To be remembered and respected as a truly exceptional team, perhaps the best ever, Barcelona must stamp out the playacting that tarnishes its oh-so graceful soccer.
Tuesday against Real Madrid at the Camp Nou would be a good place for its players to let their ball skills, not unsightly theatrics, do the talking. By rising above what is expected to be an ill-tempered match, Barcelona can redeem itself.
Rolling like tumbleweed on the field in feigned mortal agony or exaggerating the pain of a brush to the face from a rival isn't just uncool and unmanly, it's also cheating if designed to get the referee to whip out a yellow or red card.
That means you Dani Alves, Sergio Busquets and Pedro Rodriguez. That trio all looked guilty of making needless drama from admittedly bruising challenges in Barcelona's 2-0 Champions League semifinal, first-leg defeat of Madrid last week. A dollop of makeup, lights, cameras, action! and the setting could have been Hollywood, not the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.
Slow-motion video that aggrieved Madrid posted on its Web site suggested that Pepe may not even have grazed Alves' right calf with his studs-first tackle that earned him a red card in the 61st minute, altering the course of the match.
Even if there was contact, Alves made the absolute most of it, rolling across the grass like a 4-year-old in gym class.
Perhaps unfairly, the melodramatic way in which Busquets collapsed, clutching his face, from a throat-high slap from Madrid defender Marcelo was reminiscent of Robert Capa's famed ''Falling Soldier'' photo. The black-and-white image supposedly captured the fatal shooting of a Spanish Civil War rifleman but some Spanish researchers think it may have been faked.
Pedro for some reason also clutched his left eye socket after a thumping body-check from Alvaro Arbeloa, although Madrid's video again suggests that the aforementioned eye did not touch the Madrid defender. Capping the dismaying ugliness of it all was the way in which both sides' players repeatedly harangued and surrounded referee Wolfgang Stark like squawking dolphins around a trainer with a bucket of fish.
Such tactics and behavior should be beneath a team that makes an art form of kicking and sharing a ball.
This blowout of ''clasicos'' - four Barca-Madrid matches in 18 days - hasn't been much of a spectacle. Absorbingly tense but not pleasing to the eye. Fear of losing to their classic rival seems to have suppressed both teams' drive to win. Still, Barcelona has won the moral high ground by largely hewing to its philosophy of attack, attack, attack. That has had the corollary effect of making Madrid's understandably defensive tactics and play-blocking physicality look as nasty as a kid trying to tear the wings off a butterfly.
But winning cleanly and honestly is important, too. That's what Barca manager Pep Guardiola should tell his players before sending them out Tuesday night for that place in the Champions League May 28 final at Wembley. Their expected opponents are Manchester United, a team which doesn't regularly resort to shameful theatrics to trick referees, especially since Cristiano Ronaldo's 2009 move to Madrid.
Hard to imagine United strongmen like Wayne Rooney or defender Rio Ferdinand pretending they've been blinded, maimed or otherwise poleaxed by a rival player's faint touch. To be fair, Barcelona's Lionel Messi also isn't in the habit of making an oversized fuss of the many rough tackles he's subjected to, which is another of the many reasons to like and admire the Argentine heir to Diego Maradona.
The stain of play-acting lasts for eternity on YouTube. Rivaldo's Razzie-worthy dive at the 2002 World Cup - when the Brazilian pretended to have been struck in the face by a ball that actually hit his thigh, getting Turkey's Hakan Unsal sent off - has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Millions have laughed at the young Chilean player who made a fool of himself this year by grabbing the arm of an Ecuador opponent and whacking himself in the face with it.
Barca's Busquets has also accumulated a big audience with his thespian turn in the Champions League semifinal last year, when he made a mountain of a backward hand to the throat from Inter Milan's Thiago Motta.
Surely, Barcelona doesn't want to be cast as a team of whiners and divers. The high quality of its soccer deserves honest play of the highest order, too.
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John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org.
