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Journalism of Courage
For some reason, people kept talking about this as “the purists’ final”, or “the final the purists wanted”. But football is seldom pure and for that matter, rarely simple. Perhaps the nearest football has got to purity was the football of the old Arsenal, the 1-0 Arsenal of the Tony Adams and George Graham days, football as the pure pursuit of victory, football unadulterated by such stuff as beauty or joy.
But both Barcelona and Arsenal are capable of playing football that has more in it than victory. With both, beauty is not their aim but their method. Their football is not willfully but incidentally beautiful; the way they seek victory has an aesthetic value as well as a value that can be measured in goals. And that aesthetic response is — for all the mud and the fouls and feigning and the cheating — an ineluctable part of football, as every fan who has ever responded to the notion that one goal is “better” than another must admit.
There had been fears that this match would see Arsenal wrapped up in doubts and fears. But their strongest suit is beauty; what option did they have but to play it? They went at Barcelona from the first, and it seemed that the Henry v Ronaldinho aspect of the match would be the deciding drama.
Henry is football’s master of speed. It is not just that his pace over the ground is terrifying, it is because it is accompanied by such touch and finesse. Ronaldinho’s incidental beauty is more obvious, more gaudy; an ability to do improbable things with body and with ball…
Beauty is every team’s tactic of choice against a side with only ten men on the pitch. Any well-evolved passing game draws sighs of appreciation from the so-called purists. The fewer men you have to cut off passes, the easier it is to pass; and the harder it gets for the increasingly beleaguered opposition ever to touch the ball again. And so Barcelona, a side better-equipped to do so than most, attempted to pass Arsenal to death, death by the thousand brush-strokes…
It was, in the end, a game short of beauty. For a while it seemed that the old Adams purities might win the day for Arsenal but it was not to be, Barcelona won 2-1. Instead of great beauty we had high drama. Not as satisfying, but good enough to be going on with. Quite a night.
Excerpted from a piece by Simon Barnes from ‘The Times’, London
