If there is anything positive to emerge from Gerard Pique’s announcement that he will quit international football after the 2018 World Cup Finals, it is that Spain at least have plenty of time to plan for his departure.
And Pique’s boots will be very tough to fill, because he has without doubt been one of the best central defenders in the world for several years.
For some reason, however, he rarely gets the kind of recognition his consistent excellence deserves, neither for his club nor his country.
On the domestic scene, this is no doubt because, at Barcelona, he is part of one of the greatest attacking teams in the history of the game – once Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta, Luis Suarez, Neymar and co have taken their share of the limelight, there’s not much left for anyone else.
And at international level, Pique was initially a peripheral figure, dominated by senior partner Carles Puyol, and more recently he has been talked about more for off-the-pitch controversy than what he has actually done on the field of play, which is generally faultless.
The lack of plaudits heading Pique’s way should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he is an exceptionally good central defender, who has played arguably the best football of his career since being given a kick up the backside by Luis Enrique a couple of years ago.
2 - Gerard Piqué was the only outfield player to play every minute of the 2010 World Cup & 2012 European Championship. Farewell. pic.twitter.com/O4nnwpKoOH
— OptaJose (@OptaJose) October 10, 2016
And Spain will find him extraordinarily difficult to replace a couple of summers from now, especially considering their dearth of top-quality replacements.
The lack of central defensive strength in depth available to recently appointed manager Julen Lopetegui is evidenced by the fact the replacement for Sergio Ramos against Albania this week was Inigo Martinez of Real Sociedad, who has never really fulfilled his youthful promise.
Other candidates such as Marc Bartra and Nacho Fernandez have also consistently failed to convince, and Lopetegui can only desperately hope that a young player – perhaps Sporting Gijon’s highly-rated teenager Jorge Mere – will make significant advances in the next couple of years to fill the void.
Of course, there is still a fair amount of time before Pique’s newly-announced retirement becomes effective, and the next 18 months or so will be pivotal in determining how he is remembered by Spain fans.
Really, it’s extremely odd that a player who has (already) earned 84 caps and played an integral part in winning both the World Cup and the European Championships can have his legacy even questioned.
But the reality is that Pique has always been an extremely divisive character among Spanish fans, and it’s currently difficult to envisage how the country’s many millions of Real Madrid fans will be able to see past their club biases and regard the Barcelona star with any affection whatsoever.
He deserves better, but the partisan nature of club rivalries – especially the most intense club rivalry of them all – makes it unavoidable that Pique, who has always been the first to celebrate Barcelona’s victories and mock Real Madrid’s failures, has infuriated a significant number of people in his homeland.
When you further consider his belief that Spain shouldn’t even be his homeland, and that he should instead be a proud member of a newly-formed state of Catalonia, and it’s easy to understand the ambivalence.
Perhaps only one thing will convince Pique’s haters to wish him a fond farewell: winning the World Cup in 2018. Anything less, and he will have more enemies than friends in Spain.
