32. LIFE AFTER PEP AND WITH MOURINHO: MESSI AND RONALDO

It was fair to say that no one quite knew what to expect from Barcelona as the new season began. Even in an era in which they defined themselves by finding solutions from within, still Tito Vilanova would in no way have been the bookies’ favourite for the Barcelona job. Extremely well liked, Vilanova had come with Guardiola as they’d made their journey from managing the Barcelona reserves in the third tier all the way to the first team. He’d famously responded to Guardiola’s question, ‘Are we ready?’, while he was deciding whether to take the job with Barcelona B with, ‘You are.’ Guardiola had dedicated his coach of the year award to him at the beginning of the year, in Catalan, after his friend had undergone an operation to remove a tumour. The man whom Thierry had once called ‘Pep’s twin brother’ had the full approval of Guardiola and the club. The most high-profile new signing, Jordi Alba, had played in the Barcelona youth team before being released and making his career elsewhere, but was now returning to the fold. Vilanova also had the requisite antagonistic relationship with Mourinho who, after poking him in the eye the previous season had repeatedly referred to him as ‘Pito Vilanova’, changing his name to the Spanish slang for penis.

Real Madrid, on the other hand, were entering a period of what passed for stability in that neck of the woods. It was the beginning of Mourinho’s third season. The signing of players Luka Modrić and Michael Essien for Nuri Şahin and Hamit Altintop felt like upgrades. Although the muttering over Ronaldo’s penalty order choice continued, in Spain it was assumed that he would be back to business as usual.

Barcelona started as they’d left off the previous season, winning 5–1 against Real Sociedad. Madrid, on the other hand, seemed out of sorts, drawing 1–1 against Valencia at home. The Spanish Super Cup first leg was a pulsating affair in which, it was largely agreed, Barcelona played all the football, but Real Madrid scored two priceless away goals.

Barcelona were like a caricature of themselves at their dizzying, passing best. Iniesta seemed to be able to see round corners and to move his feet twice as fast as anyone else. Messi was running from deep, bursting past challenges and slipping passes all over the pitch, smuggling the ball past Real Madrid players who didn’t quite seem to know where it was a lot of the time. However, it was Madrid that took the lead from Ronaldo’s powerful header, their first attempt on goal. Pedro’s impeccable finish from a lofted Mascherano pass made it 1–1. Then Iniesta’s dancing feet won a penalty which Messi dispatched. 2–1 to Barça. When Xavi scored a third after good work again from Iniesta, it seemed as if Barcelona would be taking a comfortable lead into the second leg, but then Ángel Di María scored and with two away goals the balance swung back towards Madrid.

Madrid lost their next League fixture against lowly Getafe, so that when the return leg came around, there was already talk of a mini crisis. Without a win in three games, it was the worst start Mourinho had ever made to a season. He admitted that he had doubts about their mentality after losing the previous Sunday. Meanwhile, Barça sat serenely at the top of the table.

When the return leg started though, Barcelona were a mess. A simple ball over the top allowed Higuaín to score and equal the score on aggregate. Then another long ball from the back was flicked neatly over Piqué and his deflected shot beat Valdés. Suddenly Real were in the driving seat. Things got even worse when the Barcelona defender Adriano was sent off for tugging back Ronaldo when he was through on goal.

Barcelona were in tatters. As one match reporter remarked, we were used to seeing Real Madird do this to small teams, but not to Barcelona!

In the thirty-seventh minute, Messi tried to single-handedly drag his team back into the game when he scored a wonderful free kick into the top corner. The second half was cagey, as the game was so finely balanced. Madrid seemed happy to sit back and allow Barcelona the ball, who with ten men seemed unable to ever really trouble Madrid without running the risk of a counter-attack. Messi had the chance to win it in the ninety-second minute, but his shot was just wide. Real Madrid had won on away goals.

