Source: Daily_Mail
MARTIN SAMUEL: So you're the best Barca? Now is the time to prove it...
Prove it: two little words that are the full stop in any debate. There follows a significant pause in which one side must put up, or shut up. From the playground to the boxing ring to the Crown Court at the Old Bailey, the process barely changes.
When the time comes, the only way to win the argument is through substantiating action. Put the suspect in the room with the weapon, put the champion on his backside on the canvas, put the class bully in his place.
This is what Barcelona must do in Rome tonight.
Keepy-Cuppy? Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson shows how to retain the Champions League title
You think you are the best team in the world? You think you play the most beautiful football? OK, now show us. Here, where it matters, against the reigning champions.
Here, against Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. Here, with the world looking on. This is the night on which Barcelona must step up if their pre-match tub-thumping is not to be exposed as hollow noise.
The Champions League final cannot be won at a press conference, or in a forum, even a Roman one. The trophy will rest on the sideline at the Olympic Stadium tonight and, if all that has been said is true and Barcelona have the best footballers, at the end of the game it will be paraded around the running track by the players in red and blue.
If not, as Sir Alex Ferguson told his team at half-time in the Nou Camp in 1999, it will be within reach, yet unobtainable; there in its gleaming splendour, yet not one of Josep Guardiola's players will be able to lay a fingertip on it. Nor will they deserve to.
'There is an exam
to be sat, and
passed, tonight'
Football is brutal like that. Weeks and weeks of talk and then that great conversation stopper: the match. Lose it, and all further claims are valueless. There are odd unlucky losers, of course, but no team can boast of being the best in the world if it is not the champion of Europe. The greatest do not fail, a fact Ferguson was quick to acknowledge yesterday.
'In terms of the pantheon of the best teams, you have to win this cup,' he said.
'You can be unlucky in life, and there have no doubt been some teams like that, but Barcelona or any team will have to do it to gain that recognition, just as we did. We should have done better after 1999 and I repeated many times that we needed another victory to be considered great. Now, to retain it in the modern era would be a first - and we are good at firsts.'
Contrary to belief, there are few who can be labelled undisputed champions. Not every winner of the European Cup or Champions League has that status. Even the most one-eyed observer would not say, for instance, that Liverpool were the best team in Europe in 2005; the Premier League table would suggest they were not even the best team in Liverpool.
True greatness is elusive. One could make a case for Manchester United last year, the Ronaldinho-inspired Barcelona in 2006, Real Madrid with Zinedine Zidane at his peak at the turn of the century, AC Milan under Arrigo Sacchi and then Fabio Capello, Liverpool between 1977 and 1984 when they won either the European Cup or league title in every season, mid-Seventies Bayern Munich, the total footballers of Ajax, the Inter Milan side that practised catenaccio with flint-hearted efficiency before providing the antidote with Jair, Luis Suarez and Sandro Mazzola, Eusebio's Benfica and the Real Madrid side that dominated the earliest years of the European Cup.
It is an elite school, and the current Barcelona team cannot just talk their way into it. There is an examination to be sat, and passed, and it takes place in Rome tonight.
Barcelona were last admitted three years ago when they faced Arsenal at the Stade de France in Paris. There was a sense of entitlement before that game, too, a belief that this would be a coronation, more than a contest, and if the match did not progress entirely according to plan, the best team still won, the Catalans rewarded for their patient, passing game, coming from a goal down to emerge worthy winners.
That night, Barcelona proved it. Instead of chasing the game in frenzy after going behind against the run of play, they remained true to their principles; patiently picking away at Arsenal's overstretched defence until opportunity knocked. They played like a team who never believed victory was in doubt. Ronaldinho, who had talked up such occasions as the pinnacle and proving ground of a player's career, has not been the same since.
It was as if his work was done. Certainly, it cemented Barcelona's reputation as the finest team in the world that year, status that was preciously fleeting.
Since then, in Europe, particularly against English sides, they have more often talked a good game than played one. Liverpool eliminated them the following season, United the year after that and, while Chelsea were knocked out in the semi-final in this campaign, it took a rogue refereeing display and a last-roll-of-the-dice goal in injury time to make it happen.
'This is a match with
the spirit of a
world title fight'
Bayern Munich had been dismissed imperiously in the quarter-final, but looking at the Bundesliga table, form readings from that game may be unreliable; likewise the splendid 6-2 win over Real Madrid in La Liga. 'That was not defeat, that was annihilation - but we are better than Real Madrid,' added Ferguson.
So questions remain; not that one would know this from Barcelona's recent pronouncements.
