It is an understatement to say that I was very pleased with this match. However, as I watched, and then watched again, a creeping doubt entered my mind: what did Guardiola have to say about it? According to Goal.com's translation:
"The important thing is that we played very well, with excellent possession and control of the ball. It was one of our better home games. [. . .] We were far better than our last games."
Phew! After thinking I was going crazy after hearing his pretty sharp criticism of the admittedly-incomplete hammering of Malaga, I hear a blessing from the master, which gives validation to what I had in mind which was this:
Dear Lord, did Barca look good. Dear Lord. Did they look good. Very good. Exclamation point. Exclamation points. More of them.
Did Malaga lay down and take it? That is partly the case. More importantly, Barca never let them stand up. The way the team was spreading the ball from the wide left to the wide right, back and forth. The way the whole team cohesively defended, with everyone in the right position. The way each individual won their own one-on-ones, and the way many of them did even more than that. The way everyone moved. The simplicity and precision of every pass, dribble, and tackle...all these things made this performance one that could have left world-beating opposition completely stumped.
And mark my words, our best performances this season will come at home, from "The" starting XI of this year (minus Abidal): Valdes, Alves, Puyol, Pique, Maxwell, Busquets, Xavi, Iniesta, Pedro, Messi, and Ibrahimovic. Why do I rate Henry behind Pedro, and why do I rate Yaya behind Busquets? Because Guardiola does so on both counts, and because I am just starting to believe.
That said, I am not convinced that Barca is a better team this year than last year. Last year, Barca finished a great many of their chances. In the first half of this game alone, I counted eight quite gilt-edged chances. A sampling:
-9th: After a failed cross to Xavi from Pedro, with three other players in the box lurking, Messi touches the ball but cannot control. However, Busquets' pressure is immediate, and forces a bad pass to a man tracked by Alves, and the ball bounces back to Busquets without ever having crossed the halfway line. A few passes later, Xavi drags his marker forward before dropping back and receiving a pass from Pedro, who continued to run diagonally inside, and Pedro feeds him through a quite-tight angle. He touches it on to Messi, who lofts it to the wing for Alves, who makes a fool of his man, crosses in with the outside of his left foot, and nailed Messi's head at the far post. Messi's run was great, and whether he saw it late or not we will never know, but he missed the open net.
-14th: After a goal-kick is owned by Puyol in the air, and it comes to Iniesta upfield, who cannot control his space in the air. Malaga briefly recovers the ball, but they have their own problems with the bouncing ball. Within a half of a second, Messi pounces onto the ball and has a two-on-two situation. Being Messi, he leaves that unfortunate player in the dust, dashes into the box with Ibrahimovic to his right, but Weligton tackles the ball just as he takes the shot. Whether he should have taken the shot earlier or stopped and gave it to his partner, that should have been a real punishment.
-24th: Maxwell's header, one of the approximately one hundred (and 98%) he won all day from a goal kick, sends the ball bouncing into the middle. Xavi never has control of it to begin with, he has no right to it. But he sombreros the man running at him, then with the second touch, sombreros a second man running at him. The first comes at him for his third touch, which flicks it behind his standing leg and turns one of them. The second arrives and converges on the ball, but with the fourth touch, Xavi passes it in between both of his victims to Messi, who is fouled on the break. That was not a goal scoring opportunity--it was just awesome.
-26th: Another Maxwell defensive header finds Ibra, who uses his head to ping it back to Xavi. Busquets uses great composure to receive one of the not-so-great passes from Xavi under the pushes of two Malaga players, and gives it off to Messi, who runs off and gives to Pedro, wide open on the wing. Pedro jukes once, jukes twice, and beats the left fullback handily, puts in a peach of a cross into the path of a great run from Messi, who inexplicably heads it high.
-29th-30th: Busquets finds himself on the wing, and gives to the real winger, Pedro, who loses the ball with a loose touch. However, Busi chases his man immediately to the corner flag, and the fullback passes it forward expecting it to hit his winger--but Pedro had tracked the winger, and controlled-cum-passed it to Busi. In a real error, the fullback doesn't attack Busi (on the wide right) for several seconds, and he is allowed to pass it back into the midfield. The forward play falls into the midfield (and to the wide left), mainly through Xavi, and the midfield play falls into the defense (and the middle), mainly through Busi, before coming forth (to the wide right!) to Alves, who releases Messi at the corner of the box. Messi jukes once, jukes twice, finds himself in on goal...but honks it high, with Ibrahimovic waiting at the other side of the goal. I really do not know if that was supposed to be a shot or a cross.
-36th-37th: A Xavi set piece is headed out, but Xavi himself runs across to catch it and distribute it to Alves, who knocks it on to Pedro on the right wing, who absolutely tears his man to pieces with a simple turn and run. He should have crossed to Ibra on the far post, but instead he gives back to Xavi on the edge of the box, who moves about and gives to Iniesta on the left side. He keeps running though, and turns around, so that when Iniesta crosses it to him, he looks uber-cool, when he catches the ball with his studs and flicks it with decent pace on-target for the keeper to save. I do not rate that as a gilt-edged chance, it was just another most excellent Xavi-moment (and a great Pedro-moment, as well).
