Looking back - on Guardiola, Pedro & Messi

It has often been remarked that Leo Messi has succeeded in making the spectacular look so ordinary, such is the sheer number of incredible goals he scores. From 2009-2013 was Messi playing at a level few, if any players have ever reached. The ability to turn and dart past an entire defence on a whim, finishing it off with either a deft chip or a wrapped finish into the far corner. This Messi still exists - but today he tends to unleash it in shorter bursts, spending most of his time linking the play and freeing up teammates to run on goal. The Messi we saw under Guardiola played like a ferocious recurrent explosion. None of this is to deny how great Messi still is. To my mind he is still the greatest player in the world by some distance, but every time I've seen him play (nowhere near as much as I did 6/7 years ago...who at all watches any Spanish football these days?) of late, despite the flashes of brilliance, he seems to walk a lot more, wait rather than run for the ball a lot more and generally plays a much flatter game than he used to. Much of this will no doubt come down to age but some of it must also come down to how Barcelona have changed as a footballing force since Guardiola left.

Guardiola's team of course was something else to behold. Coming into life just after the financial crash, at the tipping point of neoliberal commonsense, a team that showed you didn't have to be the biggest, strongest and fastest to win. Rather that simply by working together and trusting in each other's appreciation of space and care for the ball, you could create a style that played out on the pitch like a sublime piece of modernist art, a style able to punish and thrash any other team in the world. I use the word modernist here because although Guardiola's football was in one sense derivative (Cruyff, Michels et al), it was also a shocking revival of a tradition that had largely been either forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant. Barcelona had won the Champions League three years before Guardiola's arrival, in 2006. But for this, Rijkaard had sacrificed the wizardry of Iniesta and Xavi in midfield, 24 and 26 years old at the time respectively, for the steel of Edmilson and Mark van Bommel. This followed the trend in thinking at the time: that you couldn't have too many small, skillful players in the same midfield anymore. The game had become too physical, too tough and fundamentally honest to accommodate players like that. Power was the order of the day and players who lacked it were finding it difficult to break into the sides of top European teams at the end of the '00s - Aimar, Riquelme, Rui Costa and even Pirlo towards the end of his time at AC Milan are prime examples here. Barcelona ripped all of this up, and for myself - 16 at the time - the way Barcelona side played completely blitzed my own beliefs about how football could be played in the top flight, and hinted towards a world beyond the screaming hype, Nikey-swooped marketing and cage-shaking Lucozade-on-steroids football of the Premier League.

The 2010/11 season was the high-point for this side. Having gotten rid of Yaya Toure, Henry, Eto'o, Ibrahimovic and assembling a fluid front three of Villa, Pedro and Messi, Guardiola had created a team wherein any one of seven players (front three, fullbacks, Xavi and Iniesta) could provide the forward-most reference of an attack. The technique and touch and sheer appreciation of space of these players was what took the side to another level, producing, at its most potent, a brand of exhilarating one-touch football that no team in the world could even come close to dealing with. Just take the opening goal in 2011 Champions League final. Wembley. 27th minute. Xavi picks up the ball midway inside the United half. Nudges forward. White shirts compact on the edge of the area. Nudges forward. Gaze locked ahead. Pedro in Xavi's line of vision, on the right edge of the D. Pedro marked by Vidic. Xavi still. Pedro feints to run inside but then edges onto Vidic's blindside. Pedro 3 light tiptoes away from his man. One yard. Two yards away. Xavi plays the pass and Pedro has precisely one touch to control and set up a shot. One touch, one square metre of turf. Vidic closing in from the left. Pedro's touch is absolutely pinpoint, not only taking the ball out on to his right foot, but taking it just the right amount away from Vidic without turning too far an angle away from goal. Before Vidic can even try to react the damage is done: Pedro's movement into a fraction of space and subsequent touch into an even tighter fraction of space has set up the finish, a swift sidefoot into Van der Saar's near post. It's a goal who's simplicity conceals the genius of the short, fractional movements that made it possible. The timing of the pass from Xavi, Pedro's feet dancing like a figure skater in an elevator, glancing off from his marker's shadow, finding just enough space in just the right place to put the ball away.

