a more urgent meaning.
I watched the first of this season’s “classicos” and i was honestly impressed by the Real Madrid’s players intensity in the game, and their sense of honor and pride in wearing the white shirts.
As much as people focused on the Barcelona story, the will and guts of the Real Madrid players created the real tension in that game. The result was not debatable. Barcelona would win. Real would lose. The important thing for the Real Madrid fans was the “how” of the loss – not because it made a difference to them, but because it mattered to the FC Barcelona season. That “how” was to be decided by the numbers and the attitude on the field. And that determination would be important in the relation between the two main clubs in Spain. A humiliating Barcelona win, would create a Leviathan that would be insurmountable for Real Madrid.
The close nature of the actual defeat, gave credence to the Real faithful that their spirit and competitiveness still had a place in this year’s La Liga. That Real delayed the inevitable, scrapping around for all they could find, and clinging to every possible confrontation, every possession, as a microscopic victory, was a season-changing event in itself. As such, the physical assault on Messi was viewed in Madrid, not as a desperate move by a weaken side, but as a sign of a competitive spirit that still believed it could resurrect a prematurely defunct season. They had created the doubt in Barcelona.
Real entered the lion’s cage and came out alive. Bruised and battered, but alive, and it was all that mattered, because they knew that their spirit would allow them to fight another day. That day comes this weekend. Barcelona comes to the Bernabeu just 4 points ahead and Real is the team on form, having just won away at Seville.
This game comes before the one against Chelsea. And it may well determine a lot about that game. If roles were reversed, and it be Real playing in London, you could make the case that their competitive streak would prevent them from losing two game in a row. FC Barcelona, however, are a different animal. They rely on their belief in their moral compass. They have to believe in their way as the “right” way, and any uncertainty that may creep in, is a possible step closer to the abyss.
Either way, people will remember this incarnation of FC Barcelona as one of the best football sides ever. As such, any loss in either of the games will ultimately not matter as much to the Barça fan as it might do to others, because their moral superiority is already proven and that counts almost as much as wins on the field.
Joao, you bring up a really good point about RM’s intensity and fight in the clasico. I suppose they did end up with a “bloody but unbowed” mindset after that game, and we’ve seen what they’ve done with that.
Joao’s comment had me thinking about Nabakov’s Speak Memory where he goes into the development of his love for butterflies. In describing the many methods various species use to camouflage themselves hoping to avoid predators, he goes on to discuss how so many species have developed colors and patterns so minute or intricate that they would be impossible for the eyes of any predator to appreciate. He how mentions that this type superfluous ornamentation reminds him of fiction in it’s highest from.
Great stuff, all of you
It’s the same stubborn adherence to the ideology of beauty in soccer vs. winning in soccer that has defined the Brazilian teams of the 70s and 80s, as well as just about every Dutch national team in history.
Beauty always comes first, and more often than not, they will live and die by that sword.
Excellent stuff, Brian!
But what do you expect them to do Brian, be less good so that Chelsea and Real come out of their shells?
Barcelona will always play the same. There is no club that is so consistently, uncompromisingly committed to their style of play as Barca. The only thing that changes is that in some years they have teams that are better at that than in others, and depending on their opposition and a bit of luck, those better years produce triumphs.
“[S]occer is only a great game for the spectator when the players make a great game out of it.”
Absolutely right, the tension here is between the tendencies towards life and death drives (Eros and Thanatos) which are highlighted by football.
I’d posit two states, states of creative play on the side of Eros, and on the other hand, the desire to preserve or return to an earlier state on the side of Thanatos. Barca’s power seems to be in their standing for the former when they are in a position of fame and importance which makes most clubs turn towards the latter. Chelsea are pure death drive manifested as sport: a paranoid machine who’s parts only care about restoring themselves to a time when they were considered the greatest in the world. Sometimes watching someone like Ballack play he looks trapped under the weight of his need to re-become ‘Ballack’, the proper name for the player who dragged along Germany and Munich single-handedly at times, of whom he is now only a simulacrum.
However, I’m uncomfortable with attributing either of these tendencies to questions of good / evil. Rather than push the goals of an Erotic football team to a transcendental fantasy of right or wrong, take them as what they are: a manifestation of the drive to create something, to effect a change in the system. Playing quickly and intricately isn’t to become beautiful in any meaningful way. It is an attractor of human attention because our brains are designed to look at systems which rapidly change with interest; to calculate from what has been what might be, and to work out how it can help us.