And that was just the first half. And, that is not to mention 1) an Alves cross that somewhat luckily came to Ibra, whose reactions were not quick enough, 2) a Busi header scuffed that came from a shortly-taken corner on the right that was crossed in from the left, 3) a piece of beat-three-then-pass Messi magic that should have been a Pedro one-touch assist and an Ibra counterattacking goal, and 4) another piece of Messi magic and teamwork with Pedro that would have been either a goal for Messi's portfolio or an always-coming scrapper from Iniesta. That is also not to mention that those last three came in the 43rd, 44th, and 47th minutes respectively. And thusly, I explain the title of this post. Last year, Messi is calmer with his touch and scores four. Busi scores also scores one with a calmer touch. Pedro's pass is perfect and Ibra doesn't have to stretch, like that goal from last year of Eto'o's, assisted with Henry's one-touch.
But I do not want to be negative because this was an absolute blitzkrieg, with the "style and discipline" that marks our best performances. Notice the main characteristics of all these goals. Except for the last three chances that came in the last four minutes, everything started with good defense. It could have been just a header from a goal-kick that seemlessly connected possession upfield with possession at the back, and it often was. That is nothing to underestimate, however. It was all the defense needed to do most of the time, because once Barca had the ball, they passed it from right to left, from left to right, usuallyall the way into Malaga's box. Was Malaga fighting? Perhaps they could have fought harder, but they certainly were fighting: they just had no chance of winning. When Xavi is playing his best game all season, when Messi is combining his excellent runs with excellent passes, when the defense (+ a Busi who is really, really getting the hang of the game) does their one-necessary-action-per-few-minutes perfectly, no team in the world has a chance.
Strange, then, when Barca finds all this collective play perfectly, and all that is missing is the finish, the game-breaker has essentially no collective play, and only a finish. Or should I say cannonball. Indeed, it took my bet on first-scorer, the always over-performing Pedro Rodriguez, to finally open up the scoring, after ten or eleven great chances. Out of nowhere, Pedro puts the ball on his right foot and, from about 25 yards beyond the left side of the goal, drives it home--as simply as that. After creating a ton of chances in the expected way, Barca scores the unexpected way, from the most expected of unexpected scorers. And just like that, the game is 1-0, seemingly dead-at-last, and Pedro, the Real Special One, is one piledriver closer to the always-starting list in everyone's opinion and not just mine.
Within 15 minutes, all that brilliance seemed to come to an end, with the one mistake the defense made. It came down to overconfidence and thinking that the game was over. After Alves puts in his 1,843 poor cross of the game, Busi makes a rare defensive mistake. Sure, he is in the right place, as he was the whole game, but he tries to recapture some of that fanciness that characterized his poor play in the past by heading it to somebody who would be there, because Barca is magic. Except they are not magic. Malaga does the right thing for once with one of their few moments on the ball and brings it down our right side, which, with Alves having just made the cross, is wide-open. Xavi fills the space, but he is no defender. Pique and Puyol are, but they, in quite uncharacteristic overconfidence, miscommunicate and burst forward at the same time, each thinking that the tackle will be made, so why don't they themselves make it? Magic, right? No--the ball is passed simply in between the two, and Valdo has at least forty yards to run in on goal. Just maybe, Valdes could have done better--Pique and Puyol definitely should have.
And after 81 minutes of domination, it looked like one of the worst "one-of-those-days" anyone can think of. Except, Barca had a perfect reaction: "well, graham crackers. We have to put one away now." On the very next play, within a minute of the restart, Messi ran in from the right, beat two, passed it to Iniesta, who backheeled it back to Messi, who took the snap-shot for a good save. Within three minutes, Barca had their goal, and it was a special, special goal.
In those three minutes, Malaga did not have the ball. Not once. They came close to getting it after a Maxwell cross to Messi that was to tall for the little guy, but Pedro came bursting back to pick up the loose ball, and showed off some great skill to escape pressure. Then he passed it back, and the ball moved back to Pique, who gave it to Xavi, who gave it to Messi on the right. Messi jogged inside, and mis-placed a pass to Ibra, who mis-touched to Pedro, who was back on the left side of the box. Two-touches, Ibra continued running to the wing, and he gets it back. One-touch to Maxwell, one-touch (and a difficult one) back to Pedro. Two-touches, turn, and it's Xavi in the middle, who just takes a moment to look--three touches. Alves is running inside the box on the right. Boom, he has it, from a narrow ground pass through a gap between four players. He is unmarked, one-touch into the middle, and Messi is unmarked. Messi taps it home.
Tracking back from a forward. One touch in our third, one touch in the middle third, then the rest in and around the box. One-touch and two-touch play, with only one player--the key player with the best eyes in the world--touching it thrice. Ball-movement that puts the sport of basketball to shame. This goal had it all.
It should have been 3-1, when Bojan came on for Pedro and, in his one moment, received a perfect long-ball from Pique on the left, ran in along the touchline, and stroked in the most perfect ball you can ask for from the young'n for Ibra to tap in. But Weligton, who was a constant thorn in our side with his strength, fell over next to Ibra because he was "fouled".
I apologize for the length of this post--it will probably be my longest post for some time, but I cannot say enough about this performance. It was not a perfect game. Aside from the goal conceded and the chances missed, certain errors became prominent, such as Iniesta's consistently poor crosses, to Alves' consistently poor crosses and deteriorating distribution throughout the game. Everything else felt so distinctly not-memorable that it is hardly worth criticizing. If I was in the habit of rating players, I would give the worst player on the field an eight--maybe a nine. But I do not dare say who I thought that was, because it would be so harsh.
Next week, tune in to see Barca thrash Almeria. I cannot say if it will be such a good performance, but I also cannot say Barca will not put away six or seven goals on a poorer performance. Such is the period this team is in right now, and sometimes I feel honored to watch.
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