You all are getting a Eulertastic review, so stand back for that one. But just some quick thoughts from me, and let’s share some joy:

–I tuned in at 1-0, and was oddly calm. It looked like they had played their best, and we hadn’t.

–I have NO idea how we are going to replace Puyol.

–Fabregas was invisible most of the match, popped up at the right time.

–Happy 600th for Xavi, way to celebrate with a goal. Next time, lay off the hair gel, and you could have a brace.

–Messi was erratic, but enormous at a few crucial times.

–Sanchez is worth every penny. He seems to have said “The hell with it,” and is playing his game. Amazing stuff.

–Valdes needs to work on passing out of the back, man-style.

–The return of Iniesta to the midfield saw the surge of our dominance.

–Keita is. He just is. I predicted he would come on about ’75, for those in-the-way qualities, and so he did. Brilliant.

–Abidal, when players weren’t getting full-speed runs at him, was enormous.

–Best of all, there is absolutely NOTHING they can say about this match. No refs, no diving, no nothing. We walked into their house, and whipped their asses.

That’s all it got for now, folks, but let’s have some FUUUUUNNNNN!

This is a guest post written by reader SiempreBarça07 (twitter here). The BFB staff would like to them him/her for this lovely post and for giving us all a break from the action. Please note that this was written prior to the Getafe loss. Any mistakes are almost assuredly the editor’s. -BFB staff

Our #7 has been under constant attack since he has joined the blaugrana side because the goals have not been flowing for him as with his previous teams. With arguably the world’s best midfield behind him, everyone expected Spain’s top hit man to be even more prolific. Following the World Cup, the media, fans, his ex-teammates, his friends and family all placed bets that Villa would achieve one of his lifelong goals to be Pichichi of the league he didn’t dare leave, the league he loves so much – La Liga.

Before he joined Barça, Villa equated himself with the goal. And if you watched or read any interviews asking others such as Xavi, Casillas, Pique, and Iniesta how they would describe Villa, they all answered with one word: goals. Few knew - and few know - that for Barça, the job Villa was signed to do was not so simple. It seems that only two men really knew what el Guaje was in for: Pep Guardiola and Johan Cruyff.

Cruyff knew with Barça’s system already set to revolve around the world’s best player in Messi, Pep would assign Villa to the left. In his weekly column for El Periodico published on March 28 2011, Cruyff wrote in defense of Villa:

Just as Xavi is not in the field only to give assists, Villa plays not only to score. As they are two of Barça. Xavi was needed to be champions of Europe and the World, and reached 100 to receive the praise of all. With him, the selection is a bit of Barça. And a bit of Barcelona is a lot. Xavi brings style, balance and ball control; Villa, depth. His problem, not yours, is the burden up front, is that of a forward. And for that there is no field, there is no coach – the striker stands alone on goal. The error of appreciation is enormous.

Villa is no less dangerous at five games without scoring for Barcelona. Or does any less of a good job for taking three caps to overcome Raúl for the record. The strikers are selfish. The team can win, but they will not sleep easy if they do not meet with a goal.

But if he is already the top scorer in the history of selection, if the percentage of goals per match is high, it is because he does much more than wait for the ball and push it. Villa is synonymous with depth. It means being always ready to open passing lanes, to draw defenders and thus freeing space for others.

Will he always score? No. This failure is part of football. For me, whether a forward plays badly or not has nothing to do with the goal. Or just by moving near the penalty area and marking more numbers than any other. Playing good or bad depends on whether he does or does not do a number of details that mean just as much as a goal. In his case, we are talking about depth.

Cruyff emphasizes that Villa is used to allow Barça to play with its signature philosophy and style. Furthermore, time and time again, Guardiola has also defended Villa and reiterated his confidence in el Guaje, saying that he is “indisputable.” More tellingly, in his October 24th press conference, Pep said: ”Thanks to Villa, we can play as well as we do. We do not find many like him. I would like to have more players like Villa by my side in my career. He has adapted and has the humility to do it… few would have the modesty to sacrifice themselves like that.”

And that’s what Villa is for at Barça: sacrifice. Guardiola knows well that he is not using Villa optimally – but Villa is being used to help Barça in the best way possible.  In a team sport, sacrifice is a necessity and in this team, Villa is a necessity.

