You want to believe playing good football is not pragmatic, as if just by not playing good football you’ll win. A nonsensical idea.

Most of the most successful teams ever have played good attacking football. The confidence to impose oneself on a match is the true mark of superiority.

A team that sets up not to concede and not to lose concedes inferiority.

Playing football does not guarantee you will win games, but Bolton or Stoke never won trebles or finished seasons unbeaten either.

Every season 99% of fans will wait till the last few weeks of the season to find out how successful their teams would have been. Playing well at least makes the passage more passable.

Conversely, the pragmatist views this re-re-incarnation of Mourinho’s Chelsea under Hiddink as a team that, undone by unbalanced expression run amok under Scolari, has returned to an ethos of playing to win. Expression and creativity’s all well and good, but as long as it’s fully compatible with winning–Revie’s rejoinder that “You get nowt for coming in second” rings just as true today as it did 35 years ago.

Yet what amazes me a few days after the fact is that football is such a human, capricious game where foresight, philosophy, and organization can be rendered null through one swing of a boot and simple human error under pressure. We can argue until it’s 2 am and the caffeine buzz from the double espresso at 11 finally dulls our minds into butter knives about footballing philosophies and preferences, and that’s a great part of being a fan of any sport. But what often happens is that these tactical frameworks, instructions, and monotonously practiced passes, shots, and tackles break down into an extremely high-level kickabout that can equally end in either a fair result or a case of highway robbery that is, for the most part, immutable. It’s all so…human.

I return to Shankly’s wisdom, not just as a Liverpool supporter, but as someone who believes he was one of the few figures in the history of the sport who actually represented something more than results on the pitch; an outlook on life that was unadorned but refined and ultimately quite wise: “Football is a simple game made complicated by people who should know better.”

Anyway, my point still stands about Barcelona doing absolutely nothing in the 2nd leg. For the guys above claiming that Chelsea didn’t attack, that’s a load of nonsense, we created more attacking opportunities than Barcelona, you had 1 shot on target for the entire match. You had a load of possession but as I discovered with Scolari, passing the ball from side to side doesn’t really get you anyway unless you’re creating chances on goal.

It was a devastating loss for us. We’ve had so much heartbreak in this competition but I think we’re better for it. Because if we do ever finally win this thing, it will be all the sweeter. I just feel sorry for guys like Ballack and even Drogba (even though he lost the plot) because they knew in the 93rd minute that that was probably the last chance they had to play/win a Champions League final.

And Ballack has to be the unluckiest player ever. Misses the 2002 World Cup because of suspension when he got Germany there on his own boot, loses the Champions league final twice and also loses the European final last year. When he went nuts you could see it was his entire career’s frustrations exploding at once.

I can’t refute what you’ve said. I also like to believe that football is similar to great art in that it is capable of producing an aesthetic response and speaking intimately to the human condition in its myriad permutations — flair, anger, shame, pride, etc.

But what I really want to make known is that there is an upside and a downside to placing football on this pedestal. If football speaks to the human condition, and if it does not always speak to it kindly, then it follows that we as football fans have the real potential to hurt ourselves by it. An Arsenal fan hanged himself earlier this week. Ovrebo’s had threats on his life. I wish I could say that these events are unprecedented, but they are not.

The vast majority of fans can, after a given match, redirect the emotions which have arisen and cope with the situation. If an existential crisis has arisen during the game (e.g., “I am a Chelsea fan. Chelsea has lost. Therefore I am a loser for liking Chelsea, and therefore my life has less meaning.”), most fans are capable of resolving it. But what if some fans aren’t? It could happen to anyone, at any given time, if they were unstable enough. No one is exempt, just like no one is immune to cancer or depression. Integrating football and humanity the way we are discussing here can enhance one’s quality of life, sure. But I’m saying that it can also damage it, or even destroy it, as the case may be.

Football is fantastic and I love it to death. But really that’s just a metaphor, and really it’s just football. At the end of the day, we have to be okay with that.

Everyone chose to ignore that as well.

The “a match is just a match” attitude seems so dreary to me because it suggests that we have to be cowed by the proportions of things to the point that we can’t even think about our own feelings toward them. Watching a team play, I have an aesthetic response: it makes me feel something. Thinking about that, I realize that the way they play suggests a certain attitude toward life, that it stylizes a range of qualities: joy, arrogance, pessimism, flair, anger, whatever. Obviously this is all more or less confined to a metaphoric plane, but not any more so than the conclusion of the person who looks at Botticelli’s Primavera and decides that it represents a harmonious conception of the universe.

So why can’t I take that side of my brain into my experience of a game? Surely it’s not so difficult to see the difference between saying “Chelsea and Barcelona will settle the existential crisis of modern football” and saying “This match can be seen as important because of the qualities each team represents.” I think it’s pretty much given that the latter is what we mean when we say something like, “This is the biggest match of the year so far”*.

Keeping my mind scrubbed of all this stuff just so I don’t risk making any unwarranted historical claims seems really boring, honestly. Why not risk the occasional unwarranted historical claim and try to see something huge and beautiful in the sport you love?

Don’t get me wrong; I can see that at a far distant point of imagined intensity there’s a certain “strike through the mask” danger in confusing the symbol with the essence it represents. But surely no one really thinks that Captain Ahab is what’s happening here. Or am I totally misunderstanding your point?

* UPDATE: Obviously that’s not what Sky Sports means. But you see my point.

I was thinking in particular of a Soccerlens article by Andrew Satori (http://soccerlens.com/an-ode-to-barcelona/28141/), but now that I think about it, my comment encompasses your first leg match review as well (http://www.runofplay.com/2009/04/28/barcelona-0-0-chelsea-doubt-chance-and-mutability/). It was well written, to be sure–I enjoy your writing very much–but I want people to hear me when I say that when we put special emphasis on a fixture like Chelsea-Barcelona to determine abstract, superhuman things like legacy or historical significance, we just end up hurting ourselves. A match is just a match; as much as we fans like to think we can influence or will the outcome, anything can happen.

I dunno. I buy into it too, calling the Champs League final “the most important game of the season” wherein the winner garners a “place in history.” But I want people to realize that this is the kind of attitude which perpetuates pathological fandom– fanaticism in the literal sense.