I have learnt to be wary of proselytising about football. The last time I tried was the final of the World Cup in South Africa, Spain versus the Netherlands, two teams with a reputation for skilful, attacking play and thoughtful rather than hopeful passing. These two sides, I explained to people whom football fans like to call ‘neutrals’ (it means they’re not interested), would show how the game is meant to be played at its most refined — especially if your most recent encounter with football was watching England’s concrete-booted performances in that tournament, culminating in ignominious exit against an unusually exuberant Germany.
I was half right. Spain played their neat, probing, clever game, while Holland went for full-frontal assault, approaching the match more in the spirit of Bruce Lee than Johan Cruyff. Afterwards, the greatest Dutchman ever to wear the orange shirt summed up the national embarrassment. Holland, he said, played in an ‘ugly, vulgar, hard, hermetic, hardly eye-catching, hardly football style’. I know: ‘hermetic’. I don’t know what it is in Dutch, but you can’t imagine Andy Gray saying it in any language.
When Arsenal travel to Barcelona next week, however, for the second leg of their knockout European Cup tie, I have reason to be hopeful that a classic is in store and, if football has you reaching for the off-button, I would urge you to reconsider. There have been recent domestic slip-ups — as an Arsenal fan, I have had to accept losing to a slightly less glamorous second city, Birmingham, in the Carling Cup final on Sunday. But both teams have decent form against each other. They will be meeting for the fourth time in two seasons, and so far each match has been more extraordinary than the one before.
Last season Barcelona arrived in north London as the team of all the talents, outplayed their hosts with breathtaking speed and agility, but somehow drew two-two. The expected deluge arrived back at Barcelona’s home, the Camp Nou, when all four goals were scored by their Argentinean magician, Lionel Messi. It was a brilliant display, but not exactly a ‘match’.
Drawn against each other again in the same competition, Arsenal and Barcelona have already delivered a better contest in the first leg at Arsenal’s home, the Emirates. The drama of the comeback from one-nil down was there, but that sort of thing happens every week (if you watch Arsenal, you can also see their opponents come back from four-nil down). This game was special because of the way both teams played: ‘Estamos tocando tiki-taka tiki-taka’, as a Spanish football commentator once put it. ‘Tiki-taka’ is a phrase suddenly in common use by English journalists. Like all the best onomatopoeia, it operates as a form of Esperanto, perfectly describing the pinball-like short passing game that sends the ball around the pitch in a geometrical blur, without letting the other side have a touch. Barcelona, a team built around a core of Spanish World Cup winners with the addition of Messi, universally recognised as the best player on earth, have been playing tiki-taka for years. Arsenal have been trying to. Last week, although often still reduced to the role of piggy-in-the-middle, when they did get the ball, the Gunners gave a pretty good imitation of the masters. They even scored a couple of goals, to Barcelona’s one.
Naturally, not everything interesting about a sporting contest happens on the pitch, or in the ring. Ali and Frazier or Louis and Schmeling were not just heavyweight title-fights, they were two world-views colliding. Arsenal-Barcelona may not be the Clash of Civilisations, but that Arsenal’s captain, Cesc Fabregas, is a Barcelona boy who began at the Camp Nou before being transferred (Barcelona supporters would say ‘poached’ or, after a few sherries, ‘stolen’) to north London adds something to the encounter. One would be tempted to call it ‘irony’ had our own football commentators not long ago robbed the concept of meaning. The fact that two of Arsenal’s best players, in a side routinely scoffed at for being ‘foreign’, were two young Englishmen, Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere, as yet unsullied by long exposure to the England national team, was also heartening.
So perhaps I won’t jinx the return leg on Tuesday 8 March if I recommend it to anyone who thought football was all sexist remarks, grotesque pay-packets and witless hoofing. We laughed at Eric Cantona, Manchester United’s French philosopher, when he claimed that football was ‘le plus beau des arts’, but at the Camp Nou, it might just come true. Then again, I’m an Arsenal fan, we’re a goal ahead. Art’s all very well, but I’d be happy with a nil-all draw.