In November 2010, Barcelona played Real Madrid at the Camp Nou in Jose Mourinho's first league Classico managing the latter. Mourinho has always been Guardiola's antithesis. While Guardiola's legacy has been one of building teams around technique, Mourinho's legacy is to stifle it. Joe Cole, Juan Mata, De Bruyne, Salah, Ozil, Eden Hazard - players whose techniques have been used to dominate and coordinate an entire team's attacking play, but who for Mourinho were only ever liabilities, players he needed to shunt out on the wing or simply bench. Mourinho's time at Madrid revealed a man who couldn't care less how football was played. All that matters is winning, and Mourinho would go to all sorts of lengths, both on the pitch and off the pitch to prove it so. His battle with Guardiola - a fierce competitor but someone who also cares intensely about how things are done - has defined the last decade of football. Going into the 10/11 season, punters were unsure whether or not Guardiola's team could maintain its dominance over La Liga. This was after all a team that had been convincingly beaten by Mourinho's Inter Milan in the previous season's Champions League semi-final. Mourinho now had a team with more depth to it, a team with a much stronger spine and a lethal attacking force lead by Ronaldo too. In the first leg of that semi-final he'd shown that the earthquake could be stopped: that if you ran faster than Barcelona, outnumbered their midfield and attacked fast at holes in the backline, they could be beaten.

But that November night Barca raced to a 5-0 win, throwing Mourinho's team through the shredder and then sweeping them into the waste at the end of it all. Messi didn't score but was the engine of Barcelona's play, driving them forward relentlessly and dropping deep to help control and propel his teams attacks. Small, skinny, not especially fast - Messi is often posited as the anti-Ronaldo, simply a born genius who's technique and naturally endowed football-brain have powered him to the top of the game. Ronaldo in contrast is typically defined by his hardwork, his dedication to the perfection of scoring goals and his own body, a great player molded out of sheer, furious determination. What this narrative ignores is the effort and work that has gone into making Messi the talent he is - cultivated from the age of 13 in the art of passing and movement, the art of finding and working space on a football pitch. Messi has had to synthesise his own abilities with a wider idea of how the game should be played, and in particular, an idea of how the ball should be manipulated and sewn across the pitch (by an entire team) in order to win. Messi's passing range and appreciation of his teammates positions are probably his most underrated assets. In the 56th minute against Madrid at the Camp Nou, November 2010, Messi picks up the ball on the turn inside his own half. The Madrid backline is pushed right up, close to the halfway-line. Messi advances, two short sprints forward towards Carvalho. Carvalho approaches slow, scared, and Messi too drops his pace. He waits a split second, scanning the back of his head for the piece that fits. On the left wing forty yards away David Villa has started sprinting. Messi isn't even looking but Villa is sprinting. Sami Khedira runs across to help his centreback, facing Messi square and trying to swipe him out with his right leg. One feint, a jink, Messi is away from Carvalho, away from Khedira's outsretched leg, the ball almost behind his left boot. Villa started sprinting three seconds ago. Forty yards away. From the television camera you can see Messi glance up for barely a second. Villa running, forty yards away. Barely a second. Messi's pass is the trace of a samurai blade along the turf, racing angrily off from his foot and slicing the space between two Madrid defenders in perfect halves before somehow, as if by some telepathy, drawing up abruptly into a soft roll, poised for Villa to finish it off without breaking stride. The genius to make that pass cannot be overstated, Messi's foot like an angled mallet swinging 90-degrees through the ball. Barely a second. If that.

That Barcelona didn't go on to become the first team since Arrigo Sacchi's late-80s Milan to win the European Cup twice in a row is undoubtedly the biggest tragedy played out by the fiction of European football over the last decade. Watching Guardiola's team lose to Chelsea in 2012 was gutting because you knew then that it was over: for all the dreamlike success, of a side that could win without having the most money or the fastest players, for all the times Barcelona managed to unlock long-forgotten doors and completely rescript the the way people thought about the game, they would not be the first side to do the thing thought near-unachievable in the modern era. After the Chelsea defeat Guardiola was asked what he would say to a young Barcelona fan, crying having watched his team lose for the first time tonight.

"Welcome to the club. There will be many more times too. This is football. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Welcome to the club."

Fancy Mourinho having even the pure decency, let alone intelligence to ever say anything like that!

Guardiola won the Champions League in 2011 with a team composed of 7 players nurtured by Barcelona's youth setup. They did it by playing a style of football people had for a long time thought extinct and not only inappropriate, unrealistic but damnright useless at the highest level of the game. In the casino themed hot-house of the football world, Barcelona were a team that dared to suggest the windows could be smashed, the doors unlocked, the outside found. At the very highest level of the game they were the last sign, the last dash of feet upon turf to suggest that things could be different. We're still waiting for the team that proves it will be.