DEEP IN THE RECESSES OF THE Nou Camp, away from the million or so tourists who visit the ground every year, in a dim, windowless room in which the shelves are lined with DVDs of past matches, a long-legged, brown-skinned man, dressed in several shades of brown and wearing brown suede boots, sits on a brown sofa, smoking a cigarette. Frank Rijkaard, the Barcelona coach, is relaxed about Chelsea’s visit tomorrow, but then he is relaxed about everything.
“We didn’t play that badly (at Stamford Bridge the week before last), but we didn’t seem to have the spirit to win the game,” the Dutchman says. “Chelsea had more of a winning mentality than us. We dominated a large part of the game but without being really dangerous. I don’t think losing 1-0 to Chelsea is that dramatic and with a bit more aggression we could have got a better result.”
On the eve of a match that could result in the champions being turfed out of Europe, this calm assessment is typical of the man who claims that he never looks back and says that the way to deal with pressure is always to play to win. With seven league titles and three European Cups to his name as a player, Rijkaard knows about winning and, as a coach with Barcelona, he has added two league titles and a European Cup.
But whether he feels it or not, he has been coming under pressure after losing successive matches against Chelsea and, in La Liga, Real Madrid. For the first time since he arrived in 2003, this season he introduced a rotation system, partly to compensate for unfit players returning late after the World Cup finals.
It was a case of fixing something that was not broken and experimenting in matches where it would have been wiser to play safe, such as at Stamford Bridge, where Barcelona played with an untried 3-4-3 formation, and the Bernabéu, where against Real he dispensed with the defensive midfield player, vital to his trademark 4-1-2-2-1 formation. He has performed a public mea culpa and, for the time being, the rotations have been suspended.
However, as a coach with a reputation for fairness who dislikes big squads because of the difficulty of giving everyone a game, Rijkaard says in his defence: “This year we have more players. You have to consider every member of the team and everyone deserves a chance to play. For example, I can’t always play with (Carles) Puyol and (Rafael) Márquez in defence and leave (Lilian) Thuram on the bench because he’s too good for that. The rotation system worked well for us at the start, especially when you bear in mind that we had a lot of players in the World Cup. But we’ve been through that phase and now we have to decide which kind of player we need for which kind of game.”
A group of individuals is not a team, Rijkaard says, and it can be no coincidence that he played for three outstanding teams in which individual brilliance was always at the service of the collective purpose: the Ajax side of the 1980s, the AC Milan team of 1991-94 and the Holland side who won the 1988 European Championship.
“I think stars are the people who give something extra to the world of sport or entertainment,” he says. “I’m not against stars — the more stars the better — but on the other hand, if you work in a team, it has to be strong and act like a team. And if the players are working for each other and everyone knows what they have to do, then those with the talent can be even bigger stars.”
The forlorn Barcelona he inherited in 2003 (a team packed with overrated, overpaid former Ajax players) were not a team. “The change has been accomplished by a lot of people, the players and a lot of other people,” Rijkaard says, lighting another cigarette. “But the big difference was that one day it wasn’t 11 players who ran out on to the pitch, but a team. At the beginning, when the results were bad, having a player like Ronaldinho gave people hope that better times were ahead.”
He adds that it made a big difference when Edgar Davids joined on loan from Juventus and also when Luis Enrique, the captain at the time, “started to help his companions”. Luis Enrique had a reputation as a disruptive influence in the dressing-room, precisely the sort of behaviour Rijkaard has no time for. He says that he prefers to create a culture of “comradeship rather than competitiveness”, adding that the coach is not the magic ingredient. “The most important thing is the mentality, the atmosphere, the way the players are working together,” he says.
Rijkaard said recently that his approach to the game was a blend of Ajax and Milan, styles that he characterised as a balance between the “playful” and the “serious”. When I ask him to elaborate, he reverses the roles. “Ajax was a very serious club, it was a tough club. It was very direct, lots of insults. That’s how people are in Amsterdam — they say what they think to your face. Milan was calmer and there was more respect between the players. But the concept at both clubs was the same: play to win.”
Rijkaard is the latest flame in Barcelona’s long love affair with Ajax that began in 1971, when Rinus Michels, the father of “total football”, joined as coach. Rijkaard played under Johan Cruyff (with whom he famously fell out) and Louis van Gaal, both of whom went on to coach Barcelona, bringing in a total of six league titles and the club’s only other European Cup. Cruyff and Van Gaal are notoriously domineering, while Rijkaard’s style is laid-back.
No one has a bad word for him, not the players, or the fans. Joan Laporta, the club president, glows at the mere mention of his name. He may be a nice man, but he does not lack steel. He said when he arrived that players who did not shape up would have to go. Within a year, Patrick Kluivert, Michael Reiziger, Philip Cocu and Marc Overmars — all Dutch and all, except Cocu, former Ajax players — were shown the door. In came Deco, Ludovic Giuly, Márquez and Samuel Eto’ o, since when Barcelona have swept all before them.