Wasted

Guardiola doesn’t fully utilize Villa’s excellent control with long balls and his searing directness in counterattacks. Longs balls are not Barça’s style – though some variability now and then really can’t hurt. However on the second point, the counterattacks, the team really needs to work on. When space is cleared for once, Barça’s counterattacks are miserably slow. Too many players pass sideways even when there is space ahead, throwing the advantage of counterattacking in the bin. But returning to the main point, it is clear that unlike with Messi, the team does not play to Villa’s strengths – Villa is made to play to make the team stronger.

Football Without the Ball

David Villa is one of the world’s best players with his off-the-ball movement and with his ability to desmarque  – to lose his markers, draw defenders, and wreak havoc in the back line with his tireless and intelligent runs.  Especially against teams that park the bus, Villa creates space so that the team, so that Messi and Cesc – or whoever is allowed to play centrally – can score.  Maintaining the width of the pitch like he does requires strict discipline and patience – the latter of which, many have failed reciprocate with Villa.

Taking on a lot more defensive duty and constantly pressuring, Villa became a more complete player but ceded his role as being the focal point through which goals are scored. And nominally known as a striker (and I say nominally, because at Barça he is really a winger), the primary thing people expect of him is goals, and lots of them. Failing to realize that his off-the-ball movement and link-up play up front is what helps create Barça’s goals, many continue to question Villa’s place on this team.

Moreover, Villa always expects himself to score more because that is what he truly loves to do. He achieves this mainly by cutting in from the left, connecting with his teammates, and playing clever one-twos. He also by making runs across the backline waiting for thru-balls. The second strategy has drawn criticism due to the number of offsides he has accumulated – last season. This season, he is in fact onsides a lot more, but the reputation has stuck so that for any 50/50 situation, the linesmen would now raise the flag.

Not Only Barça’s Rivals Are Denied Possession…

Perhaps compelled to fit into the Barça way of passing and eager to prove he’s compatible with Messi, Villa sometimes hesitates, overthinks, and is less bold than his former self. However this is a psychological matter – maybe one of confidence – rather than a matter of ability. He needs to feel that he won’t be reprimanded for not passing and for taking shots. In this team known for possession, he is afraid of losing balls. But look at Messi and you’ll see that he loses plenty – it’s only natural with forwards because they are the ones responsible for taking those risks. Villa needs to know that he is allowed to take those chances too. David Villa has shown and he is continuing to show with Spain, that he has plenty of technique and ability with the ball. With his national side, he still plays on the left but he is given much much more freedom to float between lines and move around. As a result, he receives the ball a lot more and scores at a much higher rate. It’s simple in this respect: in order to put the ball in the back of the net – you need the ball.

1-on-1s is not one of his strengths, but he rarely gets the opportunity to make those individual on-the-ball plays on a team of players who all love to play with the ball – Messi, Iniesta, Thiago, and especially now Fabregas. Often flailing his arms and screaming in frustration in attempt to receive the ball, the amount of ball this footballer sees is minimal. Even Guardiola has recognized that Villa’s runs too often go ignored. Why is this though?

Ignoring any biases players may have with each other and strictly tactically – the space in the middle has now opened up because of Villa and Pedro on the flanks; Messi is free to face the goal. And since it is obviously easier to score right in front of the goal rather than having to come in from an angle, the midfielder would opt to pass to the centrally located false-nine. Also, it must be noted that because Dani Alves is so much better at pushing up and playing the ball in from the right than any left-back at Barça is capable of replicating on the left (with absolutely no disrespect to Abidal), there is simply more action and goal scoring opportunities on that other band.

Behind the Numbers

Any player in Villa’s position, with his job and on this team, will have difficulty scoring as regularly as they may have on other teams.  Too often is the work behind the goals ignored.  Too often are people blinded by the score-line and statistics – the number of goals, assists, shots, etc. The work Villa does (and Pedro too) is immeasurable – often unnoticed and off the screen because it is accomplished without the football. However that work has a very tangible effect on the game and on the success that Barça has achieved.

