It is part of their beauty because they are a side committed to playing their best football on the ground, and stand top of La Liga for their eye-of-a- needle passing, their fluency, their finishing and pace. At best, it’s a seductive antidote to the premium that modern football puts on physique, and at times they have been scintillating. No big club in Europe has played more attractive football more consistently since August, and they no longer hang too heavy a responsibility on Ronaldinho. They may even be good enough to beat Chelsea. When the players and coaching staff at Barça start discussing how to do so in detail this morning, they should turn to Ludovic Giuly, 28 years old, 5ft 5in high, and ask him how. Giuly was playing for Monaco last season when they eliminated Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final.
Granted, that was a less evolved Chelsea, and several of the details of the first leg will forever be recorded in the obituary of Claudio Ranieri’s London career, his peculiar substitutions and the tale of how 1-1 against 10 men became a 3-1 defeat. Giuly remembers the match as a one of the standout events in a “magical run”, a journey to the final in which little Monaco and Giuly had already dispatched Real Madrid.
Giuly’s speed and anticipation were key. “Against Chelsea,” he recalls, “we scored early enough, but they equalised and we went to 10 men. But that seemed to release something in us. We showed real character to recover our morale.”
Aspects of that evening will also be scorched on Terry’s memory. He’ll knows what it is to duel with Giuly. The England defender had a poor game in partnership with a desperate Marcel Desailly. Monaco were too quick for them.
Of course, Chelsea have changed since Giuly undid them. “They remind me more of how Porto were with Jose Mourinho,” says Giuly. “The players are very aware of their positions, they’re competitive, and I see them winning games with a zero scoreline, quite often 1-0. They are big and strong, and play a bit the English way. We play the Spanish way, we like to get a lot of men forward. But Chelsea are coming to a big stadium, with a big pitch, which means they’ve a lot space to cover. We’ll try to find the gaps.”
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It was these wider spaces that Giuly was brought from Monaco to Barcelona to exploit. He operates on the right of a front three completed by Samuel Eto’o and Ronaldinho and though not an orthodox winger, he gives width to their football. They miss him when injury — and his hamstrings are prone to it — has kept him out. Giuly has been conspicuous in the two most emphatic victories since the New Year: 4-0 at Sevilla and
4-1 last weekend at Zaragoza. He scored in both, vintage Giuly goals, in as much as Barcelona’s football has established certain trademarks: a defence stretched by Ronaldinho and Eto’o, Giuly finishing off the move, having cut in from the right. A reminder, too, that opponents are distracted by Barça’s superstars, Ronaldinho and Eto’o, at their peril.
Last month Giuly celebrated 10 years as a professional. He made his debut for Lyon under Jean Tigana, who he hopes will be in Barcelona as his guest this week to admire the work of a footballer grateful for Tigana’s faith in him, sometimes when others did not entirely share it.
Tigana signed Giuly as Monaco head coach four years later, and he joined a squad including a young Thierry Henry and others who would leave for Italy and the Premiership. Giuly stayed, and by the time he won the French league with Monaco and his first cap for France in 2000, he was on his way to acquiring what was a mixed compliment: that he was the best French player working in France. The very best French players tend to leave for wealthier employers to the north, east or west. He was in his late 20s by the time he did.
Serious ligament damage postponed Giuly’s migration, but also made him reappraise his game. The injury deprived him of football for six months in the 2001-2 season. “I learnt a lot during that time,” he says. “Before that I thought of football as something for pleasure, that I happened to play on Saturdays. I came back and it was pleasure, but it was also a career.”
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He redoubled his application and he acquired better status. He acknowledges that he needed encouragement. As a young footballer he felt that “I always had to work harder than the bigger guys”.
At Monaco he assumed status enough to become captain, and his contribution to their Champions League run last season confirmed that this was a footballer who belongs at the upper end of that competition. Without him, Monaco would probably not have beaten Real Madrid, or dismantled Chelsea that evening in Monte Carlo. With him, they might have given a better account of themselves in the final against Porto, too. Giuly suffered a muscular problem 22 minutes into the final and his team lost its pizzazz.
“It’s hard when you have fought so much in such a magical season and then you only have a few minutes to take part in it — that is difficult. It was very disappointing. It had been a fabulous season, overcoming all these big clubs, and we ended up without a prize at the end.”
The injury would have longer-term consequences, and although Giuly feels that since the new year his fitness is back, he has one of the more specific training regimes at Barcelona. A fine start to his Barça career — he scored on his league and European debuts — gave way to various interruptions during the autumn, and he still tends to be among the earliest substitutions once Barcelona have established leads. This should not be read as dwindling faith, though. He has the approval of Johan Cruyff, which at modern Barça is like having three Michelin stars on your front door, even if Cruyff has no official role at the club.
Giuly cost about £6m. The head coach, Frank Rijkaard, lobbied as hard to recruit him in the summer as the club would do for the more expensive signatures of Deco and Eto’o. He found plenty in common with his colleagues at the Nou Camp, and not just that he could stand shoulder to shoulder with Xavi, Deco and Silvinho and measure the difference in a couple of inches rather than a foot. “You look around this team, and one thing we share is that we need trophies. Okay, Deco has the European Cup from Porto, Ronaldinho has the World Cup, but for clubs he has not won that much yet. We all have that hunger.”
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To that, as well as technical gifts, he attributes the team’s rapid sense of mutual understanding. Five of the XI expected to start against Chel- sea will have been at the Nou Camp for less than six months. It seldom shows.
Close to 90,000 will be at the Nou Camp in three days’ time, the Catalan nation behind them. Giuly has not taken long to get the hang of Catalanism. He was born in Lyon, but calls himself a Corsican, his father having been born on the island where young Ludo spent his holidays. “I’m Corsican and I’m French,” he says, “but here in Barcelona it quite suits me to be Corsican.”
A high-profile match will bring hundreds of Catalan flags and probably the 30m-long banner that a group in the second tier of the Nou Camp likes to unveil on special occasions. It says, in English, “Catalonia is not in Spain.”