James Lawton: The mighty have fallen so enjoy it while it lasts, Bayern

 
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3 May 2013

Some myths die harder than others but if there was a special sadness in the Nou Camp this week, it was the way the one that was attached to Barcelona for so long did no more than curl up and expire.

The myth, the unsustainable one, was that the team of Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi were the best club side in the history of the game. The reality was that their admirers were always reaching too far. They thought they saw a fundamental change in the way the game should be played and that Barca had not only created a dazzling epoch but also laid siege to the future.

They didn’t. They seized their time, quite beautifully, they exploited the brilliance of Messi and his lieutenants Iniesta and Xavi but that could never be the same as establishing a system of play that was inherently superior to any that had come before and might appear in the future.

That so many excellent judges and not least arguably the best pound-for-pound pundit in the land, Graeme Souness, should have embraced the latter assessment so fervently perhaps tells us more about the fever of today than the evolution of the world’s most popular game.

You might have thought that the dynasties of Real Madrid, Milan, the first Bayern Munich, Ajax and the Liverpool of, ironically, Souness, might have stood up better against the lionisation of Barca. Or that of the performance generated by the Milan of Fabio Capello, which resulted in the 4-0 demolition of a heavily favoured Barcelona in the Olympic Stadium in Athens in 1994, might have lingered in the collective mind a little more powerfully. At the time it was described as the most complete performance ever seen in the European theatre.

Souness, unsurprisingly, is not quite ready to surrender his position entirely. After Bayern Munich had completed their second straight ransacking of the Barca culture, he said it was a little early to usher his favourites off the high road of history. He insisted Messi was still the best player we have ever seen — better than Pele, Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Alfredo Di Stefano — and pointed out that the apparently broken team are about to claim another La Liga title.

This argument might be stronger if there had not been growing evidence that Barca were no longer what they were before Messi was ambushed by injury at precisely the time the new wonder team, Bayern, bore down like Visigoths at the gates of Rome.

Inevitably, Bayern are the new Barca, bigger, stronger, younger and, unlike their victims, equipped with a defence ultimately fit for purpose. Just as the Spanish empire crumbles, the one of Germany rises inexorably.

Sooner or later, we can be certain, the new received wisdom will be shredded as profoundly as all that of it which was heaped around Barca’s victories over Manchester United in the 2009 and 2011 finals.

The 2006 win over Arsenal was, we should not forget, completed with a substantially different team, for 72 minutes against 10 men and with a huge slice of inspiration from the Swedish veteran substitute, Henrik Larsson. It was a valuable triumph, no doubt, but it could never be made into the foundation stone of the team of the ages. Of those claimants, only Victor Valdes and Carles Puyol started the game, the teenaged, injury-troubled Messi did not make the bench, Xavi stayed on it throughout and Iniesta appeared only for the second half.

Bayern have lost two Champions League Finals in the last three years and if their journey to the one at Wembley later this month could hardly have been more impressive, it carries no guarantees against Borussia Dortmund, their German rivals so superbly led and coached by Jurgen Klopp. What is assured beyond hugely merited respect for the recent achievements of the Bundesliga, both on and off the field, is the widespread conviction that in the fall of Spain we have also seen the inexorable rise of Germany.

Formidable though Bayern are, it is not hard to see the formation of still another myth.

For a reminder of this possibility we have only to go back five years to Moscow, where English football celebrated, as the birth of its own empire, the all-English final between Manchester United and Chelsea. It was a tense, hard-fought game, riveting in the strength of the battle and worth recalling the reaction of one observer, who said: “What power, what competitive character! Only English football could produce such football. It is the strongest being played. The rest of Europe cannot compete with this.” The observer was Spanish.

He must have been extremely surprised 12 months later when, in Rome, Barca so utterly dominated the Moscow winners United.

The point is immutable — and glorious in its way. Football, for all its sins, has a fascinating habit of mowing down even the biggest of its myths.

Roman will have to build a bonfire of his vanities

There is only one certainty if it is true that the Special One is indeed heading home to Stamford Bridge.

It is that it will be impossible to cast him in the role of a victim, which still seems to be the preferred option in the case of Rafael Benitez despite his reported £3million enrichment for a stint which was never portrayed by the club as anything more than a desperate holding operation.

Mourinho, more than any football man alive, knows the Chelsea deal. He knows the mores of a club that drove him out after some years of astonishing, transforming success.

Now, however, it seems we have come full circle.

By having him back, Roman Abramovich might well be implying that he has realised, at least to some extent, that he has become a victim of his own vanities in a world whose basic values, and imperatives, have for too long passed him by. What is not in question, though, is that if any man can impose a creative dynamic on one of the richest but most dysfunctional clubs in all of the game, it is surely Jose Mourinho.

The Real Madrid boss was kicked out of Europe the other night but in the end his team could not have gone less quietly.

At Chelsea he would bring back plenty of noise but there would be, you have to believe, a sharp drop in the sense of futility.

Absent Wilko not forgotten

The controversy over Jonny Wilkinson was calmed surprisingly quickly by the argument that he would not be able to fulfil all of the touring demands of the Lions.

For some of us, though, this rather paled beside the irrefutable fact that no one could have announced more clearly his superb credentials for the challenge of the Test matches in Australia. The issue, we can be sure, is far from closed.

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