Not many players of Villa’s quality – top scorer of a Euro and World Cup winning national team – will be able to fulfill that job description with as much grace and professionalism as he has. In addition to what he adds in the locker room (I hear from Pep that he’s a real joker), let’s not forget all the goals he has scored for Barça. David Villa is already a part of Barça history and I say he has done and is doing enough to merit a place in its future. El Guaje is here because more than he loves goals, he loves the team and he loves the game.

This piece was not written as an excuse for any lack of goals; on the contrary, this piece was written in condemnation of people who mistake goals as the sole means to victory and the end to the game. This piece was written to remind spectators, especially culés, that football is més que the numbers, and that there is much more to see behind those statistics. It was written with the hope that they will see the game… and the most beautiful game there is: Barça’s game.

Sources:

The original El Periodico column is no longer available but the quotes can be found on these other news sites:

(1) http://www.lne.es/deportes/2011/03/29/cruyff-dice-villa-goleador/1052716.html
(2) http://www.goal.com/en/news/12/spain/2011/03/28/2414742/johan-cruyff-barcelonas-david-villa-is-more-than-just-a
(3) http://futbol.azumare.com/pep-guardiola-elogio-al-asturiano-david-villa
(4) http://www.fcbarcelona.com/football/first-team/detail/article/guardiola-eager-to-see-how-his-squad-will-react-in-granada

Sure, the Tyneside coast might seem like a very long ways from the sun-filled Mediterranean shore by la ciudad condal, but some of the things happening in Newcastle are worth reflecting on how they affect Barcelona. The news that St. James’ Park was renamed Sports Direct Arena was an interesting anecdote for the non-Geordies out there and barely made a dent in my Twitter feed (though I did learn about it there), which is odd considering the things that appear in front of me while I browse the news, 140 characters at a time.

Newcastle’s owner, Mike Ashley, has gone the route of renaming St. James Park after his own company, Sports Direct, and has thus pushed Newcastle fans into a spot where they either accept that their stadium is named something other than St. James’ Park or they stop going to matches. As The Fiver points out,

…with the club sitting third in the Premier League almost entirely as a result of business decisions made by Ashley and his henchman, they continue to attract the ire of locals who, typically of football fans, are happy to protest about various perceived injustices, as long as it doesn’t involve any effort or sacrifice beyond a pre-match “march” from a pub they were going to be in anyway to a match they were going to anyway. Meanwhile outside St James’ Pa … sorry, the Sports Direct Arena, Ashley laughs up his sleeve as the House Full sign lights up again.

And there’s the question about Barça that appears before this particular writer: can you support a team financially and still have the leverage to make changes to that club’s approach or rules? I’ve been fairly vocal about my dislike for the new membership rules instituted under Sandro Rosell’s administration and I don’t think I’ve ever come across as a sympathizer for his particular brand of catalanismo (though such a statement should probably come with several explanatory statements for clarity), but I’m also a dues paying member and a regular purchaser of multiple Barça logo-ed products a year. I can rail against the Qatar Foundation soiling my beloved shirt as much as I want, but doesn’t my money say I don’t care that much?

Well, perhaps. Cules are in a different position than Newcastle supporters: we own the club and Rosell is just renting it for a couple of years. Like how I still pay taxes and live in the US even though I don’t support . At least that’s my current rationalization. We’re capable of changing the system by voting down the budget each year or, come the end of the president’s term, rejecting his vision outright and choosing an opposition candidate. Yet we’re also ultimately human animals as persuaded by success and the status quo as any other fan base.

Come the end of the Qatar Foundation sponsorship for the front of our shirt, will FCB simply sell to the highest bidder rather than restoring either UNICEF or the complete lack of a sponsor? Are we becoming used to the idea that the blaugrana is just another part of our business model? Or are we principled enough to have a few pre-match marches that can be derided by the general media and understood to represent massive voting blocs come election season?

And, more directly comparable to St. James’ Park, what of the Camp Nou? Is that next on the “monetizable assets” list? Are we going to see the Estadi La Caixa? Turkish Airlines Arena? We’ve got official sponsors for just about everything (and possibly actually everything), from our beer to our cars to our handball team to, I imagine, our urinals: piss on Bwin!

