As I savoured the memory of last night’s Barca Champions League victory over AC Milan this morning’s surf landed me by pure chance on the Italian club’s supporters’ website Forza Rosseneri.
It was an old page, now slightly dated but which nonetheless gave one an insight into the shortcomings of a club that once claimed, not without justification, to be the best in Europe. Alongside flashing advertisements showing semi-naked models promising that more would be revealed, the club’s CEO Adriano Galliani paid tribute to club owner Silvio Berlusconi- “These 26 years with Berlusconi are the best years of our lives.”
Not a man short of superlatives, Galliani also raised Zlatan Ibrahimovic to the pantheon of football Gods:” Ibra’s goals are always something special. He’s fantastic … Extraordinary! “Galliani gushed.
Well, I don’t know if Berlusconi saw in his team’s defeat last night a mirror of his own political and allegedly private misfortunes, but there is surely something in this AC Milan’s ultimate capitulation before a superior FC Barcelona that echoes the decline and fall of the former Italian prime-minister.
This Milan’s potential has been overhyped and nowhere more so than in the figure of Ibrahimovic, a player whose departure from FC Barcelona Pep Guardiola did well to encourage. For all his towering presence on the pitch, the Swede was outshone by Barca’s little big men, not least by Messi and Ibra cut a resentful and graceless figure at the end of last night’s match when he sided with Mourinho.
Whatever Ibrahimovic’s qualities, they pale in comparison to that of Marco van Basten, one of the key figures of that truly great Milan side that emerged in the late 1980’s after Berlusconi bought the club and saved it from bankruptcy, appointing Arrigo Sacchi as manager. The Rossoneri flourished thanks to the Dutch trio- Gullit, Rijkaard, and van Basten.
“After watching him for a while, you will be amazed with his all round skills and his big body frame twisted and turned inside the box, fooling the best of the defenders with such ease, and his ability to turn the slimmest chance into a goal made him one of the most deadliest striker of all time,” “Van Basten the divine!” wrote Dianni Brera, one of the greatest Italian football journalists. And that was no hyperbole.
Last night it was the impish Messi that managed to fool and weave his way through Milan’s defence, his talent given freer rein than in the first leg at San Siro thanks to Guardiola risking a three-man defence and widening the field of play with Cuenca and Alves helping move the ball forward on each wing.
This was a game in which the quality and endurance of Guardiola’s boys (how that Iniesta goal must have put the fear of God into Chelsea, like a bad dream revisited!) won through. In the final stages of the game, Barca still managed to show themselves Lord of the rings, their one touch football ‘in the round’ leaving their opponent looking increasing ragged by comparison. The sound of oles resonating around the Camp Nou –ironically in a region of Spain that has banned bullfighting- conjured up the inevitable image of a skillful torero who in the final stages of the faena has humiliated the fiercest of fighting animals to the point of rendition.
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