In many ways Manchester City found exactly the right team to lose to on Tuesday night in what was one of the more profound narrowly preserved 2-1 thrashings one is likely to see. Like City Barcelona may or may not end up winning any trophies this season. They may also shed another manager, although of the two men whirling and pointing on the touchline at the Etihad Stadium Manuel Pellegrini looks the more likely to suffer in the wake of this tie, a victim of weighty expectations but also his own bodged tactical plan in Manchester.
Should they fail, however, Barcelona will at least fail in the right way, a team who can lose while still appearing to know in exact detail how they intended to win. For City, on the other hand, the defeat flagged up how far this spirited champion club still has to go.
Most obviously Pellegrini sent out a team ill-equipped to deal with this opposition. City’s manager may get another season after this, depending on the availability and willingness of City’s preferred alternative, Pep Guardiola. But his mistake in setting his team up in an attacking 4-4-2 highlighted above all the disorienting pressures of the job at a club that is still all aspiration and ambition at this level.
No matter how Pellegrini tries to spin his team’s stirring zombie resurrection in the second half, the fact is the players he selected were never really given a chance. The talk before the match was of City’s need to play without fear, of the craving for a defining European performance just as 20 years ago Manchester United had those unforgettable matches against Juventus and Chelsea found their own muse in Barcelona in the early Mourinho years.
And yet common sense dictated City simply play the game in front of them whatever their wider sense of destiny. Málaga had shown a way to play Barcelona at the weekend: press high up the pitch, put two men on Messi, force those malevolent little ball-playing superheroes inside every time. Instead City’s manager lost his bearings, gambling that the best of his team, the ability to build up wave after wave of full-width attack, might overload Barcelona’s vulnerable defence. Instead it left his team exposed to a superior central midfield not to mention the deadliest attacking trident since Poseidon as City’s own two-man attack presented Sergio Busquets with the freedom to run the game from the space just behind them.
And so City came marching out across the ring with their chin held high waiting to be picked off and providing in the end not a defining victory but an example of how the champion spirit of a fine group of players can cover shortcuts and work still to be done in the grander plan for only so long.
City, of course, do have a plan. The visitors on Tuesday night are in many ways their model for the future. Approaching the ground before kick-off through the vast construction site of the Etihad Campus it was clear that plenty of City fans had taken the opportunity to watch the under-21s in action at the excellent new academy stadium next door. The idea here is to create a sense of continuity, a grand tactical and textural scheme, a club at home in its own self-sustaining model. Tuesday night was a register of the distance there is still to go at the cutting edge, most notably during a first-half Barcelona performance that spoke to an entire supporting culture, 40 years in the incubation, of how the game should be played.
Before kick-off inside the Etihad there was a crackle of authentic heavyweight European competition in the air for a meeting of two teams who are second in their domestic leagues and who have spent impressive amounts of money in recent years. And yet on the pitch the difference in style and ambition was painful at times. To borrow a phrase from the great Australian Bill Woodfull, there were two teams out there, but only one of them was playing elite level modern European football. And wWith half an hour gone this tie was effectively over as Barcelona produced football of a different style and calibre to anything seen here this season, a team completely in tune with itself, seeing the pass before it came, movements synchronised all over the pitch.
We like to scoff at the idea of a footballing “philosophy” in this country, to sneer when one of the great footballing method men – whose fingerprints are still there on this Barcelona team – is unable to reinvent a drifting Manchester United team in the space of six months. But it is no accident that Barcelona looked from the start like a coherent whole, able to display all those accumulated good habits of touch and pass and move when it matters most. This is what happens when you have a system in place so sturdy it supersedes the managerial merry-go-round, the loss of great players, the pressures of performing that left City looking like a team attempting to invent a way of playing on the hoof.
A quick glance at the two teams is instructive. The number of home-reared players in the Barcelona first XI has dipped but they still had four dominant outfield players in Messi, Busquets, Gerard Piqué and Andrés Iniesta. Even the players bought in fit the pattern, selected with a playing style in mind not just a scattergun sense of big-name splurge. Ivan Rakitic was a considered midfield reinforcement. Neymar may be a marketing prize but he also plays as if he could have been raised in La Masia. Luis Suárez has shown in the last few weeks that he is, stylistically, what Barcelona need, not just what they could get at the time.
By contrast City are basically the same old New City with £130m of fresh talent bought in over the past two years but largely absent here; a failure to buy well has put extra pressure on the stalwarts of that first title-winning team. It has been obvious for some time that the Premier League produces revenue not footballers. But at some point the absence of method, the churn of new signings and new managers will naturally affect the product itself.
Compared to the visitors City’s team at the Etihad was a high-priced hodgepodge with an attack that jammed together a 6ft4in Bosnian nicknamed “the lamppost” in his own country and the relentlessly subtle movement of Sergio Agüero. James Milner and Fernando looked like a will-this-do? central midfield pair sent out in hope. City have spirit and great heart. Only a fool would write them off completely in the second leg. But the fact is what pressure they exerted came when they basically had nothing to lose, like a lower league team having a right old go in the dying minutes of a third-round FA Cup tie.
This is perhaps to be expected against the very best. City are still an evolving idea and this may be a useful defeat in the end, just as their likely exit from the competition in Catalonia could be the spur for a clear-out of the ageing component parts of City 1.0. Pellegrini was spooked by the gravity of the occasion in Manchester but he remains a fine manager well liked by the hierarchy. Whether he can stay in place to oversee the next stage in this constant sky blue revolution may depend on a famous change of gear at the Camp Nou.