Not my words, but those of Alex Ferguson, after seeing Barcelona give his Manchester United team 'a hiding' in the UEFA Champions League final last night.
I don't watch football much, but this was a match not to be missed, and the fluid and deft play the Barcelona team displayed was both extraordinary and memorable.This is football a million miles away from the shirt-pulling, 'if you can't tackle them, push them over' tactics that we observe weekly on our screens. Seeing Lionel Messi run with the ball will remind some of how it was years ago with George Best, when he really was at his best. But this was never a one-man show. To watch the intuitive interplay between those gifted mid-field players as they worked their way up the pitch to produce the inevitable strike, nineteen times in all, should be a lesson in humility for all the Premier League overpaid and overrated teams for whom their car collections, court injunctions and overtanned WAGs appear to be the main focus of their lives.
This was far, too, from the bad-tempered semi-final exchanges with Real Madrid where the spirit of Mourinho ruled rather than that of Guardiola. Mourinho's lip-curling comment after that defeat that the Barcelona team couldn't be beaten because they were 'too nice' was telling in that it said more about him than anyone else. It has to be said that in comparison with Barca on that occasion, the Real Madrid team seemed like a crowd of delinquents.
To their credit, Manchester United played a clean game, not Mourinho style, and it was an event where for once, being the exception rather than the rule, football could truly lay claim to be 'the beautiful game'.
Though not as beautiful as tennis, of course ...
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