Barca: The challenge of being more than a football club

Next to feeling that things are not going right, there is nothing worse for a football club, as it is for one’s own life, than not knowing quite why, or not being able to find a way of expressing it.

For all the club’s historically self-conscious sense of cultural and political identity, this Sunday it’s difficult to find a  Barca fan without a deep sense of foreboding. The defeat in Milan, and the two Clasico defeats have left cules struggling to keep faith in a project they had come to believe was impregnable.

How different things seemed back in mid-January when Barca ‘s away 3-1 victory over Malaga was secured with football of such sublime quality as to leave few of those watching with any doubt that this was indeed the greatest team in the world. The talk then was of a team, gestated by Cruyff, moulded by Guardiola, and developed by Tito Vilanova, that had evolved to the point of near perfection.

Now there is a blame game under way, with the one-time choreography now transformed into a disparate target list of below-par individual players vulnerable to criticism. I watched saturday’s game vs Madrid with a group of usually discerning Barca fans and noone really could decide whether having Villa or Cesc works better when both have barely made a mark in recent games. Others suggested that Xavi and Pujol have been showing their age. A few criticised Alba and Alves  for failing in attack. Yesterday not even Iniesta and Messi escaped criticism, both showing evidence of brilliance in the first half, but effectively absent from the second when the arrival of Ronaldo shifted the whole dynamic of the game in Madrid’s favour.

Far from rising to the challenge, Barca  seemed cowered by it, bereft of a plan B, its sense of impotence summed up by Captain Valdes getting a red card for claiming a penalty against Madrid that was not given.

And yet the Barca players, in their anger, and their poor form, merely showed that they were human after all, leaving exposed the terrible deficit the club has to face with the continuing absence of   Vilanova. For Tito’s temporary stand-in Jordi Roura at the Bernabeu acted and behaved like a man utterly overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control.

But let’s be clear: all the talk of Tito managing the team from New York does no one any favours, least of all Tito himself for it aims to transform him into a mythical figure when he  is a very real person who is struggling to focus on the real enemy at the gates: cancer.

What it does do is underline the dilemma facing Barca –a team that appears to have lost its compass but can’t call on the person who might be able to restore it. To appoint another more experienced and talented manager to take over from Roura -however temporary- rather than wait in the hope that Tito will recover and return would risk being seen as a clinical act unworthy of a club that emotionally aspires to represent more than just football.  For such an appointment would imply a public definition about Tito’s fate that would violate his wish that his illness remain a private matter.

The hope of every Barca fan is that Tito will recover and return as quickly as possible, just as Johan Cruyff did following his heart scare in the 1990’s. But while Tito’s absence continues, things may well get worse for Barca in football terms however much it may feel it has to retain the moral high ground. The coming days are going to be a real test of the meaning of mes que un club.