For a Catalan, it gets no better than this. The penultimateweekend of the soccer year, and not one, but two rivals from Madrid fly thewhite flag in surrender to the power, the beauty, and the spirit that makesBarcelona the best.
Barca gave Atletico Madrid a goal lead, but then overwhelmedthe second-place team in La Liga in a 4-1 victory on Sunday. That promptedAtletico coach Diego Simeone to say: “We brought out our best weapons, butBarcelona is playing at a different level. They are in a different league tothe rest of us.”
And from the Bernabeu “ where Catalonia’s second team,Espanyol, held Real Madrid, 2-2 “ came a plaintive cry by Real’s coach, JoseMourinho. “It’s too much,” Mourinho said. “I have never known a situation likethis, losing so many points and having a team so far from its objectives.”
Mourinho was triumphal back in May when his team took thetitle in La Liga. Thirteen points adrift before Christmas, the coach realisesthat Barca had not so much ceded the crown as let Madrid borrow it for aseason.
This gave glorious affirmation that players, not coaches orgurus of any type, are the heart of sport.
Pep Guardiola, Barca’s former coach, is on family leave inNew York, closing his ears to offers to cut short his sabbatical and makeChelsea, Milan or Manchester City play like Barcelona.
Guardiola knows, but owners overlook, that he last playedfor the Catalan side in 2001. The men who now make up the best team on earthcame through the same school that Guardiola attended in his youth.
Nine of Barcelona’s starting players last Sunday graduatedfrom the club’s academy, La Masia, which teaches boys to love the ball, toshare it and to play to a certain tempo. The coach who followed Guardiola, hiserstwhile assistant Tito Vilanova, is also from that school.
Whisper it quietly, but Tito’s start as head coach ismathematically superior to Pep’s. A run of 15 victories and a draw in theopening 16 games beats anything in the history of La Liga.
Barca being Barca, the style also matters. We almost tire ofcounting Lionel Messi’s goals. Yes, Leo scored twice more, his 89th and 90th ofthe calendar year. Yes, the Argentine who came to La Masia at 12 is on a levelof his own.
But more “ much more “ importantly, the team got back itsoften-injured central defenders Gerard Pique and Carles Puyol on Sunday. Ittook time, but eventually Puyol was the man hurtling toward the point ofdanger.
He needed to be, because the pregame billing had forecastthat this was night of La Pulga versus El Tigre. Messi was dubbed La Pulga (theFlea) because of his diminutive size as a child in Argentina. Atletico strikerRadamel Falcao earned his nickname as a boy in Colombia.
Now belonging to Atletico, but maybe not for long with theJanuary trading window about to open, Falcao is a fabulous No. 9. He is whatBarca does not have, a complete center forward. He is goal-greedy, athletic andcapable of scoring with finesse, power, speed or stolen craftiness.
Falcao struck first at the Camp Nou. His colleague DiegoCosta bullied Messi out of possession near the halfway circle, then Falcao didthe rest. The Colombian outpaced Sergio Busquets and enticed Barcelonagoalkeeper Victor Valdes toward him, and when Valdes came, Falcao sweetlyflicked the ball over him.
Vilanova, the quiet man who has kept the ball rolling afterGuardiola’s defection, looked as if he never doubted the victory. And he has nothingto say that might hide the fact that the talent is there, and the coach is amere custodian of it.
