Pep the Poet

Pep Guardiola sits in the Barcelona dressing room listening, rapt, on his CD player to a piece of classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The players watch their coach in mute bafflement. When the music ends, Guardiola stands up, wipes tears from his cheeks, turns to the players and, in no way diminishing their confusion, urges them to improve their minds by reading. "The whole of life is contained in books," he enthuses, "the poetry, the prose..." This is not real life.

It is a sketch from a very funny Spanish TV comedy show called Crackovia that routinely sends up the Barcelona coach. Like all good satire, it starts from a kernel of truth, in this case Guardiola's known devotion to fine music and good books (some of his best pals are novelists), as well as his conception of football as art. Results are important for the Barcelona coach, but he is a man who believes that the greater merit lies in how you play the game.

We should see that philosophy in action today, in what is quite possibly the most widely anticipated fixture in world football this season, Barcelona versus Real Madrid. More intense emotions may have been generated by Slovenia-Russia or Kenya-Nigeria in the World Cup, or by any number of domestic clashes the world over, but few games are likely to attract more interest among more people than this one.

There might be two or three football clubs with names as big as these two's, but none bigger, and on display we'll have the three players generally regarded as the best in the world: Leo Messi for Barcelona, Crstiano Ronaldo and Kaká for Real Madrid. In Casillas, Xabi Alonso and Benzema for Real and Xavi, Iniesta, Ibrahimovic, Touré Yaya and Danny Alves for Barça you have a pretty weighty supporting cast too. Underlying it all, you have a rivalry between the two clubs that hums with ancient enmity and contemporary political animosity.

The difference between the two teams today is that, well, one is a team and the other is not. Real Madrid is a work in progress, a collection of fabulous talents that have eye to acquire a collective understanding; Barcelona is a magnificently oiled machine that purrs and roars at the will of the man at the helm, the aesthetic, somewhat priestly Guardiola.

Champions of everything in Europe and Spain, the game Barcelona play is the one it was supposed to be when it was invented, a game originally known not as football, but as "association" football. It's not a game in which 11 individuals seek to outshine each other; it is a game played by a society that happens to consist of 11 people who work for each other as hard in defence as in attack.

As we saw in Barça's midweek annihilation of Inter Milan in the Champions League, the team has the quality of a perfectly co-ordinated living organism, all the parts moving with one purpose, seemingly organised by a single controlling mind. In possession, they fan out in all directions, offering each clear and varied passing options; lacking possession, they pursue the ball like a swarm of very determined bees.

What is the secret?

The starting point is the philosophy - or, as they prefer to call it in Spain, the "ideology" - that Guardiola inherited from Johan Cruyff, who is to Barça as Lenin was to the Russian revolution. It derives from Holland's "total football" revolution of the Seventies and is translated into Spanish in the phrase "amor por el balón": love of the ball. In the case of Guardiola and his team, it is a jealous love. They cannot tolerate being without the ball; they seem to madden without it. That is why they get it back so quickly, that is why a Barcelona defender will never hoof the ball upfield, that is why they often succumb to the semi-suicidal lunacy of playing the ball deftly out of their penalty area, even when they are being hounded by opposition forwards.

Love for the ball is the rock on which Guardiola has built his temple to good football. Rigorous in his attention to his players' fitness and diet régimes, meticulous in his study of his opponents' strengths and weaknesses, he combines an unsmiling discipline (Messi was fined for arriving one minute late for training last May) with a manifest respect for his players, whom he treats as adults. As important as anything else, he has created at Barcelona, what Xavi, his midfield general, describes as a tremendous "solidarity" between the players, a team spirit which subordinates individual brilliance to the team cause.