However Real Madrid’s travails in the League didn’t improve. After they lost 1–0 against Sevilla, Mourinho lamented the fact that he was only able to make three substitutions and said he wished he could have made seven. Their German play maker Mesut Özil, so influential in the previous season, was banished to train with the reserves. After only four matches, they were eight points behind Barcelona, who had made a perfect start to the season. The whole Madrid team seemed frail, conceding from free kicks, not fit enough in midfield, or creating enough chances. Ronaldo in particular seemed off the boil, muttering darkly about feeling ‘sad’ and suggesting that those at the club knew why. People suggested it was simply a ploy to get an enhanced contract.

The first Clásico of the season came early that season, on 7 October, and it received more attention than it normally would. A massive pro-Catalan independence gesture was planned: Barcelona fans would shout for independence on the seventeenth minute and fourteenth second of each half, to commemorate 1714, the date Catalonia lost many of its historic rights. Real Madrid had always been the old enemy, but suddenly the fact that Real meant Royal seemed to mean even more. Sandro Rosell, the club president, regularly went on record as being in favour of self-determination, saying, ‘When Catalans decide their future, Barça will be at their sides.’1

If all the talk was dominated by events off the pitch, the game was a startling reminder of how explosive a fixture it could be, with the Nou Camp a cauldron of noise and the ground a sea of red and yellow – the Catalan colours. At the heart of it was an astonishing personal duel between Ronaldo and Messi.

The game began with half-chances for Madrid, until the ball was flicked in to Ronaldo in the box, who cut across the ball with brilliant disguise, sneaking it past the keeper at the near post. Then Messi sneaked in on a terribly miscued clearance by Pepe and slotted the ball home.

Just past the hour, Messi curled an extraordinary free kick over the wall and into the bottom corner, only for Ronaldo to beat the offside trap five minutes later and score to equalize. In a game in which so much felt at stake, the two players at the heart of it did what they always did. Scored goals. Between the two of them they had scored 100 club goals in 2012. At the age of twenty-five, Messi was one goal behind Alfredo Di Stéfano’s Clásicos record.

For the first time, the sports paper AS gave its best player award jointly to them both. MARCA said: ‘Just when you think they can’t do anything more, they do. Every time.’

After the game, Mourinho took a break from complaining about bad decisions to say: ‘Talking about who the best player in the world is should be banned because they’re so good.’

Vilanova showed he was picking things up quickly by using it as an opportunity to land a glancing blow on Ronaldo, saying, ‘Ronaldo would probably have had greater recognition if it had not been for Messi.’

In January 2012, it was Messi who was awarded his fourth Ballon d’Or. He looked more self-assured than on previous occasions, in a polka-dotted dinner jacket and matching bow tie, dedicating his prize to his childhood sweetheart and soon-to-be wife Antonella, and his young son. He was still a man of few words and a somewhat goofy expression, but no longer the introverted, disorientated child of the past. Success had matured him, even if he seemed not to have been spoilt by the fame that went with it.

He certainly seemed a planet away from the celebrity aura that surrounded the most carefully made-up and manicured couple present that evening – the tanned, gelled Ronaldo, in a silk double-breasted dinner jacket, accompanied by his model girlfriend Irina Shayk, who’s on-off relationship with the player featured in news kiosk magazines.

Messi polled 41.60 per cent of the votes, with Ronaldo in second place taking 23.68.

As Messi’s colleague Piqué summed it up, ‘Cristiano Ronaldo is the best of the humans but Messi is an extraterrestrial.’ Although he had missed out on both the La Liga and Champions League crowns, Messi had scored fifty goals in the League season and a record fourteen goals in the Champions League season, and had become the first player to net five times in a Champions League match. He had also gone some way to shattering the myth that he couldn’t play as well for Argentina as he did for his club by scoring twelve goals for his country in nine games. By early December 2012 Messi had scored his eighty-sixth goal of the year, surpassing Gerd Müller’s eighty-five goals for Bayern Munich and West Germany in 1972, and claiming the record for most goals scored by a player in a calendar year. Unless there was a remarkable turnaround in the second half of the season, he was laying the groundwork for his fifth Ballon d’Or already.