Having watched Newcastle’s season in a a semi-conscious stupor I am all too painfully aware of how unrewarding it can be watch a team devoid of any creative ability try and play football ‘by the numbers’. Hoist it into the box. Take no chances. Clear the lines. Mediocrity rather than risk. As a player, I could see some kind of enjoyment in playing the game like that, but watching it? No way.
Football as a spectator sport is a game the mind plays with itself, trying to understand a complex yet constrained network within a defined area – a kind of super-dynamic su-doku – from the chaos of which we see order. Young teams, teams on the way up, teams that offer innovation – these things attract our attention. On the other hand, when we see a team in stasis, concerned only with a futile attempt to preserve its past we are disinterested. All the more so when the method of preservation is the exact opposite of the thing which might have made the club or its players great in the first place: the new.
Beauty is a relative term and I don’t see why “attacking, flowing, intricate” football is the only form that can be beautiful or “moral”. There is beauty in defense, in physical play, in jagged rythms. If Barca is Bach then Chelsea is Shoenberg. And the Catalan press is the crowds who booed Stravinsky at the premier of the Rite of Spring.
I agree that “attacking, flowing, intricate” football isn’t the only form of beauty in the game. A well-timed slide-tackle can be just as awe-inspiring as a great one-two. However, the comparison of Chelsea to Shoenberg I will not abide. Shoenberg was a master of invention; dismantling what was acceptable in Western music and creating a tension beyond the vision of his peers. While the argument may be semantic, the idea of putting nine men behind the ball is by no means a restructuring of our “concept” of the game. In fact, I would consider it to be wholly degenerate. Chelsea’s tactics, the other night, will never be considered “beautiful” which, I guess, is the real rub. If we are to call football “the beautiful game” and wish to concern ourselves with what beauty in the game is, then we will have to come up with new terms (as with all great art, the selling; the ability to talk about it, creates its worth) that successfully rise what I saw as a negative display into something positive.
Now, if I’m to view the Chelsea tactic as negative, I need to qualify that. I argue that Chelsea did not, in fact, play football; as I consider football to be a game of defense AND attack. Just as John Madden with his ever-obvious rhetoric, “If you don’t score any points, you can’t win the game.”
In order to give Chelsea some kind of conceptual credit, I have to believe that they were actively changing the structure of the game. Which has some merit. Not unlike the NBA where the game has changed so dramatically because the players have begun to outsize the playing field, Chelsea, by placing the entire squad in the defensive half, created a structure that imbalanced the field, effectively changing the structure of the game, as we know it, when Barca was in possession.
Whether it’s conceptually brilliant, or simply callow, I can’t say that I enjoyed watching that game. And being that sports are designed as a spectacle, Chelsea failed miserably in their ability to impress, inspire, excite… etc.
Beauty in defense: Bobby Moore’s tackle on Jairzinho.
As Germany demonstrated in the Euro 2008 final, even a well-executed defensive strategy can sometimes be as dangerous as its opposite. With slight alterations to the decisive play, the outcome of the game could have been different. Torres spoke of the water on the field and how under dry conditions the spin of the ball might have carried it past the goal.
Clearly last summer’s Spain was a “team…that plays beautifully and coherently and defeats both the chaos of the game and all the studs-up, 10-men-behind-the-ball bullies who try to stop it”. Barcelona has yet to answer the question, but it strikes me as harsh for fans of the game to allow a millisecond and a few centimeters on one side of the post to (potentially) sort Spain ’08 and Barcelona into different categories. Doesn’t defeating the chaos of the game often require an element of favorable chance?
When a goal comes out of nothing (i.e. does not result from constructive play), as it nearly did for Drogba, does it not expose the illusory nature of football “methodologies”? Were it not for our expectations, why would Barcelona’s commitment to its philosophy be less forgivable than any other approach, when all are equally capable of being undone by deflections, incorrect calls, individual errors, solo brilliance, etc.?
In playing only to its strengths behind the ball, Chelsea becomes more vulnerable to that one mistake, that one fraction of a second that enables Barcelona to fulfill its potential. As Bojan rose to meet the cross in added time, it seemed that this weakness in Chelsea’s plan had been exposed. As the ball sailed over the bar, it counseled patience.
Great article and posts.