Perhaps you scoffed at the Newcastle fans for their marches and their fake caring while still attending matches, but are we so far away from selling the things we claim are the most important to us? There are socis out there who no doubt don’t care about the ever-expanding corporate sponsorship and it’s hard to say they’re wrong when they suggest it would hard to hold onto superstars like Lionel Messi if we couldn’t offer massive contracts. But it would be nice if the general membership could feel confident that they would be asked, in a referendum, if these changes were acceptable.

But Sandro Rosell worked for Nike and no doubt learned the valuable lesson that money makes might and might makes right. Running shoes will never be the same thanks to the swoosh’s advertising, but at what cost?* Are we so sure we want to give ourselves over to the monetary extravagances of PR campaigns from World Cup host nations? To some the UNICEF shirts may have felt like the rich buying off their consciences, but to others it was validation of a motto now emblazoned everywhere like a corporate logo.

The question becomes, I suppose, whether Newcastle fans will make that march and still fill up the seats or if they’ll take their money elsewhere. If you’re a member, what’s the last straw for you? Have you pulled the plug? Are you considering it? Are you in this for the long haul regardless? If you’re not a member, would you become one if you could? Would it matter to you if there was UNICEF on the shirt? Is QF where you draw the line or can we play in Nike Stadium and you’ll still go for that carnet? Let us know in the comments. My own, personal response, will be forthcoming in the next couple of days.

—–

*Not to get too tangential, but here’s a good quote from a different NYT article: ‘“On the one hand, no one has yet published a study on whether barefoot running is better for you — the evidence is all anecdotal,” Lieberman says. “On the other hand, no one has ever published a study showing that running shoes prevent injury.”’

Yet here we are, all wearing these shoes when we go running and fighting off ridiculous injuries. Some of us are better at it than others and I generally believe in technology, but McDougall’s story about Runner’s World is as illuminating a description of a corporation creating reality through money as you’re likely to find.

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is forced to relive a single day–February 2, in this case–over and over again until he gets it right. I’ve always been fascinated with the movie for multiple reasons. First, it’s comedic gold throughout. Ned Ryerson? Genius character (and insightful, perhaps). Second, there are the concepts within it that mirror The 5 Stages of Grief as described in On Death and Dying.  Yet it’s the third thing, the attempt to get everything “right” that’s superficially fascinating.

What if you could relive everything until you got it just right? What if you could just hit reset sometimes and that awful day you just had could be a little better if you avoided stepping in that dog mess right before you went to the really important meeting with the CEO? This morning I read an article in the New York Times that set the stage perfectly for me then moving on to reading all about Zlatan Ibrahimovic railing against Guardiola and Barça in general. Check out versions of that story here, here, and here.

"And in this part of the Master Plan, you begin to hate me. We win the league anyway."

The difference between the two stories is pretty obvious: in one, the protagonist (or antagonist, if you will) is attempting to perfect the past while in the other he is attempting to redefine his own role in that past saga. I’m not even an amateur psychologist and I can tell you there’s got to be something going on behind-the-scenes. Yet they’re both attempting to redo parts of their past and re-emphasize certain parts of it. Perhaps Todd Remis is merely still in love with his ex-wife and really can’t stand that he doesn’t have all the memories as perfect as he thinks they should be while Ibra is attempting to tarnish the image of the thing he could not convert to his method of thinking and acting.

They’re both somewhere in the throes of grieving. Like Phil Connors in the scene where he drives Punxsutawney Phil off a cliff, they’re reacting negatively to the things that they perceive as having destroyed their opportunities. Having personally just gone through the stress of a wedding and gotten back wedding pictures, I understand how easy and comforting it is to blame the photographer for all the missed shots. Not necessarily his fault he missed that absurd dance move I put on because he was following my orders and snapping pictures of my grandparents doing the limbo, but I guess I could always sue him when my grandparents disown me.

Ibra may not be asking for a redo of the season, but he’s clearly pushing the blame onto Guardiola and the Barça system. Saying things like “I know I share some of the blame, but they were complete dinglewackers I couldn’t work with at all,” is, really, not taking any of the blame. You are clearly blame shifting!

