Annoyed by Barca?

[Misfit]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/apr/13/barcelona-bandwagon-barney-ronay

Welcome back, then, Barcelona. As the Champions League dwindles towards its seasonal endgame, it is once again time for the world's greatest football team, the righteous skill-goblins of Catalonia, to arrive on these shores and bedazzle some Premier League hopeful with their travelling weather front of swarming geometrical intricacies. This week it is the turn of Chelsea to flail around Stamford Bridge in pursuit of the usual clique of Velcro-touch ball-hogs. And with this in mind perhaps it is worth taking stock for a moment. We may be witnessing a generational high here. These things are always hard to measure – but the fact is this may be the most annoying Barcelona team ever.

We should of course be wary of hyperbole. Barcelona have been annoying before. They have been extremely annoying – and I speak as someone who was annoyed by Barcelona before being annoyed by Barcelona went mainstream, before the arrival of the nouveaux-annoyed or the merely casually annoyed. Mainly I have been annoyed not so much by Barcelona's relentless pigeon-chested excellence but by the attendant Barça-lifestyle, a wondrous feat of transcontinental marketing that has managed to project this uber-club, a regional superpower of steamrollering ancestral wealth, as simultaneously a kind of balaclava-clad anti-corporate collective. We are not the empire, Barcelona screech. We are not even the rebel alliance. We are the Ewoks! We abjure (most) shirt sponsorship. We are not just better: we are better. And so beyond Catalonia Barcelona are presented as a dreamily styled under-overdo, a high-end footballing brand for people who believe themselves to be above brands, a kind of iPhone football for the wised-up urbanite.

It is hard not to feel sometimes that out of this platinum-hulled technical excellence Barcelona have created a strain of football for people who don't really like football. Most teams play like Barcelona once a season for about five seconds. Barcelona play like Barcelona all the time. It is a continual popping of champagne corks, a kind of BMW 5 Series football: undeniably high-spec, wondrous production values, devoid of ragged edges. Barcelona deliver every time at a pitch of homogenised consumer perfection. There is no need for faith, despair or sullen leering hope. This is a church where the miracles are on tap, where levitating pensioners come as standard, cadavers are reanimated, crutches hurled away daily.

It is important to acknowledge this is not a debate about how good Barcelona are (this is their era: they are laughably superior). Similarly it is also important to move beyond the recent wrong-headed suggestion that Barcelona are actually just "lucky", favoured by referring conspiracies, darlings of the Uefa illuminati. This is fundamentally misguided. It is the laws of modern football, rather than referees, that favour Barcelona. They alone are equipped to demonstrate the absolute limits of 25 years of reform designed to make the game more televisually hospitable to technical brilliance. Cradled within the skirts of the new non-contact rules, Barcelona can exploit both their own hard-won peerless technical mastery and the fact that peerless technical mastery is now enough in itself, reducing other teams to a kind of sandbagged seawall, a lumbering zombie horde there to be daintily picked off. Barça have already won this macro-battle. They are what football is supposed to look like now and if there is a conspiracy in their favour it is an entirely open one.

If no team have ever done this before it is perhaps because football at elite level has never been quite like this before: geographical difference ironed out, physicality minimised, players tending towards a certain shape and skill-set. Next to Barcelona this ageing reconstructive Chelsea team look like a hilarious example of extreme human variety, fielding in Frank Lampard a player who is now almost entirely immobile and instead simply lurks reproachfully like an unwanted mahogany armoire handed down from some distant aunt; Didier Drogba, who increasingly resembles no more than an enormous stationary head; and John Terry, who seems to be constantly running backwards, arms windmilling, scrabbling desperately for a handhold. It is easy to feel a little sorry for the traditional British-style player caught up in these fixtures. It must feel a bit like being the only normal person at a party where everyone else is a handsome spy or a polyglot supermodel and all you can do is stand awkwardly and occasionally rock with silent, baffled laughter while they all make jokes in Latin.

And yet, things have moved on even further this season. If Barcelona are suddenly more annoying than ever before it is perhaps because for the first time there is a tinge of uncertainty about all this. Until quite recently there seemed a blanket inevitability to their preening ascension: one Barcelona would naturally bring along five Barcelonas, 100 Barcelonas, 10,000 Barçabots all ready to turn the world a shade of tippy-tappy touch-ball. There have been tiny but still tangible wobbles this season: some managerial restlessness, the possibility of finishing second in La Liga, the suggestion recently from Brazil's visiting technical director that the notion of a new model army of Barça-kids emerging through the academy system is "all crap".

And somehow you can already see the imprint of an unrepeatable greatness in this current team. There will not be another Xavi just yet. There will perhaps never be another Lionel Messi. And in time the realisation will dawn, grudgingly, that like pretty much all great teams, this Barcelona is a one-off, a freakish coincidence of grand talents. Paradoxically this is perhaps the most annoying thing about them. As another Champions League title looms it may even soon become necessary to nurture a grudging affection for this wondrously dextrous force of footballing righteousness. Barcelona will probably beat Chelsea because they are if nothing else unforgivably severe on the merely hopeful, the fingers-crossed. So drink it in. Luxuriate in the chafing self-regard, the sense of managed, frictionless excellence. Be annoyed, be very annoyed. Be annoyed like it's the last time.

Some real belly-laughs in there, particularly the description of some Chelsea players and British players in general.

 

[liam17oi]

Barney Ronay is a fantastic writer. Always enjoy reading his stuff. This was no different. Great piece.

 

[gilzeantheking]

Great read

 

[NickHSpurs]

Mourinho will be after that outrageous penalty decision, absolutely crazy, never a pen in a million years, if anything the Barca player fouled the Levante one.

 

[Misfit]

Yep. Barca player kicks Levante player in the area = Barca pen.

Bit of a piss-take.

 

[antiloqus]

to be fair, their pen was very harsh also.

 

[beats1]

to be fair, their pen was very harsh also.

His hands where out and he was slightly too late in tucking them in, if that ball was half second later it wouldn't of been a penalty for me