Still I am concerned with what i have read (not so much here) about how this was a victory for Chelsea. Barcelona simply didnt take their chances. Eto’o should have passed to Henry, Bojan should have nodded in, and Henry also had a clear route.
At SB, if one of those is in Chelsea will have a lot of work to do.
Beauty in defense: Canavaro slamming into the post trying to keep Messi’s delicate chip out at the end of the lost classico early this season.
For all intents and purposes, what we are looking here for, while discussing dribbling skills, goals and penalties, is possibility of truth in the random and chaotic world of a game.
Barcelona has a real chance to become the first team, since the Magic Magyars (i would consider the Real Madrid of the late 50′s as a possible candidate if it were not the child of the hungarian ideal), to achieve a real shift in the basis of the game, that is based on a predisposition to play attacking football.
Every sport has become, through coaching, an attempt at negating the variables on offer. You build teams based on defense because it is easier to control and create dependence on a defensive stand than on an attacking model, that is less prone to control. That is true in every sport, be it Football (american or soccer), basketball or even baseball.
“Defense wins championships, and attacks win games”, goes the saying. Mourinho and Capelo are the masters and leading mentors of this approach.
Barcelona, are attempting to create a new paradigm of football. To create a dominant team from the front. Their success may force a rupture in the interpretation of the rules of success in football.
Really good piece, you’ve summed up Barcelona very well.
As to whether Tuesday counted as a success for Chelsea, is there not an argument that, their defensive set-up apart, Chelsea simply weren’t able to attack Barcelona? The Chelsea midfield was pretty poor, Lampard and company weren’t effective against their Barca counterparts, Drogba was isolated and Chelsea’s few chances came from defensive mistakes. Maybe Chelsea had no choice but to play exactly as they did. What will they do if Barca score? The tie could easily go either way, but a 0-0 in the first leg is not quite the victory for Chelsea that many, especially in the British press, seem to think.
Great article and FANTASTIC POST BY JOAO.
A few thoughts:
1) We should always be careful with what lens we view the world. If we impose a black-white worldview on the reality we want to perceive, such as beautiful/ugly and win/loss, then we will see what we wanted to see. Brian did a great job of pointing out the competitive frame placed on the sport, so its inescapable that a game will end in a win or loss.
But how do we measure success? Assume Barcelona loses La Liga and the CL – is semifinalist that bad? Is second place that bad? Would we rather sit through 90 minutes every Sunday of catenaccio to see our heroes lift a trophy? I would rather see 15 minutes of Henry, E’too, and Messi running around defenses, even if they lose the match 5-3 and never lift a trophy.
As spectators, we have a privileged and unique role. We set our own expectations and values – I value what I see, and I turned off the Chelsea-Barcelona game at half time. If I want to see a trainwreck, I will see a real one with blood and gore.
2) Chelsea played their strongest formation – they lack a genuine class winger (Malouda is improving but….) and have two world class holding mids in Essien and Mikel. I know the “reality discourse” is loaded, but the last time chelsea excited me was the second leg against Barcelona when Duff and company were lethal on the counter.
I think A.’s question is pretty important. The ctitique of Barca as valuing style over results, or failing to play a more utlitarian game, presumes there is some other option that Barca are willfully ignoring. So what is it that they are failing to do?
Sides are considered utilitarian because of what they lack, namely an aesthetically pleasing style. But are teams that are aesthetically pleasing necessarily lacking in utility? I’m not sure that holds up. The way they function is more difficult to achieve and sustain, but the system that came through Ajax, the Dutch national team, and on to Barca is based on a belief that it is the most effective system when played well. Its beauty was and is a by product of its utility.
Thoughtfully and engagingly written Brian.
There’s also a tendency to underestimate Barca’s defensive game, if not their defenders (some of whom are arguably more efficient passers than they are tacklers, and do a better job of distributing the ball than clearing imminent danger).
Ever since Riijkaard, the team thoroughly embodies the modernist philosophy of pressure high up the pitch reminiscent of the Milan teams of Sacchi and Capello, to a very high level. They hunt in packs for the ball, squeezing the available space to play the ball through, thus leading to the opposition either turning the ball up directly or hoofing it up field for the Barcelona back-men to recover.
This is the best thing I’ve read, post and comments, in a long time.
I have a question to posit to everyone, though, because I haven’t seen it addressed yet.