The process of revisionism began almost immediately after the second leg with Chelsea, when Catalan cheerleaders such as Johan Cruyff began making immodest claims. It was total football, according to defender Daniel Alves, total hyperbole, to many who saw the two games, in which Barcelona were first out-muscled and then outwitted.
Chelsea executed a negative game-plan perfectly at the Nou Camp and should have won at Stamford Bridge. The referee got the major decisions wrong for both sides, but did more harm to Chelsea's cause. Barcelona's crowing since then, as if they were at any stage in charge of the match rather than washed towards Rome by the vagaries of official incompetence, greatly overplays their influence on the outcome.
Barcelona's sense of entitlement has been increasingly overbearing in the build-up to the final. 'We deserve to win for the football we have played all year,' said Lionel Messi.
'It has been spectacular football. A lot of people want us to win because of that.'
This may be true. Barcelona's dedication to victory in a certain manner makes them, like Arsenal, the friend of the purist. Yet, talk of deserving to win a competition as hard-fought as the Champions League, particularly when a team as cultured, expansive and consistent as United are the opposition, cries out for rebuttal.
Barcelona will get what is coming tonight, either way, and if United become the first club to retain the trophy in its modern format, there will only be one team who can rightfully claim supremacy. This is a football match with the spirit of a world title fight. United are the champions, Barcelona a mighty contender.
The trophy should be handed over by Don King, rather than Michel Platini. Barcelona's preening could be mistaken for the confidence of Muhammad Ali, except it does not always come with the smile attached.
If anything, it smacks of a dangerous sense of privilege. Barcelona's most fervent defenders tend to paint their opponents as one-dimensional, and this includes United.
Yet, Ronaldo smiled broadly at the prospect of returning to the Olympic Stadium, the way that Ronaldinho talked excitedly on the eve of the final three years ago.
He exuded the confidence of a great player in his prime, and all should remember that on his last visit here he scored one of the most dramatic and brave headers the competition has seen, against Roma, arriving with such abandon that they could still have been collecting fragments of teeth and bone from the Curva Nord some hours later.
The ball flew into the net and United moved on through what is now a 25-game unbeaten run in Europe. To push on to 26 would be proving it in the most spectacular fashion, establishing a record to render further discussion unnecessary.
Abramovich wants a real secret agent
The big game has not kicked off but there may already be a loser in Rome: Carlo Ancelotti, the manager of AC Milan. Promoting his autobiography at a launch party in the centre of the city, Ancelotti revealed himself to be to discretion what Didier Drogba is to measured, analytical response.
His lurid description of a clandestine meeting with Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner, to discuss succeeding Avram Grant as manager, is almost comical in its injudiciousness.
One imagines Abramovich's toes curling as Ancelotti reveals what purchases were discussed (Franck Ribery and Xabi Alonso, apparently), how he went to the meeting disguised and feeling like a secret agent, before describing his prospective employer as timid.
Those hoping for a more reserved approach when it comes to dressing-room secrets are in for a shock, too.
Ancelotti tells how Mathieu Flamini was conned by an Italian-speaking colleague into announcing that he would like to perform oral sex on everybody in the Milan team.
This is the man that Chelsea wish to make their new manager, a man who is believed to have discussed the future with Frank Arnesen, Chelsea's director of football, in Rome this week. Quite how those talks will progress from here remains to be seen. Ancelotti may well go down as the first manager to write his resignation before taking the job.
Abramovich has an almost obsessive regard for privacy. He does not give interviews, never explains, never fronts up. Managers arrive, managers go and the puppet master remains behind the curtain. For this reason, Ancelotti's book provides excellent insight into the way the man works and runs his football club.
The pair met in Geneva, then Paris. There was a middle man. Ancelotti adopted the persona of 007 to avoid recognition. Abramovich described Grant's Chelsea team as having no personality.
These are tiny details, but there is little doubt that Abramovich will be mortified to see them in black and white; particularly at such a delicate stage in this present round of negotiations.
What we cannot know is how he will react to this breach of confidence. There is no passage in which Abramovich tells Ancelotti to keep their meeting under his hat but, with job offers, the need for tact is implied.
Ancelotti laughed off suggestions that his foray into publishing could cause Abramovich to retreat, but who knows? Certainly, the players will now be wondering whether the new man can be trusted to keep a secret and that is never a healthy start.
Ancelotti said yesterday that if Milan wanted him to stay, he would. Privately, he is believed to feel that Silvio Berlusconi, the club president, wants him out. The question is, after this, will Abramovich want him in? Having published, will Ancelotti's career in the Premier League be damned?
