A Belated Eulogy to Andres Iniesta

I never understood what it meant to watch a footballer at the peak of his powers until I saw Andres Iniesta. Sure, I’d watched Barcelona play innumerable times before. Indeed, I am naturally inclined to define the three years I spent at Durham University – three years during which the pursuits of drinking, watching football, and drinking and watching football ensured that I’d lamentably fail to take advantage of any of the wonderful academic and extra-curricular opportunities the institution had to offer – as ‘the Guardiola Years’.

I arrived at Van Mildert College’s Halls of Residence the autumn of 2008 expecting the next three years to be filled with impassioned evening debates about the merits of Post-Marxist Urban Georgraphy, conducted in dimly lit rooms to a canonical sixties soundtrack. I graduated utterly confused about ground-level challenges to neoliberal urban policy, and convinced that Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team were the greatest to ever take the field.

I had watched Football Italia as a child. I had greedily devoured every word of World Soccer issues. As I grew older, I nodded along with sage teenage wisdom to Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid. I was cognisant of Rinus Michels’s Total Football Holland team of 1974, and Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan. Guardiola’s Barcelona were the first team in my lifetime to replicate their rabid intensity out of possession. The fury with which they converged on the opponent to regain the ball electrified me. The rhythmic passes and improvised movement in attack was like nothing I had seen before. “They get you on that carousel and they make you dizzy with their passing,” Sir Alex Ferguson admired ahead of Barcelona’s 2-0 defenestration of Manchester United in the 2008/09Champions League final. As a mere viewer, I sympathized with him. I can scarcely summon the courage to imagine the fierce burning of lungs, the lactic acid slowing the movement of limbs and the fearful gasping for air felt by opposition players. Even on television, viewed thousands of miles away, theywere mesmerising. Legion were the days I’d excuse myself from a tutorial reading, essay assignment or – latterly – a review of the latest Taxation magazine, lured by the promise of aesthetic and sporting perfection when Barcelona played.

Of course, there was Xavi – iconoclastic midfield metronome with radar vision and velvet boots. There was even Dani Alves, the embodiment of what a sheer joy it can be to play football. And there was Lionel Messi, blossoming before our eyes into the greatest footballer ever to play the game. With every pass, pirouette and slalom, they oozed perfection. They still do.

Watching Messi, Xavi and the gang, you realise that greatness is captivating, compelling even the Angels to postpone their heavenly pursuits and peer down to Earth. Further still, greatness in the face of adversity sends the soul soaring. On the field of play, there is simply no sight better than watching somebody overcome profound disadvantages to outwit a visibly stronger opponent. Messi was unstoppable. Xavi could not be dispossessed. Andres Iniesta, however, was, is and forever will be sickly thin,pale and balding. His markers are uniformly taller, fitter and faster than he is. His midfield contemporaries are more consistent sources of goals. Yet there has never been a footballer in whom you would place greater trust with the ball in any part of the field.

Barcelona’s game was - and, in a diluted form,still is – about the search for and manipulation of space: receive the ball;pass; move to the space. Rinse and repeat. What makes Iniesta exceptional is where and how he receives the ball. When Pique or Puyol – or latterly, and much more frequently, Samuel Umtiti or Jeremie Matthieu – mis-control and are forced to take quick, evasive action, Iniesta is the man they seek. He is the man onwhom opponents converge, convinced they can capitalise on the overhit pass. Forfifteen years, each and every single Wednesday and Sunday, for each and every single pass, he has trapped the ball with the 'tuc' sound Charly Rexach closes his eyes and listens for to identify the perfect player. With a sashay of thehips and a soft-shoe shuffle, he slaloms through the most implausible of gaps.The danger has passed. Suddenly, he is leading an attack of his own. There is nothing ostentatious about his brilliance – the Marseille Roulette and Rabona are not part of his repertoire. He deceives using nothing more than a series of subtle shifts of direction. You keep your eyes on the ball, you concentrate, you lunge and…he’s gone.

When you watch football on television – even as cohesive and elegant in style as that which Barcelona play – you are still ultimately only seeing fragments of the game; pieces of the puzzle which you cannot completely join. Events, passages of play, pieces of skill are all viewed in isolation. You simply do not get as complete a picture of the geometry of the teams, the mechanics of their formations, or even of the off-the-ball runs; all of which the cameras fail to capture. Nor do you fully comprehend the speed at which the ball moves, or the hurrying effect of the sound of several pairs of feet pounding the turf towards the player in possession. Football, you come to understand in the stadium, is hard. It is not a series of beautiful moments, but a ninety-minute physical, technical and mental slog.Brilliance does not emerge from nothing. It is crafted, conjured. It is earned.

On 29 September 2015, Victoria and I attended Barcelona vs Bayer Leverkusen, a Champions League group game complacently perceived as a mere formality for the hosts. The weekend preceding the game,Lionel Messi injured his knee. He would be missing for two months. With that,we feared, went our opportunity to watch the greatest footballer of our generation live. Victory for the Blaugrana would be that bit more difficult to earn;the spectacle would be a little blander for the absence of Messi’s bi-weekly lesson in making the marvellous seem mundane.

The game, confirming our fears, started disjointedly. Maybe Messi’s absence was critical. Xavi’s summer departure must surely have been a contributory factor. Perhaps the simple passing of time –the collective ageing of the group – jolted Barcelona’s usually hypnotic rhythm. Closing your eyes, you could hear the gears grinding, see the sparks fly, as the machine malfunctioned.

Entirely typical of the evening, an overhit pass whizzed from left to right at fifty miles an hour at shoulder height. It sped in the general direction of Andres Iniesta, but had clearly been miscalculated.Two Bayer attackers rushed towards him, like a thousand others before, sensing opportunity. The Camp Nou crowd teetered between disinterest and malaise.Danger approached.

The seconds of the greats last longer than those of mere mortals. How else to explain how he jutted out his right leg, contorted his body, and cushioned the projectile missile onto a plinth? In one exquisite motion, a hurtling meteorite became soft and smooth. It was quite simply the greatest first touch I have ever seen. The resulting pass was suitably economical. Under immense pressure, in spite of his team malfunctioning, Iniesta brought calm and order. The stadium – two-thirds full, subdued and complacent – barely stirred. One assumes they have long since grown used to such insouciant sorcery.

As a season-ticket holder at Middlesbrough during an unprecedented period of success, I have had the fortune of watching players representing my team swashbuckle to UEFA Cup comebacks, and bloody the noses of domestic giants. At the Riverside Stadium I have also seen Paul Scholes aim a missile into the top corner from 25 yards, Dennis Bergkamp orchestrate several humiliating defeats and Cristiano Ronaldo drag Manchester United kicking and screaming to a consecutive undeserved victory and draw. Alas, my parochial nature meant I could not derive pleasure from the occasions. It took an Andres Iniesta first touch out by the right hand touchline for me to finally appreciate footballing perfection when I saw it.