FC Barcelona – decoded at last!

       The best football player of all time, in my humble estimation, Lionel Messi, scored a brace as usual and equaled the existing European Champions League record of highest number of goals scored by an individual – 71!
 This season they have left most of their fans hungry for the FC Barcelona of old, the team that won everything in club football in the world, including contributing the largest number of players to a Spanish national team that won the World Cup!
In the past 10 years FC Barcelona have been the team to beat in global club football with unforgettable memories of performances beyond description!
In terms of actual performance, for a period of years, the rest of the world was playing catch-up.
Without been disrespectful to any one of the other great clubs in Europe and South America, FC Barcelona, at their best, stood alone and apart from the rest of the world.
The secret to their monumental achievement was a system and football philosophy implanted, nurtured and perfected in the club’s Nou Camp football academy.

        Personally, it is in the work perfected by coach Pip Guardiola that I started to have a fuller appreciation of how a coach can truly impact a team, how the daily grind of training sessions could transform into a playing style and system that become entrenched as a culture in the performance of a team, and etched into the psyche of their followers. Now I understand and appreciate Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, and Yelisavic Tito (the national coach of Nigeria in the mid-1970s) even better!
That was the birth of the phenomenon called Tiki Taka, an intricate ‘dance’ movement like no other with the ball, quick short one-two passes, endless, seamless movements and interchange of positions, back and forth, leaving in their wake a perplexed, bemused and confused opposition struggling to keep pace.

       The intervention and instruction of the President of Nigeria has seen to his immediate reinstatement.
Unfortunately, even as he seems to have won his ‘battle’ against the forces in the NFF that wanted him out, his reengagement has put him in an even worse situation with his employers than he was before.
Now, he is standing at the edge of a precipice. In order not to plunge to the abyss below he must now win the last two qualifying matches of the African Cup of Nations. Ordinarily that is a difficult enough with the average team he has now and their recent poor performances. To propound the situation he must now invite and use some players he had rejected and humiliated in the past.
He will also now work with his same bosses of the NFF that sacked him and have, themselves, been stripped of their egos, authority and power by Mr. President’s intervention.
Stephen Keshi may be back on his hot seat but he is surely not out of the woods yet! I hope he has not just been pushed from frying pan into fire!

Source: Daily Trust