Barca shows that football can be more than just a game

I knew I hadn’t been dreaming when early this morning my local Battersea street flower vendor Steve told me: “You must pleased, mate”, before congratulating Barca on a “master class in football.”

You see, Steve is not only football mad, he is a fanatical Chelsea supporter and, as followers of my blogs and specifically of one of my assiduous stalkers Captain Terry will know, I don’t normally get such genial comments from across the river.

Steve is of course not alone. Last night’s game at the Nou Camp delivered what by any standards of know-how or tribal prejudice,  a performance worthy of taking a noble place in the history of the game, as an example of technical as well as creative brilliance  but above all of the human spirit.

This was no ordinary kind of victory, but almost an existentialist moment, which defines the self as the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset once wrote, by a sense of “who we are and of our circumstances”. This was a team that in recent weeks had, by a process almost of transference, seemed to absorb within itself the darkness and despair that no doubt has affected, in the worst of moments, their heroic coach and friend Tito Vilanova.

Only days ago the astute football commentator Jorge Valdano, talked of Barca  “staring down a precipice” after its defeats against Real Madrid and Milan in the first leg of the Champions League.  The gloom was catching and spread among Barca fans, a sense that the club was entering one of those purgatories that the older generation of socios suffered for so many years, but which younger cules –brought up on the euphoria of the Rijkaard and Guardiola highs-had barely registered in their collective memory.

Last night’s post-match euphoria, uniting as it did all generations and cutting across political or social bias, seemed to have a more transcendent feel about it. Ok, one could, in other circumstances, have pointed to the two missed opportunities by Milan and suggested that things might have just turned out very different had had they scored. But this was not the kind of game where the winner simply struck lucky. This was a Barca that rallied having been spoken to by Tito by conference link in words that defied distance and cancer and filled them with hope. There was a redemptive quality to the occasion- a team back in touch with the most noble of its self , honouring Tito with his best ever victory.

Like the father said in the parable of the lost son: “We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” Visca Barca– Mes que un Club!