Simon Barnes says this was no chick-flick, more a boys’ film about character and endurance in the face of adversity, won in the end by skill over dogged resolve
TONIGHT, you can watch the women figure skaters pout and preen their way to the medals. But if you wanted to get a serious understanding of the difference between artistic impression and technical merit, then obviously the thing to do was to watch the Chelsea-Barcelona match last night.
That, at any rate, was the way things were supposed to be. Football has this thing about beauty, and Barcelona do beauty, according to the consensus, while Chelsea do not. That is the now-traditional meaning of this fixture and last year, when the teams met in the same stage of the Champions League, Barcelona got all the available points for artistry in a single moment of genius from Ronaldinho. But Chelsea won, showing that beauty only gets you so far. Which meant that along with their victory, they had to endure the gibes that they won it, yes, but they won it in the wrong way.
These things hurt in football far more than you might think. Behind every footballing tough guy there lurks a mincing aesthete with a love of art for art’s sake, football for football’s sake. A win without art is somehow less than a victory; less, almost, than a beautiful defeat. In football, the romantic and the pragmatist are ever at war in the same breast.
Beauty, it must be understood here, is not Barcelona’s aim but their method. And last night they were ready to use this method at every opportunity — quick-fire passing of wit and purpose in the danger areas, seeking always to produce an unlooked-for player in a position of threat. And Ronaldinho may have all kinds of technical merit to offer: but he is incapable of doing anything without beauty.
He is football’s Michael Holding, and Holding looked a study in grace even when he kicked the stumps over in temper. The Brazilian’s low, thumping drive had Petr Cech performing a skill that no one but a goalkeeper ever thinks beautiful: a skimming, stinging dive into the mud to make the save. The famously horrid pitch seemed muddy only to Chelsea, who tried a fair amount of the football that people do not consider beautiful, with plenty of stuff in the air and plenty more — don’t call them long passes, that would be too beastly. Longish, and somewhat speculative passes, then. And speed is only beautiful in certain contexts in football.
So far, then, so predictable, but one of the little bonuses of sides that strong in artistic impression is that a team that does beauty can also do surprise. And that was the undoing of Asier Del Horno, taken totally aback by the speed and the skills of Lionel Messi. Beaten once again, he abandoned all thought of aesthetics and went in for a Grim Reaper scythe-swinging tackle, got it horribly wrong and was — perhaps a shade unluckily — sent off. Beauty can be a right bastard to deal with. And perhaps referees are aesthetes, too, and wish to protect beauty as conservationists seek to protect rare butterflies.
But in football, beauty is not truly an end in itself. José Mourinho prefers a functional side full of pliable talents, rather than a random flock of geniuses. He doesn’t get distracted by football’s strange obsession with beauty. And it is one of the strange rules of football that every team in some way reflect their manager.
Chelsea are a dizzy blend of very high technical merit and an even higher sense of self-worth. That was the heart of the clash: Barcelona know they are beautiful but Chelsea know they are wonderful. Something, then, must yield in the course of this tie. The sending-off changed the dynamic of the contest: Chelsea went unashamedly for pragmatism when down to ten men. That naturally involved swapping stiletto for mace, and substituting Didier Drogba for Hernán Crespo.
Chelsea had little option other than ugliness: and for people such as Mourinho there really is no contradiction involved in the phrase “winning ugly”. If you can only see it in the right sort of light, every victory has about it some aspect of beauty. That is, if you can find the victory. And so Chelsea marched on, feeding off the sometimes ugly vibes that exist between the two sides. No pride in method, in such circumstances you take anything you can.
What to do, then, but celebrate when Thiago Motta turned a — beautiful? Supremely effective, anyway — free kick by Frank Lampard into his own net. If there was art in Chelsea’s performance, it was not painting or sculpture or poetry. It was a tough, downright narrative, one about character and endurance and of shared resolve. It was no chick-flick: a boy’s film about what you do for your mates.
Not the most compelling story of all time, no. But Ronadinho then created another unheard-of thing: an own goal of exquisite beauty, a gorgeous free kick for John Terry to head home in horror. Ronaldinho does love to horrify an Englishman. The horror was completed by Samuel Eto’o, heading in a most emphatic winner. Losing ugly: no one has ever considered that a contradiction.