But this somewhat arrogant belief that their way of playing is the only way and would overcome all and sundry needs to go away. They have not stumbled upon the secret of football, they need to change and adapt just like every other team out there.
I never heard anyone from barcelona saying that, and if you knew A BIT about barcelona fans, you would know that we are demanding a PLAN B for years. The problem is that with our PLAN A we won 15 trophies, including 4 leagues, 2 Champions leagues and reaching CL semifinals for 6 consecutive years, something no one did before.
The PLAN B was Ibra and turned to be worse than PLAN A, for whatever reasons. I'm pretty sure that if we had had someone like Larsson in the squad we would have some additional CL trophy in the cabinet. But hey, having won 3 in the last 10 years it' enough.
All cycles are based in a way of playing. Sacchi's Milan always played the same way, Ajax always played their style... Were they arrogants as well? Were they stubborn?
As in other areas of life, like science, sometimes a paradigm makes it way and triumphs for some time. The paradigm will become useless sooner or later, but reaching this status is reserved to only the best temas in time.
Most people will judge this team by it's last efforts, where possession has been above 70% but chances slim, and yes, Barcelona has played boring football in the Champions League lately. But this can't hide the way in which this team played with Pep at their peak, when they had the highest amount of chances per match in Europe, the lowest shots against and most of the possession was aimed to hurt the opposition. And it was very very similar to what Bayern are doing now.
All this "arrogant" stuff I think was created by journalists all over the world praising so much the team and the style. But it was only natural to have all that praise. Don't forget that Barcelona played finals of Champions League with up to 8 players from the youth team in the field.
I risk being arrogant now, but I really think that this (a majority of people from the youth team) is the way football should be. It's my belief, and I'm prettu sure there's people who disagree and would prefer otherwise. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with people who prefer the athletic type of player and consider that passing the ball around is more boring than just running around. I don't call them arrogants. It's just different styles of play.
Barcelona wasn't really a top big club until Cruyff changed its history in the late 80s and stablished te way in which football should be played. It doens't mean that football should be played like this by ALL teams. It means that Barcleona HAS to play like that because it's his style. And since that change, the club has achieved more than any other club in the world.
So blame the journalists or people over the world for changing that praise into mantras. We Barcelona fans are perfectly aware that there are many ways to play football and there's no ONE way to play it. It's just that we are aware of how our team has to play, and yes that's THE way we have to play in order to make thinks work. Each group/company/club has an idiosincrasy and culture, and the same way Atletico has always succeeded with counterattack football, we mastered (for right and for wrong) possession football, it's our way. And it pays a lot more than not having a clear way at all.
Besides, it's just wrong that the club only wants tecnihcal small guys. Toure was a key player and he left simply because of the money. Busquets is no small at all. For years one of our key players in midfield was Keita and we recently signed Song. There's an idea of balance in the midfield that just got wrong lately, when we didn't sign the right players and kept putting Xavi and Iniesta when they were clearly too tired and almost injured. They have no gas left in the tank after playing so many matches. Blame Tito for that.
I think most of the "haters" of this team at the beginning didn't like that a team was able to nullify the opponents. Barcelona truly made, for several years, the opponents like like amateurs without the ball. That's very hard to achieve and imply a kind of enjoyment of the sport that is not related to goals/chances. In the CL finals against Manchester, we faced an incredibly strong team that was dominating locally and in Europe. And they had no chance against us at all. They felt totally useless and that's because of how Barcelona nullified them by having the ball. You may not like this style, but it's an incredible feat.
And really, I never felt the team was boring until the last year and a half. You only have to watch matches from that period and Barcelona was having 20 chances per match!
For years Barcelona has been the highest scorer and the team conceding less goals. How can the team that socres the most be as boring as you say? The boring side of it was that it was so superior to opponents! But really, is Barcelona to blame for that?
It says a lot on how people change their mentality towards a team when it begins to win a lot. Take into account last year semifinals. There was people talking about how bad Barcelona had been against Chelsea.
But let's recap the numbers of the round:
- Barcelona had 4 posts
- Barcelona wasted 2 empty net shots
- Barcelona shot 35 times (18 on target) in the overall (practically 1 shot each 4 minutes of REAL playing time).
- Chelsea shot 4 times, 1 off target and scored 3.
At the 2nd leg, after missing a penalty, Barcelona got nervous and didn't deliver. But overall it was a team that had done everything to win, had shot a lot of times and had simply wasted too many chances.
And guess what. People were criticizing the team for not playing well, for not having a plan B... practically for everytihng.
Hey, they were simply wasteful and had bad luck. You can believe in luck or not, but commonly speaking, it was bad luck. 9 out of 10 times Barcelona had to win both matches and they did DESERVE to win, in my oppinion. If those were numbers of the team you love in a semifinal, what would you think of it?
So, at the end, when a team wins, expectations rise. And they rise to really absurd levels. Barcelona this season will win the league (I hope) and have reached CL semifinals. How can this be really a bad season? It's better than 99% of other clubs seasons! But this is where expectations drive you.
And a similar thing happened with the amount of praise in the world. Some people will feel angry with that amount of praise and will end up
Having only really seen them in 'big' matches in the CL - it seems to me their passing is actually defensive, rather than offensive.
This is something that says a lot. Out of 70 matches of the season, you maybe watch 5 or 6. It's less than 10% of matches. How can you judge the entire team/season out of that?
In the CL the team suffered a lot, so they were toothless at times. But not because they wanted to, it's just they coudln't perform better and the opponents were hard to beat and played very well to us.
But if you had watched the entire season, you would be surprised. The first 5 months of competition it was a delight watching the team play, scoring plenty of goals and having a more direct approach to the game than with Pep. All this changed after Tito had to go away due to its Cancer and the team running out of gas in the final stretch. But look at the results in the first leg of the Spanish league and you will see the big amount of very interesting matches played.
Some of the people also judge some players for punctual performances. It's the case with Busquets. As I said in this thread before, Busquets acted like an idiot the first 2 years at the team. And he earned himself (deservedly) to be infamous. But, in the last 18 months, he hasn't acted, he hasn't cheated, he hasn't dived and he has behaved perfectly in the pitch. But people, out of inertia, will keep tagging him as a "cheater", before he was indeed 2 years ago.
I would say people LIKES to put those TAGS to people. It makes things easier and it's easier to criticize people/clubs. I know because I do it to certain extent as well. We always do. It has happened with all the "arrogant/style" debate, as your posts clearly show. People have TAGGED barcelona as arrogant fans that thought they style was the only way football was meant to be played. Does it holds any truth? Probably some Barcelona fans will think this. I'm sure some fans also believe in UFOs. That doesn't imply that Barcelona fans think like this. At all. But it was easier for some people to simply put that TAG to the team and the fans.
PS: Congratulations to Bayern. They were an incredible team. Watching them live at the Nou Camp was a joy, a performance I won't forget in years. It was like watching our team at its peak again. Dominating every aspect of the game. Totally focused, competitive and most of all.... HUNGRY!
I will definitely enjoy the CL final a lot, because I love the way both teams play and they deserve to be there.
