Barcelona against Real Madrid, Pepe Guardiola against Jose Mourinho, Lionel Messi against Cristiano Ronaldo: it may be familiar but the saga is yet to pall. The sulphurous atmosphere around the games - the diving and feigning of injury on the pitch, the insidious allegations of conspiracy off it - may tarnish the reputations of all concerned but the thrill of seeing what are by some distance the best two sides in the world going head-to-head remains.
Five times they met last season. Saturday’s meeting will be the sixth of the campaign and there could yet be one more in Munich in the Champions League final next month. Of those 10 previous meetings under the present coaches, Barcelona has prevailed five times, with four draws and one Real Madrid win. However, that doesn’t quite tell the whole story of Barcelona’s domination of the fixture, for three of the draws came in two-legged ties in which Barca won the other leg. Last season’s Copa del Rey final aside, when Ronaldo’s header in extra-time settled a bad-tempered contest that came as the second episode in a four-part epic spread over just 18 days, is the only time Mourinho has got the better of Guardiola. Tactically, the Catalan has outwitted the Portuguese again and again.
Barcelona’s core philosophy may have been laid down by Vic Buckingham and Rinus Michels four decades ago, but it’s far from static. One of Guardiola’s strengths as a coach is his refusal simply to send out sides that do the same thing over and over again. In Barcelona’s last two games, the 4-0 home win over Getafe and the 2-1 victory at Levante, he has even taken to playing what has variously been described as a 3-1-4-2, a 3-4-3 and even 3-3-4 (which, given that Javier Mascherano tended to sit deeper than the other two defenders could be termed a 1-2-3-4 – the pyramid re-inverted).
In both games, Mascherano played between Carles Puyol and Adriano to form the back three, with Sergio Busquets sitting deep in midfield to provide cover if required. Xavi played to the right of the two central midfielders, with Andres Iniesta or Thiago Alcantara to the left. Against Getafe, Messi dropped off a front line of Isaac Cuenca, Alexis Sanchez and Pedro; against Levante it was Cesc Fabregas dropping off Sanchez, Messi and Pedro.
Barca has long played with a false nine – usually Messi – a central forward who drops deep, drawing defenders out of the back line. What it has done differently this season is to use two, increasing its fluidity yet further – and moving closer to the highly fluid 4-6-0 formation Carlos Alberto Parreira predicted as football’s future almost a decade ago.
The other big change this season has been the frequent use of a back three rather than a back four – evidence of Guardiola’s restlessness, his refusal to allow his side to sink into a pattern, to become either complacent or predictable. Generally speaking, the pattern in football has been to increase the number of defensive players (with is why my book on the history of tactics, tracing the move from 2-3-5 to 4-5-1, is called Inverting the Pyramid. That Barca is able to buck that trend is down to its domination of possession. This is the purest form of pro-active football – the football of Marcelo Bielsa as much as of Johan Cruyff. Control the ball and you control the game, runs the theory, and the best way of controlling the ball is to field ball-players rather than ball-winners – hence the use of Mascherano, a holding midfielder for most of his career, as a central defender.
The back three was critical in this season’s first league clasico. Barcelona began with a 4-3-1-2 in which Fabregas was uncomfortable as the spare man. Barca trailed 1-0 following Victor Valdes’s first-minute error - a misplaced pass after which he showed admirable self-belief to keep playing the ball short from the back as the Barca system demands – when Guardiola pushed Dani Alves from right-back to right midfield so he could check the runs of Marcelo from full-back and cut off the support for Ronaldo.
Puyol shifted to right-back, with Busquets dropping in to become a second centre-back. Gerard Pique became the right-sided centre-back, allowing him to double up on Ronaldo when required, while Alexis Sanchez moved to become a highly mobile centre-forward (a false nine, if you like, but with lateral rather than longitudinal movement). Messi operated between the lines of midfield and attack, with Iniesta shuttling on the left and Fabregas brought back much closer to Xavi.
Busquets’s contribution is often overlooked, but he is key to initiating Barca attacks. He is always there as the get-out - if a player gets into trouble, he can go back to Busquets. Block off the escape route, though, and anxiety can be induced. Attack the metronome and the whole orchestra loses rhythm. Mourinho surprised many in that game by opting for a 4-2-3-1 rather than a 4-3-3, but what it allowed him to do was press with five men, leaving Lassana Diarra to protect the back four. That brought the opening goal and it rattled Barca.
Moving Busquets back, though, gave him time and space. Withdrawn from the front line, he could begin again to shape the battle. It was a risk, because it left Mesut Ozil free, but he is a slightly old-fashioned playmaker, somebody who is adept at finding time amid the hubbub to measure a pass. Usually that is an asset, but here it gave Busquets time to close him down. We’re used to seeing Busquets dropping back from midfield to become a centre-back, but here he was doing the opposite, stepping out from the back four to become a midfielder. Perhaps this is the logical outcome for a side that flips so often between a back three and a back four: it ends up playing a back three-and-a-half.
So what does Real Madrid do this time? The problem is that Barca is so protean, has so many variations, that it’s very difficult to know which shape to expect. A basic when playing highly technical sides is to cede the flanks and pack the middle – as USA did successfully against Spain in the Confederations Cup in 2009 for instance. Levante did that with some success on Saturday – Pedro ended up sending in cross after cross that, aimed towards short forwards who spend most of their time dropping deep, were largely ineffective. It was what Mourinho’s Internazionale did against Barca in the 2010 Champions League semi-final: it protected what Ottmar Hitzfeld terms the “red zone” - that is, the central area just outside the box from which most killer passes and long-range shots come – and challenged Barca to shoot from even longer range.
Such an approach, though, is incompatible with the pressing that gave Real such hope in the first 20 minutes at the Bernabeu and that leaves Mourinho with an awkward decision. And ceding the flanks may not be such a good idea with Dani Alves back in the side, potentially cutting infield at pace. And that really is the problem of this Barcelona team, and the genius of Guardiola. He has created a side that isn’t just brilliant, but is brilliant in many different ways.
