Valverde’s pragmatism will lead Barcelona to glory

They didn’t do much in the opening 20 minutes aside from score two goals that ended the tie as a contest. Welcome to Ernesto Valverde’s Barcelona.

So, Barcelona’s best players were superior to Manchester United’s best players, which meant the Catalan giants prevailed with ease. And that seems to bode well for Barca’s prospects in this tournament, because if you wanted to sum up what lay behind Real Madrid’s recent run of Champions League triumphs, you’d be hard-pressed not to express it in similar terms.

Ernesto Valverde is a pragmatist in charge of a club that’s a magnet for soccer romantics, which will almost certainly be a source of friction for however long he remains in charge there. And there will be those — Barcelona fans among them, probably — who will gripe that tonight Valverde’s team did very little early on apart from score twice.

Such complaints overlook one crucial fact, however: This is what Barcelona have been doing all season long. You can criticize it as a spectacle, certainly, but you can’t deny either that it’s effective or that it occurs by design.

Moreover, it’s an approach that has left Valverde’s team on the cusp of a treble that would see him match the achievements of Pep Guardiola in 2008-09 and Luis Enrique in 2014‑15. It’s worth remembering that this is something that even the great Johan Cruyff failed to achieve with his Dream Team back in the 1990s.

Another La Liga title is already a formality — it’s a question of when rather than if it will be lifted. Then there’s a tricky Copa del Rey final to come against Valencia, who have caused Barca plenty of problems in both La Liga encounters between the two sides this season.

Should Barcelona also make it to the Champions League final, their most likely opponents would of course be Guardiola’s Manchester City. It would represent a clash between the self-styled visionary and the arch pragmatist, and it would be one of the most intriguing contests of the decade.

Coming into this game, more had been made of Barcelona’s quarterfinal exits in the past three years than was perhaps fair. The Champions League is in essence a gloriously entertaining crapshoot from which it’s infinitely easier to extract enjoyment than meaning.

In 2015-16 Barca simply failed to take their many chances when they met Atletico Madrid. A year later, they came up against Juventus’ Paulo Dybala in force-of-nature form during what was otherwise an even tie. And last season’s exit to Roma was just one of those delirious, unforgettable moments that cup competitions throw up.

Returning to that early stage of tonight’s match, Luis Suarez ran up blind alleys, Philippe Coutinho was anonymous–– that was to change after the break, of course — and then a genius scored two goals, one magnificent, the other scruffy, which meant that the match was as good as over.

Another source of criticism for Valverde is the school of thought that relying heavily upon the greatest player in the history of the sport is somehow poor form. That seems, well, a little silly. After all, who wouldn’t?

Yes, United created more in the opening 10 minutes here than during the entirety of the game at Old Trafford. In fact, they pretty much managed that in the first 60 seconds alone, when Marcus Rashford was in on goal but attempted a weird, scooped finish that never looked like it was going in. But this was cause for concern rather than panic among the Barcelona players and fans inside the Camp Nou.

Indeed, much of the first half looked like a niggly training game. For a prolonged period of time, the obvious questions were how many fouls United’s midfielders would be allowed before cards were brandished and whether Barca would score again before half-time.

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There was a run towards the end of the opening period in which Messi made the bandaged Phil Jones look like he’d wandered, dazed, out of a nearby hospital and onto the Camp Nou pitch.

Despite being one of the most expensively assembled squads in the history of the game, it has to be acknowledged that this is not a great United side. They needed a very flattering win over Juventus to make it out of the group stage, and then some extraordinary defensive errors by their opponents and a coin-toss VAR call to scrape past PSG in the previous round. It’s also far from certain that United will even qualify for next season’s Champions League.

Nonetheless, this was impressive from Barcelona, and the unassuming, seldom celebrated and relentlessly effective Valverde is on course for one of the greatest achievements in the history of club football.