They reached the halfway point in the season having scored fifty-five points from a possible fifty-seven with Messi scoring a barely believable twenty-nine goals from nineteen games. The only points Barcelona had dropped in the League were those two against Madrid in October.

Madrid, though, had continued to stutter, in spite of sixteen goals from Ronaldo, and found themselves fourteen points behind Barcelona.

On 20 December it had been announced that Vilanova had undergone another operation to remove a tumour, which would be followed by chemotherapy. In a twist of fate, Éric Abidal, who had been out since the previous year after a liver transplant following a cancerous tumour, played in training. His statement on Facebook said: ‘I hope to come back soon on the fields, but I can’t stop thinking of our coach, Tito Vilanova: I wish him and his family a lot of courage!’

Meanwhile, throughout the autumn and winter, Mourinho continued to blame his players for the team’s poor form. In one bizarre episode in October, Sergio Ramos had put on Özil’s shirt under his own after the German was substituted, in what people interpreted as a defiant gesture of solidarity with the player who Mourinho seemed to be blaming for the entire team’s problems. There were rumours of a divide on the team bus between the Spanish and Portuguese players. Mourinho, the master of creating a siege mentality, seemed here to be the one stuck on the outside, his team inside the fort. People began to wonder if Ronaldo, playing for himself, was somehow a hindrance, a weakness that other teams could exploit.

And still someone – many were sure it was Mendes – was leaking stories that Ronaldo felt sad, that he didn’t want to link his long-term future to Madrid until he had atoned for the poor start to the season. The super-rich Paris Saint-Germain were said to be waiting in the wings. With perfect timing, Messi quietly signed a contract extension that would keep him in Barcelona until 2018. Reports said Mourinho was said to have agreed to leave in the summer. The news broke that Guardiola would manage Bayern Munich next season.

At the end of January, Madrid and Barcelona were drawn against each other in the Copa del Rey semi-final.

The first leg felt like a retread of every recent Clásico, as Barcelona, in their trademark style, moved the ball about, working Madrid all over the pitch, whereas Madrid seemed content to try and break at pace. Barça eventually took the lead when Messi stabbed a poor clearance back through the lines and Fàbregas found himself onside and swept the ball underneath the goalkeeper. There were good chances for each side, before the teenage defender Raphaël Varane, making his Clásico debut for Real Madrid, headed down and powerfully into the net from a recycled corner. It seemed a game mercifully lacking in controversy until the Madrid winger, José Callejón, claimed to have heard Messi call the Madrid assistant coach, Aitor Karanka, ‘Mourinho’s Muppet’ in front of his wife.

In between the two legs, Ronaldo had the little matter of a visit from Manchester United in the Champions League to contend with.

He scored from a hanging header but, more importantly, won huge plaudits for the intelligence of his performance, as his movement around the pitch pulled Man United out of shape, so desperate to contain him that they left his talented teammates with space. Though United had their away goal through a Welbeck effort, the game felt finely balanced, and all the talk was of Ronaldo finding his form at just the right point in the season. His comments that Real Madrid were a better team than Manchester United seemed realistic rather than disrespectful.

Barcelona, on the other hand, were dreadfully disappointing in their game against Milan as they lost 2–0. With Vilanova undergoing treatment for his cancer, it was left to his assistant Jordi Roura to take charge of the team. It was a night where nothing worked for Barcelona. They couldn’t find space and get their passing rhythm up and going. Messi was as anonymous as he had ever been. It was clear that the team was feeling the effects of their manager’s illness. As Roura spoke of his ‘total confidence’ that Barcelona would turn things around, it rang hollow. AS reported on the match, calling them ‘pardillos’, naive country bumpkins, thinking that what they did in the League would work automatically in Europe.

Barcelona managed to pull a result out of the bag against Sevilla in the League three days later, with Messi finding the net, but next up was Madrid at the Nou Camp.

For Madrid, it marked the start of eight days, with games against Barcelona and Manchester United that would decide what Mourinho’s legacy at Real would be. Though they had conceded the League months ago, knocking Barcelona out of the Copa del Rey and keeping on track for their tenth European Cup would go some way to making his time there an historic period of triumph, rather than up for debate.

