Tito’s cancer: the enemy at the gates


This was not something the Mayan calendar predicted but the news that Tito Vilanova’s cancer has returned has a fateful element to it.

Cancer has a terrible unpredictability about it. It is likely that Tito, under medical advice,  would have taken on the job of Barca manager, knowing that he was on borrowed on time, keeping the big enemy at a sufficient distance not just to live but to create.

We will never know how the sheer stress of succeeding Pep Guardiola and putting up with the pressure of  keeping Barca  as the best and most successful team in the world, may have played havoc with his remission, instead of acting as a distraction and speeding his recovery.

But it looks as if  Tito has been cut down like a tree in full leaf at the highest point of his professional career, having taken Barca to new heights with a successful first half of the season crowned by a magical win over Atletico Madrid. And he succeeded as one of the  most understated managers Barca and La Liga have seen for a long time-his thoughtful, quietly determined, and courageous  tactics  winning more hearts and souls, and matches,  that any amount of provocative role-play by Jose Mourinho.

If the truth be told, and I have reported it before, Tito hasn’t looked healthy this season- his pale, drawn face, and intense eyes giving the Barca touchline a stoic, suffering air about it, that, by contrast, has made most goals scored by that team seem so much more a cause for celebration, as if Tito had connected his lifeblood to his players.

There is an element of tragic irony in the news about Tito facing up again to a possible end game, just hours after fans had celebrated the contractual renewal of Messi, Pujol, and Xavi, three players that between them have contributed massively to Barca’s identity as a team and a club, now seemingly guaranteeing its  future. This week has served to remind Barca fans more acutely than ever that football does not substitute for life; it mirrors it, with its ups and downs proving uncomfortably steep at times.

The sense of lifeblood running through the Barca of today as a sporting institution, one that has taken it from Cruyff, via Guardiola, to Vilanova, makes it likely that if Tito cannot continue, his replacement will come most naturally from within the club not from outside it. It will be a controversial appointment nonetheless.

For all the early speculation of   popular household names like Barca veterans  Luis Enrique, Eusebio Sacristan, and Jordi Roua, none of them can claim to have had brilliant careers as managers in their own right. Which leaves Pep Guardiola, a great player and a great coach but who  quit as Barca’s manager just six months ago, exhausted after four successful and highly intense years at the helm, and who will need some persuading to go back, not least because of  the tempting challenge of  moulding another club in Barca’s image.

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