In the modern Iterations of Madrid and Barsa, what role does St. Iker play in all of this?
I hope Chelsea is watching the Classico right now. This is an absolute cracker and my man Ray Hudson called Chelsea cowards.
Also, TT is back! The Barca smile is gone and the hard-stare returns; the Arsenal blood seeping into the Crimson and Blue.
Ryan — So true about TT. He’s not happy to be there anymore. It seems like he’s lost the complacency, too, because the sense of entitlement you sometimes see from him on the French National team is nowhere to be found. He is bringing the ruckus.
Watching Casillas singlehandedly try to fend off the Barsa attack today reminds me of warfare. Something about one piece of superior technology holding off a less technologically advanced opponent. The defensive version of the Spanish conquest of South America. Michael Caine in Zulu, if the Brits had lost in the end.
Amare,
I have to think that St. Iker is just that. A man placed in an alien element, asked to become a missionary of a foreign model to the Real Madrid pattern. His constant sacrificial action, saving the infidels from their destiny. That’s why it was so jarring to see the St. Iker’s performance at the game vs. Bilbau (yet another of the spanish teams that deserves close attention, for reasons that are much more important than a win or loss).
However, the “Real” (get it?) symbol of Madrid is Raul. Never the most gifted, never the most talented, never the most loved, but always the most important. Real is Raul. The indomitable will to win against everyone and every time, in no matter what way.
Amare — That’s exactly it! He’s Charlton Heston in Khartoum!
“A world with no room for the Ikers is a world that will return to the sands.”
OH MY LORD! TT cannot be contained!
Real will throw caution to the wind.
There is no pride to be saved, only glory to be achieved.
With Chelsea forced to come out and get a goal this week, they are going to find out what it’s like to be terrorized in their own home.
Some of Ray’s commentary:
“Don’t ever call this team a machine, they are botanical.”
“A brutal way to have your nose rubbed in it.”
“Pique just puts the biggest cherry on the cake!”
“Life just beats you down sometimes and when you see football like this it just rises you up.”
“Let’s just accept this wonderful game of art provided by the Artisans of Barcelona.”
“…and reads him like a nursery rhyme book”
“Get me an oxygen tank, Phil”
“Drives past and leaves him like Lot’s wife!”
“Just think we still have another hour of this.” – Phil “Praise the good Lord.” – Ray
“Brilliant football with no result in the end, but who gives a damn!”
“He takes the earth’s rotation into consideration!”
“More intense than 100 wigwams!”
To add to Ryan’s list, Ray on Xavi:
‘cerebral dictator’ with ‘chameleon eyes’
Really, one could write poetry out of it.
“Don’t ever call this team a machine, they are botanical.”
“…and reads him like a nursery rhyme book”
“He takes the earth’s rotation into consideration!”
“More intense than 100 wigwams!”
If ever someone showed there was a thin line between madness and genius…What a list!
After the match, as the camera lingered on Messi: “He has better biorhythms than a peregrine falcon…and he clipped Real’s wings tonight.”
Forgive a Yank, but where are these amazing quotes coming from?
Also, that Bojan streak down the flank after he torched…Robben I think? And then made the beautiful cross to Messi is a harbinger of beautiful things to come. Beautiful, and terrifying.
Not to be horribly cynical here, but how much can we honestly read into this game, looking ahead to Wednesday? It reminded me of the Champions League game between Barca and Bayern — for all the fine words spoken about it, it was hard to know where Barca’s brilliance ended and Bayern’s awfulness began.
I thought Madrid played with amazing courage and willfulness in the first half. They may have lost focus in the 2nd with the advent of goals, but they were no Munich.
Amare, the quotes are from the most wonderful sports commentator around: GolTV’s Ray Hudson. Just youtube his name and listen to the hilarious and amazing things he says.
PS from a Yank to a Yank.
Chicago love for La Liga!
I do believe that this is a very good simulation of wednesday’s game.
A lesser Barcelona team could have floundered and drowned in self-pity after the Real’s goal. They didn’t.
Much like Spartan warriors they stood up and marched, crumbling all before them, armed with their inner might and their moral ambitions.
It does not bode well for Chelsea. This Barcelona team has the same confidence, belief and might as the Red Army after Stalingrad, and they will march on Stamford Bridge like the March on Berlin.