Actual quotes, unlike the made up one above, are somewhat more interesting. From the Yahoo Sports article linked above:

“He wanted to play in the middle, not on the wing, so the system changed from 4-3-3 to 4-5-1. I was sacrificed and no longer had the freedom on the pitch I need to succeed. So I asked for a meeting with Guardiola – for a discussion, not an argument. I said I was being used in the wrong way and that they shouldn’t have bought me if they wanted another type of player. I told him what a friend had said to me – ‘you bought a Ferrari but drive it like a Fiat’. The chat seemed to go well but then Guardiola started to freeze me out.”

Some of that could be construed as fair criticism–Pep is listening to someone too much and destroyed his team’s star striker in the process. But he certainly doesn’t stop there. Apologies to sensitive ears who can’t deal with cursing. Yes, that means you, Bojan.

[Ibra] pinpointed the first major row he had with Guardiola, after a 4-1 win against Villarreal during which the former Juventus and Ajax forward only played five minutes.

“(Pep) was staring at me and I lost it. I thought ‘there is my enemy, scratching his bald head’. I yelled to him: ‘You have no balls!’  And probably worse things than that.

He went on:

Diplomatic relations broke down completely when he shouted: “You have no balls. You shit yourself when facing Mourinho! Fuck off!”

and

I was completely mad. I threw a box full of training gear across the room, it crashed to the floor and Pep said nothing, just put stuff back in the box. I’m not violent, but if I were Guardiola I would have been frightened.”

That, of course, is somewhere between “whoa, whoa, whoa” and “Who are you, Carlos Tevez?” on the scale of emotional reactions to being subbed into a game. So you’re pissed off that you weren’t subbed into a game that the team won 4-1? The thing is, the context of that game should be noted: the team had just been bounced from the Champions League by Inter and was just 1 point ahead of Madrid in the standings going into the match. Ibra had also started the previous match and had been fairly stagnate throughout, so why should he start in a massive game against a good team in La Liga, especially given that his replacement, Bojan, had been good as a sub and then scored this gem.

But it goes beyond that. It goes to this:

“I would walk into a room; he would leave. He would greet everyone by saying hello, but would ignore me….after this I stopped trying to adapt.”

Yeah, okay, let’s say Pep is a total dickweed with a hard on for making your life worse. You talk nonchalantly about being a Ferrari, that your teammates are good little schoolboys who follow the rules but you’re a hard drinkin’, swashbucklin’, man’s man and you won’t have it any other way but your way or the highway. So you hit the highway in your Ferrari and now you’re doing 200mph into happiness. Good for you. But that doesn’t make Guardiola wrong. It just makes you kind of a dingleberry for racing cops in a sports car.*

Know what’s weirder? I don’t really care if Guardiola is a terrible person. Almost the entire team seems incredibly happy with him and the trophies and lovely football are piling up like dead hookers in the back of Anton Phillips’ trunk. If Ibra can’t stomach tactical changes to suit Lionel Messi, well, he should probably not be a part of a team built around the little guy.

If Todd Remis is blame shifting–my wife left me because they didn’t record the bouquet toss!–then so is Ibra. And that’s lame. Or perhaps he should sue UEFA to make them redo the 2009-10 semifinal against Inter so they can include the part where he raced back onto the field and scored the tie-winning goal in extra time and became a Catalan hero. Instead of, you know, merely doing nothing and being subbed off with 30 minutes left.

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*When I was in high school a kid bragged that he would outrun cops on his motorcycle, sometimes just for fun while joyriding in the countryside. I believe Ibra on this about as much as I believed that gallumph.

"See? I shaved. Now shut up."

The most enduring image from this match for me came late, when they showed a rear view of Isaac Cuenca, whose No. 39 shirt was pristine. Then they showed Mallorca’s Alvaro Gimenez, and his No. 30 shirt was bedraggled, with the 0 just hanging on by a bit of adhesive, the rest of shirt all dirt and grass-stained, like dude had been dragged behind a truck.

He had. It’s license plate number was 10. No other letters, just the number 10. Familiar Messi watchers probably noted the “Godfather” stare on Messi’s pre-match face, and the fact that he was clean-shaven, then said “Uh, oh.” For whatever reason, after slumps in which he slouches around, unshaven and off-form, his comebacks are marked by a clean shave. Our fathers, back in the day, always believed that a shave and haircut were just the cure for whatever ails you. Maybe that’s all it took.

Or maybe it’s something more. Or nothing at all.
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