Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández have played tiki-taka since childhood. They have grown closer than brothers, can find one another with a pass in their sleep and have won every honour in the global game.
Their days together are numbered.They do have unfinished business because Barcelona still might win, three more trophies this season to add to the 24 that they have won as integral parts of both their club and the national team, Spain.
But a week ago, Iniesta was being booed in Amsterdam while Xavi was in Qatar, which is widely reported to be his new home once this season ends.
Barça’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, has made it clear that Xavi, now 35, has earned the right to choose when he leaves Camp Nou. New York City FC would pay a fortune for his reputation to grace its new franchise in Major League Soccer, but the indications are that Xavi will follow the route of one of his mentors, Pep Guardiola, who played in Doha, Qatar, at the end of his career before he started coaching.
Iniesta, who will turn 31 in May, has miles yet to run for Barcelona and for Spain, where his 590 club appearances and 102 caps are way behind Xavi’s incredible totals of 752 and 133.
You might think that the Dutch would appreciate, not deprecate, Iniesta. It was, after all, Johan Cruyff who instilled in Barcelona the template of passing and possession that he had learned at the Amsterdam club Ajax.
The moment Iniesta stepped onto the field as a substitute in a friendly game between the Netherlands and Spain on March 31, some in the crowd jeered him.
Why? It would seem for no other reason that Iniesta scored the goal that won the 2010 World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands in Johannesburg.
uld be deeply ashamed,” the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink told reporters after the match.
Spain’s coach Vicente Del Bosque said: “I’ve been on the Spanish team bench for 98 matches. I never experienced anything like that before.”
Hiddink and Del Bosque are in their 60s, and have travelled the world as players and managers. If the wretched behavior toward such a universally admired person as Iniesta shook them, imagine what the player himself felt like.
There is no way to excuse such bad sportsmanship, even — or especially — if envy is the cause of it. Iniesta and Xavi must be tough inside — despite being relatively short and not that muscular, they have spent their prime at the core of a rhythm and style that has never been seen before in soccer and may never be surpassed.
Yes, Barça has more eye-catching individuals. Yes, the Brazilian player Ronaldinho and then the Argentine player Lionel Messi were the goal kings, the catalysts of the breathtaking end product that captures the imagination.
Certainly Carles Puyol was the man of steel holding an often-thin defensive line together while the playmakers set the tempo and the stars entertained up front. But, before Xavi departs for the desert sun, maybe one day to return as the Barcelona head coach as Guardiola did, we should take what opportunities remain to watch him at play (it never looks like work) behind that gifted strike force of Messi, Neymar and Luis Suárez.
My personal view of Xavi’s finest hour was at Wembley Stadium in London in May 2011. It was almost like a home game for Manchester United against Barcelona in the Champions League final.
The United manager, Alex Ferguson, instructed his team to deny Barça the time and space to build its hypnotic and rhythmic game of tiki-taka. Press Barcelona deep and rush them as high up the field as you can, Ferguson said.
And for a while, it worked.
That was the evening, more than any other game, that Xavi proved he was the pulse of his team. He dropped deeper than he liked to be. He established the tempo for Barça by positioning himself just in front of its defence.
Minute by minute, Xavi gained control, and gradually he moved Barcelona forward yard by yard. Statistics are often the poor man’s way of describing art in the sport, but on this occasion the computer gave a pretty good printout of how Xavi shaped the final.
He stroked 136 passes, nine out of 10 of which accurately found the intended recipient. Iniesta made 107 passes and Messi 91. But it was Xavi who orchestrated that grand performance, Xavi who made more decisive passes than United’s top three put together. And that trio — Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs — are not ordinary or average by anyone’s measure.
Barcelona won the final, 3-1. Pedro, Messi and David Villa scored for the Catalan club, Wayne Rooney for United. Messi had the outstanding strike, while Iniesta’s footwork amazed at times.
Ferguson, the beaten manager, confessed that he would have to go back to the drawing board to see what he could do as a coach to make his team remotely comparable.
If Xavi or Iniesta said anything that night at Wembley, I forgot the words, but it is not so easy to forget how they played their soccer. Two years later, however, Xavi did articulate what he strove for.
“It’s about doing something extra, not just winning,” he said in an interview for UEFA. “In football the result is an imposter. Greater than the result is controlling or dominating a match. That is the legacy.”
Those of us who write for a living envy this. It is one thing to have the skills, but rarer, in my experience, to hear the man who creates the tempo to explain his craft in such a way. Savour the coming months because when Xavi goes, we might not see a partnership like him and Iniesta anytime soon.