Lionel Messi rightly grabbed most of the headlines for his latest European masterclass in Barcelona’s 3-1 Champions League final humbling of Manchester United on Saturday.
However, the Argentine World Player of the Year’s superbly-struck goal, his 53rd of the season in all competitions, and his all-round brilliance distracted attention from the man who has been at the heart of the phenomenal success achieved by Barca and Spain in recent years: Xavi.
Regularly nailing more than 100 passes per game, with a completion rate in excess of 90 percent, the 31-year-old has perfected the playmaker’s art.
United were powerless to prevent him seizing control of the match as he sprayed the ball left and right, twisting and turning his way into space and leaving the English club’s players chasing shadows across the immaculate Wembley turf.
One amazing statistic from this year’s edition of Europe’s elite club competition, courtesy of Opta, is that in 953 minutes of football he did not concede a single foul.
A product of Barca’s famed “La Masia” youth school along with six other members of the starting 11, Xavi was 12 years old when Barca won their first European Cup at the same venue in 1992.
His father, Joaquim Hernandez, told Don Balon magazine recently that his son wept bitter tears when he was told he could not travel to London to attend the game with his two elder brothers and had to watch at home with his parents.
His triumphant trip this week to the British capital, nearly two decades later, gave soccer fans of all stripes the world over a rare treat.
One of Xavi’s predecessors in the centre of Barca’s midfield, Pep Guardiola, is now the club’s coach and the 2011 Champions League was, incredibly, his 10th trophy in his first three seasons since stepping up from the post of B-team manager at the end of the 2007/08 campaign.
Guardiola would readily admit that he never reached the heights that Xavi has scaled and it will be a near-impossible task for the Catalan club to find a replacement when he retires, perhaps in three or four years, which brings another topic of who should replace Xavi when he retires.
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