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Well, wasn’t that one heck of a stoush? On one side was a team representing the dark forces of football, a bunch of preening, self-absorbed whiners hell-bent on sucking all the joy out our great game. And on the other side was Real Madrid.
Seriously, though, any moral superiority Barcelona thought they had over their hated rivals surely drifted high into the Madrid night sky as the Catalan standard-bearers stooped to disappointing new lows in their 2-0 win Champions League semi-final win yesterday.
Sure, Barça fully deserved their victory and were certainly the only team that came out to play.
But when Dani Alves disintegrates like a dandelion in a stiff breeze whenever an opponent so much as looks at him and the increasingly ugly Carles Puyol spends as much time coaching referees as he does organising the back four, it gets tiresome to revisit the platitudes lavished on Barcelona for their style of football.
More than a club?
Holier-than-thou more like it, although the Catalan giants showed they weren’t afraid to bust out some shrill histrionics in response to Jose Mourinho’s park-the-bus-and-pray tactics.
Mourinho laughably suggested his three-stage game plan involved introducing a recognised striker late in the game – presumably the fourth would have seen pigs fly over the packed stands of the Bernabéu – and ‘O Pouty One’ was in venomous form in his traditional post-match meltdown.
“Sometimes I feel disgusted about this football world of ours,” said Mourinho as he wiped away tears, no doubt railing against the injustice of being paid vast sums of money to conceive such elaborate game plans as defending with ten men behind the ball.
“I just have one question: Why?” asked the mischievous Mourinho, hinting at the kind of refereeing conspiracy not seen since the days when General Franco rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into the messy business of rigging the Spanish championship in Real Madrid’s favour.
Had Mourinho been paying attention, he would have been aware that the correct answer to his question was obviously, “Lionel Messi.”
The little maestro once again showed that he is so far ahead of his contemporaries in terms of shaping a game, he will invariably be compared to Pele and Diego Maradona as the greatest of them all.
Messi’s second goal was majestic, scored as it was from the sort of slashing, high-octane run we’ve come to expect from the little master.
But it was his first which broke open the tie as the Argentine deftly got in front of his marker to prod home Ibrahim Afellay’s excellent right-wing cross.
Of course, both goals were helped by some diabolical defending: were the stewards who surrounded Marcelo at the end of the game trying to show the hapless Brazilian where to stand on the pitch?
At times the Madrid defence looked as though they’d signed up for a tanga class lead by Stevie Wonder, and there’s a wonderful sense of irony in the fact Mourinho’s ultra-defensive tactics came undone thanks to such shoddy individual defending.
The ranting racounteur at least got one thing right: without the suspended Sergio Ramos and Pepe, Madrid have no chance of reaching this year’s final, so we can all pencil in a Manchester United – Barcelona blockbuster at Wembley, thank you very much.
As for Mourinho, he’ll no doubt be dreaming up a succession of witty one-liners and practicing the most appropriate scowl for the next time he lines up against arch-nemesis Pep Guardiola.
He might as well start lining up a move back to Inter too, because there’s no way Mourinho will stay on as Real Madrid coach after being tactically out-thought and out-fought by his younger rival.
Barça have one foot in the final and the legend around Lionel Messi continues to grow, but it’s a shame their penchant for play-acting and haranguing referees continues to grow with it.