It is always tempting in sport to draw huge global lessons from one defeat or victory. That is a temptation that should be avoided for the simple reason that sporting victories or defeats on their own do not signify vast changes. That only emerges if they are part of a consistent pattern over several seasons.
The most potent example of this was provided by Barcelona. Before their match against A.C. Milan many were prepared to write their obituary. Not only had they lost fairly comprehensively to the Italians in Milan but there had been some bad defeats in the Cup to Real Madrid. Much was made of the effect on the team of the illness of their manager and how from his sick bed in New York he was trying to guide the team.
The match against Milan showed the absurdity of such sporting obituaries. As they demonstrated there is nothing wrong with Barcelona. They are still playing the football that everyone wants to and few can. It is a unique combination of artistry and athleticism. And Spanish football has demonstrated its depth by Malaga getting to the quarters at the expense of Porto, twice previous winners of Europe’s greatest club football prize.
But surely it will be argued the fact that no English club have qualified for the quarter finals of the Champions League for the first time in seventeen years does suggest a pattern of defeat which is very worrying. The Premier League may claim to be the richest league in the world but on the field of play it comes a poor second even to Turkey. Such a dismal conclusion is all the easier given how this year’s English campaign for Europe has gone
Chelsea reached a nadir by becoming the first trophy holders not even to get out of their group. Manchester City, the champions, made a similar exit at the group stage and Manchester United, the almost certain winners of the league, and Arsenal fell at the round of 16. If this not a massive wake-up call for English football, as Arsene Wenger puts it, than what is? And to make the misery complete this means that the final will see many English faces but that is only because it is being staged at Wembley. This is a bit like so many previous World Cup finals where the only Englishman present on the field of play has been the referee.
But dispiriting as all this is for English football, I would argue that the gap between the best of European football and English football is not as great as it is now being made out to be. True there is no team in England that can aspire to play like Barcelona. But then no team in the world can. And it is not impossible to imagine that Manchester United could have got past Real Madrid. Jose Mourinho may have been making a job application when he extravagantly praised Sir Alex Ferguson’s team but before the Nani sending off the English team was superior. And Arsenal’s fight back at Bayern showed the gap is bridgeable. With a proven goal scorer, a Robin Van Persie rather than Oliver Giroud, Arsenal could have won. Bayern’s manager was right when he said Arsenal had given the Germans a black eye, and the fact they could showed there is still resilience in Wenger’s team
However what makes me draw the greatest comfort is that the current state of English football is far removed from the situation that existed 17 years ago. Then, back in 1996, English football having rightly paid a collective price for the Hysel tragedy and excluded from Europe had still not been integrated back into the continental game.
This was the second time the English game had to undertake this task. The first time it must be said had been self inflicted. Then, back in the 50s, such was the disdain for anything continental that English football shunned the idea of European competitions. It had required visionaries like Sir Mat Busby to educate English football of the virtues of Europe. His baton was taken over by Bill Nicholson at Tottenham, Bill Shankly and then Bob Paisley at Liverpool, Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest and even the now forgotten Ron Saunders at Aston Villa.
The process of re-education after Hysel was even more difficult because during the years of exile English football had decided that football was an aerial game. When you got the ball you kicked it into the air towards the opposition box. The so called box-to-box player was discovered and the nadir was reached by making the Wimbledon team, which played some of the worst kick and rush football ever seen, into some sort of magical example of how football should be played. It required another intervention by Manchester United led by Alex Ferguson in 1999 to set it all right.
And since then much has changed and while English football needs to regroup and refocus it is starting from a base which is stronger and healthier than in 1996.
Now the European style of play of keeping possession of the ball even in defence is so ingrained you see it even in the lower leagues. It is no longer a case of hoofing it into Row Z. No team may match Barcelona but teams do play a form of ticky tack football which, if not quite Barcelona, is both easy on the eye and effective. Liverpool demonstrated this wonderfully well in the first goal they scored against Tottenham last Sunday. Vinny Jones would have dismissed it as fancy Dan but this is now what football fans expect and love.
And the most unlikely footballers talk as if they have bought into the Barcelona philosophy. This was vividly demonstrated to me the other week when I went to interview Craig Bellamy. He is a much changed character from a man described as the “nutter with the putter” for brandishing a golf club at his then Liverpool team John Arne Riise. But what struck me was when he spoke of his desire to become a manager and the existing managers he saw as his role models.
“I would want to go into management. I am reading the biography of Pep Guardiola. I find it really interesting. I’m going to take a big time out and visit people like Marcelo Biesla at Athletic Bilbao. I have a huge affection for him. There is no-one better than [Jose] Mourinho for how he cherishes his players and their affection for him is unique.”
When someone like Bellamy can be such an unabashed admirer of everything European then you realise how far English football has come. Yes, English football has to take stock and it needs to be tweaked. But it does not need to undergo the sort of radical surgery it had to go through in the past when it was left behind in Europe.
Mihir Bose’s latest book: Game Changer: How the English Premier League Came to Dominate the World has been published by Marshall Cavendish for £14.99
Follow Mihir on twitter @ Mihirbose