I couldn’t agree more. Also, I noticed a tactical change in the usual firmness of the front 3 today. For the better part of the season the big boys have stayed very nearly to their position except for the one-touch overlap (Messi to Eto) that is so prevalent. I swear I haven’t seen Messi on the left side of the field in a long time. Anyway, I think this was a taste of the cross-pattern runs we are going to witness in an effort to get Terry and Alex to break rank. I’m betting on a goal extravaganza!
I only get the spanish feed on GOLTV….how do I switch to this god of play-by-play?
The GOLTV commentary is fantastic – nice quotes.
Well, a 6-2 drubbing at the Bernabeu and Barcelona can finally say adios to the Ronaldinho era (although there was no standing applause this time around).
I find myself sounding like a car commercial when trying to describe the game and players:
“beauty meets efficiency”
“turns on a dime with amazing traction”
“incredibly precise yet powerful”
“50mpg and four wheel drive in rainy conditions”
Just to say, belatedly: kudos to Brian and all who have commented on this thread and the previous Barcelona-Chelsea one. It’s been seriously thought-provoking stuff.
i don`t believe in beauty per se. at least on a football pitch. big ugly cavemen play big ugly caveman football. midgets play midget football.
While watching the replay last night, another quote that I couldn’t resist:
After Barca had made it 5-2:
“…and that puts them to bed with five hot water bottles.”
After Henry’s second goal: He has the face of a warrior, the touch of a belly dancer!”
After one of Messi’s runs: Zeus is on Mt. Olympus with his Messi shirt on.”
After Ramos’ goal gives Madrid brief hope: “Sergio Ramos goes Barry White disco there, free as a lark in the park. Vamanos!”
A bit back-topic, but someone on your previous Champions League post asked the question (re: the consensus definition of “beautiful” and the relative pedanticness of it):
Is watching the ball move from wing to wing at a leisurely stroll really better than watching a midfielder fall on his ass, get pounced on by three players tearing on 60-yard runs to score a screamer from 30 yards? Am I unelvolved, or does anyone else find Barcelona the footballing equivalent of eleven Europeans discussing Bauhaus?
I think this is important. I watch Barcelona and the rest of La Liga games pretty often (and I dispute the leisureliness of the wing-to-wing swtiching described here). I watch the EPL less regularly, and I like it a bit less for the following reason: a great EPL goal seems to be exactly what the above commenter described, and not all that common at that. The 30-yard screamer is wonderful to see but most often there isn’t much inventiveness preceding it, unless you count an opposing midfielder falling on his ass as “inventive.” If I could be promised 2 30-yard screamers per match I’d be a lot more willing to watch your run-of-the-weekend EPL game, but most of the time it resembles the drunken air-hockey I used to play in my parents’ basement. The ball pings around crazily most often resulting in a cross just missing a desperate lung-bursting run from the only supporting player with any time or space to recognize that he should suddenly be in position to score. The best goals of the EPL are incredible, but as Ray Hudson said this weekend during the clasico after a not-quite goal off a four short pass exchange between Xavi and Messi, “nothing came of that, and who gives a damn!! absolutely brilliant.”
With the EPL I usually feel just fine watching the highlights of the week. Now I’ll ask, am I crazy?
Great article, matched by the discussion afterwards as well. Some of those quotes are brilliant!
This is good stuff. I had originally prepared a essay-like response/tangent to your first post. This was going to cover a lot of what your second post and subsequent comments covered, only I was going to cover these ideas with sloppier and more imprecise language. So I scrapped it to keep me from looking like a fool and just wrote more of a recap on this beast of a discussion as I see it so far (www.footsmoke.com). It doesn’t really add much to the discussion, and really just quotes you and said commentators a lot. But I think there’s a deeper reason it’s so easy to see Barcelona as a sort of romantic poem. They might be the only truly lyrical team left, as opposed to those horses of the Premiership that “we feel just fine watching the highlights of,” as Nora said. In creating such results-driven forms, teams like Liverpool and Chelsea willfully divorce themselves from the lyrical narrative of the game that Barcelona so warmly embraces. At the same time, Barcelona seems caught up in some of the same postmodernist conundrums as language itself, as savvy readers like Joao Jorge pointed out…
The thing is — and I’m referring to Liverpool’s torrid streak a couple months ago (and wearing a Gerrard jersey as I write this)– when the thoroughbreds tap into the “lyrical narrative of the game” it is transfixing and breathtaking.
