Barcelona and Atlético Madrid gave us 35 minutes of perfect soccer. Can they do it again?
Barcelona and Atlético Madrid have entirely different ideas about how best to play football, which is why Wednesday’s game might be absolutely brilliant.
For thirty minutes of last week's Champions League quarterfinal first leg, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid were playing an exceptionally good, exceptionally tight, exceptionally interesting game of football. Barcelona, current holders of the abstract title Best Team in the World, were losing, and were being asked awkward questions by a very good team. And they couldn't quite summon the answers.
At the same time that they were getting on with all that, they were offering up a wonderful example of one of football’s odder brilliant moments: the brilliance that can come from asymmetry.
In concept, football is perfectly symmetrical. Both teams are the same size, play by the same rules and are trying to achieve the same thing: getting the ball into one net while keeping it out of the other one. They even do so at the same time, which sets it apart from sports like cricket or American football, where each side takes its turn to bowl or bat, offend or defend.
In practice, football is almost always at least slightly (and often hugely) asymmetrical. All footballers are different people, all teams are made of these different people. One team will be quicker, or stronger, or taller, or fitter, or technically superior or more tactically coherent. Or all of those things. Each team will presumably have different ideas on how best to win the game. And one club will have had more money to spend on better players, coaches and facilities. Indeed, much of what is miserable about the top of the game is that these asymmetries stretch and become almost grotesque. If BATE find themselves unable to compete with Real Madrid, then that’s because almost everything is skewed towards the Spanish side. If Leicester are a fairy tale, it’s because they’ve overcome these institutional asymmetries.
On the pitch, an imbalance of power can, and often does, lead to one side tonking another, and tonkings are rarely good football matches. And while nobody is going to mistake Atlético Madrid for a proper minnow, there is still a gap between them and Barcelona in many respects. This is illustrated by the fact that Arda Turan, one of Atlético’s best players, was willing to move to the Camp Nou last summer, even though it involved taking a six-month career break and came with no guarantees of first-team football.
But it's here that asymmetry can come into play on the side of the underdog. Football may have the same rules and intentions for everybody, but there's nothing to say that everybody has to play it in the same way. If Atlético tried to play Barcelona at Barcelona's version of football, they'd get thumped. They don't have that front three, they don't have Andres Iniesta and they don't have Dani Alves. So, instead they went another way. They kept their shape and crowded the center. They sat deep and frustrated Barcelona's attack. And, when they got the opportunity, they charged upfield at pace and even managed to take the lead.
Admittedly, few teams can do this as well as Atlético; plenty of sides try to shut Barcelona down, and most are slapped aside with a sneer of contempt. Likewise, Atlético’s pair of nil-all draws in the previous round will quickly fade from memory, because watching them do their thing against limited teams isn’t all that exciting. But for half an hour we were treated to something special. An exercise in complementary and competitive asymmetry: two teams playing the same game radically differently, in ways that plugged into one another perfectly. Half an hour in, and it looked like Barcelona were going to have find new levels of Barcelona-ness to overcome the deficit, while Atléti would have to be at their most Atléti to stop them.
Then Fernando Torres ruined everything, the dick.
Still, at least Barcelona could only manage a one-goal lead, so the tie is still alive. With 11, and perhaps with a lingering sense of injustice from the first leg, it’s hard to imagine Atlético being any less on it this time around. And while Barcelona have suddenly decided to have a crisis, they’re still Barcelona, with all the ability to score goals in scads even while not playing particularly well that this current iteration implies. Hopefully, we’re in for another demonstration of one of football’s most appealing brilliances: that two teams can be at their most evenly matched when they’re as unevenly intended as possible. No sendings off for at least an hour, please.
