First let me make one thing clear, before the usual fanatics and bigots launch their latest tirade on me, I have always been open that I am a Barca fan. I have also tried to be clear about why I am a Barca fan.
I love great football and this I define as something played with creative originality, skill, and passion, reinforced by an ethos of solidarity, not just as team spirit but in deference to those who have sacrificed time and money to watch the game . As Guardiola famously told Barca players just before going out and winning the champions league final in Rome, players should fight like heroic gladiators.
For the first 45 minutes of their champions’ league quarter final against Atletico Madrid at the Calderon , most of the players of Barca hugely disappointed me. The exception was Iniesta and Mascherano, the first trying his best to improve his team’s link-up play and speed in attack, the second preventing further goals by the home side, both with the kind of resoluteness that Simeone demands from all his team and usually gets ,on big occasions like this.
Even when Barca picked up pace in the second half, it is extraordinary to reflect on how many balls were lost , and how rare were any attempts at goal , and how anaesthetised continued to the three star ‘trio’ , all of whom seemed incapable of dealing with Atletico’s defence and fired blanks, on the few occasions they got through.
By contrast Atletico did not play a creative or particularly skillful game, still less a game pleasing to the eye-it was rough and tough, psychological and disruptive in its strategy and tactics, the kind that wins rugby as well as football games- but it was a team and a fan base showing solidarity and passion in spades. Of course it would be unfair on Atletico’s victory to blame it entirely on Barca’s performance . Theer was soldaity, there was passion, and there were moments of great football played by the likes of Carrasco, and Koke, and two well executed goals by Griezmann.
But a club of the size and cultural potency of FC Barcelona and a team of star quality status like Barca’s, with players like Messi, Suarez and Neymar earning fortunes that in most other professions, requires not just a sense of responsibility but also of accountability. And on last night’s performance more than half the team and their manager , following on from the dismal League performance against Real Madrid and Real Sociedad , deserved if not the sack, a huge reprimand for showing neither.
As a Barca fan I think it is perfectly justified to ask just what is the point of forming a team that is so dependent on its star trio firing on all cylinders, that on big occasions like last night they play not as gladiators, but as demotivated underlings over dependent on spoilt mercenaries.
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