In the end, Madrid swatted Barcelona aside in the second leg of the Copa del Rey, with Ronaldo scoring a goal early in each half, as Madrid won 3–1. Diego López, the Madrid keeper, made several routine saves, but in the end Real Madrid kept Barça at arm’s length with something to spare. The Madridistas sang ‘Goodbye to the Cup, Goodbye’ long into the evening.

According to Sandro Rosell, Vilanova’s cancer was the thing that none dared discuss publicly but which explained the downturn in Barça’s fortunes, as personified in the unarticulated sadness Messi fell into for a while.

All the players loved Tito, but particularly Messi . . . so it was personal and professional. It affected the team’s motivation – they kept thinking how much he was suffering . . . I remember the day I went to the Barça ground, the Ciudad Deportiva, to explain to the players what was happening, that he was going to have treatment for cancer . . . It was difficult to play football, it was really a tough time for everyone. The thing was that it wasn’t exteriorized and most of the media didn’t know and those who did didn’t know how or didn’t want to explain it . . . It was good that it was kept inside the house, under wraps . . . I’ve always said that grieving is best done behind walls. It wasn’t our way to make a big deal of it . . . The problem was that people looked for a reason why Barça were playing so badly and couldn’t find one.2

For Messi, who had flourished under his replacement mentor after Guardiola had left, it had become increasingly hard to focus. Vilanova had been Messi’s coach when the Argentine was in the Barça youth teams, and had then been assistant coach of the first team during the Guardiola years. He had learnt that Messi was the key to Barça’s success, and that the best way to treat Messi was not to bark orders at him but to trust in his vision and dexterity with the ball. The mood swings and communication blocks that affected Messi now and then off the pitch were ones that the personable if low-key Vilanova had learnt to manage with patience and empathy.

In the second La Liga Clásico of the season, Mourinho made clear what his priorities were by starting Ronaldo, Higuaín, Khedira and Özil on the bench.

Messi started but was largely quiet, as it felt as if both teams were conserving their energies for the second leg of their European ties. Benzema converted at the far post with an early Madrid attack and that seemed to suck the life out of the game. Barcelona kept the ball but were largely toothless; Madrid were happy to let them have it. After a long passage of Barcelona possession, Messi beat Ramos with a change of direction and slotted the ball under the advancing goalkeeper. But still the game felt lacking in urgency. Messi was popping up all over the pitch with neat flicks and interplay but there was no penetration.

Ronaldo was brought on after an hour and transformed the game. He was all purposeful running, urgency and power. He drew fouls, got up to take the free kicks. The brief calm that had descended over Barcelona was punctured and it looked as if Madrid were the only team going to win. And they did when Sergio Ramos rose to thump in a header from a Modrić corner. The Barcelona players surrounded the referee to demand a penalty but it was not awarded.

Ronaldo had been efficient and clinical, changing the game; although he scored, Messi looked washed out, like someone doing an impression of the player in the first months of the season.

Real Madrid’s game against Manchester United on 5 March 2013 was Ronaldo’s first trip back to Old Trafford, a return that dominated the pre-match discussions. The first half flashed by, all half-chances and blood-and-thunder challenges. Madrid had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside, but United were doing well, containing Madrid, and could argue they had had the better chances. Five minutes in and Ramos scored an own goal, after Nani’s dangerous cross was slid in. However, five minutes later he was sent off after a high challenge with a raised foot was judged to be a red card. Mourinho immediately took off the defender Arbeloa and brought on Modrić. Just over five minutes later, he had equalized with a stinging drive that went in off the post. Three minutes later, Ronaldo slid home a dangerous cross to give Madrid the lead. They played out the rest of the game and went through. There had been times in the past when Ronaldo had been obsessed with showing how he had moved on, and had ended up playing only for himself, but here he was calm, disciplined and decisive. He might not have dominated the game, but he played his part and had a big say in the result.

With Vilanova still not well enough to take his place in the dug-out, and the form book against them, on 9 March Barcelona faced Milan in a Champions League match with many fearing the worst. Crisis, never far away, was said to be fully blown.

