Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Semantic Lisp
serious question/point: the whole thing with barcelona's style and with their youth set-up is that they play the same way from a young age and the process brought a stream of players through to the 1st team. the development began well before pep was boss and these players were mixed with famous and very rich signings.
so even though pep was obviously excellent and was able to oversee that process' ultimate destiny as it were, surely he cannot and should not take or be given full credit for it? yes a famous and no doubt excellent manager. but legendary? it's an oft used word in football parlance, but he wasn't fully responsible for developing that system or those players, failed to defend the CL even though they were supposedly the best club side of all time, walked out and quit the game for a year, and then went back to the German champions and treble winners, a club who had paid off all competition in their own league btw, and failed to defend the CL there as well... and I'm a fan btw!
|
There have been a handful of teams which have dominated European football in their respective eras, but only a very few that achieved that success playing collectively at the level of Barcelona under Guardiola: a whole team moving as if it was one unit, manipulating space on the pitch; 11 players active at all times, both with and without the ball; every player, no matter how talented or renowned, willing to play with generosity and to sacrifice himself for his team-mates; each player willing to assume the risk of playing on the edge, because he understands the capabilities of his team-mates and knows that each of them will do the same; automatisms so well honed, so thoroughly drilled, that they could be performed blindfolded. The capacity, in short, for 11 players to impose their will on every opponent through the way they play together, as a team. Over the past five decades, I believe that Ajax in the early 1970s and Milan in the late 1980s are the only others to reach those same heights.
Bayern, for instance, had great players in the 1970s, the likes of Maier, Beckenbauer, Breitner, Muller. A phenomenal group. They won three European Cups in succession and their players formed the basis of the West Germany side that won the World Cup in 1974. But they didn't win because because their tactical structure created a multiplier effect on their individual abilities, as Sacchi talks about; rather, they won because they had outstanding players, good team organisation, and a fantastic mentality. There's a big difference, I think.
Barcelona themselves didn't manage it before Guardiola, even with the all the great players they've had, even with their youth system oriented from top to bottom around dominating the ball, even with coaches of the calibre of Cruyff and Van Gaal. (Cruyff is clearly the figure who played the biggest role in bringing this style to Barcelona, and he built a wonderful team, but they always left the door open for the opponent. Guardiola's Barca, at their peak, didn't.) And they haven't done it since, either. This season, for example, I'd say that the only time they've dominated in the way that they did under Guardiola, against a good side, was on the weekend against Sevilla. For the opening 30 minutes of the match. They played that level consistently, in a high percentage of matches, for most of Guardiola's tenure.
Guardiola clearly doesn't have the status of Michels or Sacchi, men who not only built teams that astonished the world, but also imposed new visions of how to play the game, visions that still shape football through to this very day; but he did manage to build a team that touched perfection, as those two did before him. This will - without question, in my view - mark him out as a special figure in football history; someone whose name will still be mentioned decades hence. And he has had an influence on the way the game is played, one as big, I think, as anyone since the turn of the millennium, and not just on football in Europe, but also on a lot of the new generation of coaches in South America.
I would also ask those who say that what he achieved at Barca was only to be expected, given the players he had and what not, what opinion they had about this beforehand. How many expected them to become one of the all time great sides when Guardiola took charge? I know I didn't. And I know for a fact that most of the people on here didn't. I remember Ginners starting
a thread towards the end of 2008 stating that Barcelona were the best team in the world. Most people said that we or Chelsea were better. Again, this was not before the fact, but months into his tenure. And even before we played them in the final, a lot people still thought we were the better side. You certainly could've seen them becoming one of the top teams in Europe again, capable of winning the domestic league and challenging the likes of United and Chelsea in European competition, but that's a long way from what they actually went on to achieve.
(I've just had a look at my reply to Ginners's thread, by the way. I wrote, in November of that year, that they were:
"[A]bsolutely £#%&!ing awesome right now. Unquestionably the best team in the world so far this season. A supremely talented group of individuals playing at the top of their respective games as individuals, but also with dedication, sacrifice and generosity on a collective basis." Think it's fair to say that Ginners and I saged the shit out of that
)
14-04-2015, 11:31 PM
Similar Threads for: Champs League qf first legs 14/5/15
