Genghis Khan 0 Salvador Dali 2

José Mourinho is like Genghis Khan, an Italian marketing man from Milan informed me last year as Internazionale prepared to lay waste to Europe. I have been thinking over this comparison for the past couple of weeks (surely Genghis was less negative?) and puzzling about who or what Barcelona remind me of. Is it a bird, is it a plane? Then last night it suddenly hit me. Salvador Dali. Technical brilliance, dazzling images, prolific, memorable...and with all that a fair bit of fakery, falsehood and sleaze.

Don't get me wrong. Barcelona play some great football, they work as a team from front to back, and in Lionel Messi they have a truly special player who could well set Wembley alight in this year's final, just as George Best did back in 1968. The other special one moans too much. Referees make mistakes. Wolfgang Stark made a couple. Barcelona have had more than their share of good fortune in Europe over the past five years.

But Real Madrid deserved to lose last night's clash because they went into this match with the wrong mental attitude and for once Jose Mourinho's pre-match mind games wound up his own players more than the opposition. In the Spanish Cup Final last week Real Madrid played a defensive game, but also attacked and were rewarded. This time their approach was even more negative – three defensive midfielders – and when Pepe was dismissed they couldn't respond. Mourinho doesn't have the defenders he had at Inter or Chelsea and last night Carvalho was suspended. Madrid needed a more daring strategy and Mourinho failed to provide it.

I can't join in the unrestrained adulation of Barcelona though. They are a Jekyll and Hyde team. Jekyll passes the ball superbly, is constantly moving and switching the point of attack, plays with poise and pace and scores memorable goals. Hyde flaunts all the habits that give football a bad name: he dives, rolls around, fakes injury, waves cards, besieges the referee. Hyde degrades a great team.

Salvador Dali is Catalonia's most celebrated artist. For technique and draftsmanship he ranks with the greatest ever. He was also an exhibitionist and a careerist: a supremely gifted sleazebag. Not all the Barcelona players have the Dali taint. Xavi and Messi are better than that. Puyol is as well, usually.

But as for Danny Alves and Sergio Busquets they are serial offenders. Busquets is simply a cheat. He got an opponent sent of in last year's semi-final and he was trying the same trick last night. Alves may have had to jump to evade Pepe's challenge, but he wasn't touched. From his reaction you would have expected a double fracture with nerve damage rather than a slightly grazed sock.

Barcelona supporters will doubtless argue that Real Madrid set out to stop them playing and thus this sort of cheating is justifiable. Unfortunately some of their players have made it into an art form, and like some of Dali's paintings it stinks.

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/8VMVfjeKf2k/post.aspx

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