Messi’s performance that day was one of those that legends are built on. Conditioned as we are by the archetypical Rocky narrative, the punch-drunk fighter up against the ropes, all hope fading until that moment when the fightback begins.

That moment came within five minutes when, after a period of neat passing interplay in between the Milan defence, he took the ball into the box and somehow scooped out from under his feet an unstoppable shot into the top corner. It had seemingly no backlift, like a hockey shot, curled from the wrist. His teammates enveloped him. Barcelona roared onto Milan, asphyxiating them, pressing them all over the pitch, winning the ball back and tearing into them, but always with the note of caution that a Milan goal would almost certainly swing things the other way entirely because of away goals. Hearts stopped when Milan’s M’Baye Niang struck the post. But only two minutes later, Messi was played in by Iniesta and struck a low shot through Mexès’s legs and past the keeper’s despairing dive. As the half-time whistle went, pundits around the world wondered if Barcelona would play with more caution or double down in the second half.

The answer came quickly – Barcelona kept pouring forward, with Milan still sensing they had a chance on the break. First Villa curling in a peach of a left-foot strike and then, in the very last minute of the match, the left-back Jordi Alba found himself sprinting forwards into the box, controlling the pass from Alexis Sánchez and finishing neatly. There could be no more fitting tribute to the style of play that Guardiola and Vilanova had perfected and encouraged. Barcelona had done it and they had done it their way.

The remainder of the season didn’t quite go as planned for either team, though Barcelona would drop only four more points in winning the League, ending on 100 points. Madrid limped home, fifteen points behind them. Barcelona beat Paris Saint-Germain over both legs on away goals, as Messi came on and revivified them, while Madrid went through 5–3 against Turkish side Galatasaray, despite losing 3–2 in the away leg. Ronaldo scored three of their five goals. They were kept apart in the semi-finals, where they both lost in the first leg to German opposition – Barcelona to Bayern 4–0, a shocking result as a clearly unfit Messi gamely ran around the pitch but couldn’t shake off the effects of a hamstring injury. Madrid lost 4–1 to Borussia Dortmund. Madrid made a game of it in the second leg, winning 2–0, but Dortmund went through. However Barcelona were a shadow of their usual selves as they lost 3–0 in the second leg, 7–0 on aggregate. It was an awesome display by the German team that sent shockwaves through Europe and caused the Spanish press to write endless pieces about a global ‘changing of the guard’, describing Barcelona as needing ‘every removal van in Barcelona to help with the clear-out’.

Real Madrid, for their part, lost in the final of the Copa del Rey to a resurgent Atlético Madrid team, with Ronaldo, Gabi and Mourinho all sent off in a fractious encounter.

Both teams finished the season in flux and with questions to be answered. Cristiano and Leo continued their own astonishing personal form, but there was the sense with both that, when it had come down to it, they had been let down, by their bodies, by their inability to focus. Perhaps it was foolish to expect two players to play perfectly always; after all, whatever others said, they were only human. The uncertainty over their managers had clearly had an impact on their concentration. Mourinho slunk away, muttering darkly, unable to dethrone Barcelona domestically for more than one season and, more tellingly, unable to deliver the tenth European Cup that Real Madrid demanded.

Both teams moved quickly in the transfer market, Barcelona securing the exciting Brazilian Neymar and Real Madrid gaining Gareth Bale, for a fee some claimed was higher than Cristiano Ronaldo’s previous world record.

On 25 June, Real Madrid announced that Carlo Ancelotti had joined as manager.

Just under a month later, on 19 July, Barcelona announced the sad news that Tito Vilanova’s cancer had returned and he would be stepping down from his role at Barcelona. As the staff and players sat in the press conference, Messi sat with his arms crossed, staring into space. He made a statement on Facebook: ‘Strength Tito! We are all with you in this fight!’ Tragically Tito would die in April 2014, and a visibly tearful Messi would attend the memorial service conducted by the Archbishop of Barcelona, with the entire first-team squad in attendance.