#360View: Barca penalty was innovative and entertaining

Andy West 09:56 16/02/2016
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  • Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi have been accused of unsportsmanlike conduct.

    All those getting hot and bothered about the apparent ‘disrespect’ shown by Barcelona in taking an indirect penalty against Celta Vigo on Sunday night may like to remind themselves of the incident’s end outcome.

    When Lionel Messi declined the usual custom of shooting for goal and instead slid a short pass into the path of Luis Suarez, what happened next? That’s right…Suarez scored a goal. And isn’t that the main point of football?

    Amid all the bluster and lofty pronouncements, let us not lose sight of the fact that, ultimately, the unusual move between Messi and Suarez was nothing more than a very effective way of scoring a goal. And how on earth can that be disrespectful?

    Football is about many things. It is about, for example, entertainment (and even detractors must admit they found the goal spectacular and surprising) and it is about winning (another box ticked, as Barca scored to kill off any lingering hopes of a Celta fightback).

    And on a tactical level, football is also about innovation. Simply doing the same old things will not lead to success because other teams soon learn how to negate them – hence the endless cycle of formations, styles of play, player positions and so on. Taking an indirect penalty is an extreme example of innovation, but that’s exactly what it is. In fact, Barca’s penalty-taking record has been so poor this season – missing six of 14 taken
    before Sunday night – anything they could do to improve their conversion rate was an opportunity to be gratefully seized.

    Innovation is also the main reason why Barca, or any other team for that matter, probably won’t be able to repeat the trick again, certainly not in the near future. Coaches will now innovate in turn, making sure they ‘defend’ penalties properly to prevent players making free runs into the box.

    In the same way that basketball players are taught to defend the backboard by ‘boxing out’ to minimise offensive rebounds when shots are attempted, football coaches will now make sure their teams don’t suffer the same fate as Celta by ‘protecting’ their penalty area when spot-kicks are taken.

    Rather than moaning about Barca’s supposed arrogance and disrespect, then, we should recognise the Messi-Suarez effort for what it was: a way of scoring a goal through a stroke of genius (albeit one that paid homage to Johan Cruyff and Jesper Olsen who did the same thing for Ajax in 1982).

    It was not, of course, genius in a technical sense. All Messi did was roll a short pass a yard or two to his left, and all Suarez did was shoot home unchallenged against a goalkeeper who had lost his balance. Nothing difficult there. But many of history’s most brilliant inventions are simple ideas, and Barca’s genius lay not in the goal’s execution but in the move’s conception.

    It came about from a recognition that an opportunity could be presented to give an onrushing player an easier chance to score than the original penalty taker.

    By thinking ‘outside the box’ – quite literally, in this case – Barca, and we can assume that Messi was the instigator of the plan, were able to conceive the notion of something which is perfectly legal but hardly ever attempted…and therefore highly likely to succeed because it is not defended against.

    That kind of creative thinking helps sets Messi apart. He is a visionary, not just a footballer, and we should celebrate that.

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