I think that there’s more to a team’s ‘lyrical narrative’ than style of play- Wenger’s focus on youth/ building a team the ‘right way’ is as important as Arsenal’s attacking football. For Barcelona, their appointed status as guardians of Catalan culture against the Spanish state/ Franco as important to their identity as their refusal to compromise their playing style. But the idealistic nature of these two teams means they can be difficult to relate to- only a true elite/ aristocratic team could even begin to consider style more important than winning.
Chelsea and Liverpool’s pragmatism has been repeatedly criticized but in truth they are both fascinating clubs. Chelsea are funny, in that they combined monetary excess with Mourinho’s utilitarian football, but it was the ‘us against the world attitude’, gatecrashing the elite, everybody hated them and they didn’t care, provoking fights with everyone, upsetting the established order, that defined the team. (Now they really are part of the establishment with less confrontational managers, so maybe Chelsea need a new story.) Liverpool, meanwhile, are just the opposite- they are about trying to live up to some mythic impossible History- having already reinvented themselves as a kind of unlikely underdog.
But background narratives aside, both Chelsea and Liverpool, while not afraid of pragmatics, are also full of great players capable of stunning performances- not the same kind as Barcelona of course, but compelling all the same, full of pace and strength. Chelsea refusing to play football last week was so frustrating because we know that they can- is there anyone better than Drogba on his day? How many midfielders can match Essien? Rather than putting out these talents and trying to compete, Chelsea did nothing (although I think that’s in part because their midfield couldn’t handle Barca’s).
My favorite part of original post was the end, when Brian said we can’t try to protect Barcelona from the Chelseas of the world. As for Chelsea, while they have every right to park the bus rather than play to their peak, we don’t have to admire them for it. But both are legit styles of play. By parking the bus Chelsea exaggerated the differences in style to a parody, the ‘lyrical narrative’ of the game, the teams, to a simplistic good v. evil. But I don’t think its that easy, there are many compelling styles of football, even if few are as skillful and unique as Barcelona’s.
Both Chelsea and Barcelona do what they think they must in order to get to the Final. We mustn’t lose sight of that.
In Chelsea’s case, that was to eliminate the first leg as a contest. They were not going to be left with an insurmountable task in the return leg!
Such is the nature of the format of the CL. Faced against a hugely talented, in-form opponent, every team on the wrong end of this spectrum will take their chances with the home leg, some will even do it from a position of advantage (not, of course, Barcelona).
Perhaps if we want clashes between Barca-Chelsea or Man Utd-Arsenal to be a better contest in the first leg we should clamor for the FA Cup format and straight KO from start to finish.
Wonderful article. This tension you point out, between creative expression and practicality, doesn’t often manifest in American sports (basketball, “American football”), where the most common axiom is “defense wins championships”.
A notable recent exception to this was the Phoenix Suns NBA team between about 2005-2007. The team of Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire, Quentin Richardson, Shawn Marion, and Joe Johnston, coached by Mike D’Antoni, was an absolute joy to watch. Their strategy was simply to out-gun their opponent, with their stated goal being to score as much as possible in open court breaks or less than 7 seconds into the shot clock.
The nucleus was Steve Nash (any coincidence that he is said to have been a fantastic football player in his youth and nearly pursued that game rather than basketball?), who’s vision and creativity have perhaps never been seen in the sport.
Unfortunately, this team was never able to win an NBA championship and was quickly dismantled, the coach replaced, and a more “defense-oriented” style of play was instituted. A sad day for those who love the game of basketball.
Hahahaha! The quoted comment was so long that I forgot it was not RoP’s writing as I Googled “Barcelona persecution”. I began to think that Mr. Phillips must have acquired a brilliant editor in the two years since writing this piece, because he is misspelling words and making grammatical errors perpetuated by OTHER soccer blogs! Haha, I am happy this is not the case. While I was surprised to find some British football commentators and writers making great use of the dexterity of the English language, almost all American soccer writers don’t seem to give a flying fuck about writing well or even using a spelling checker.
Your blog is my football academic (and artistic) refuge. I learn new words/concepts or am reacquainted with old ones. I don’t have to cringe at the sight of “professionals” writing like idiots. And I feel as if I am partaking in aesthetic, artistic, beautiful, and even academic. Reading your blog is reminiscent of reading Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and sometimes Djuna Barnes, lol.