Ballon d'Or Inquisition: The Golden Heads Of Barcelona’s Hydra

For a large number of cules, watching the potency with which Barcelona attack must recall the memory of an exciting childhood lesson in ancient folklore.

Featuring players that are able to create danger from every position on the pitch, one cannot help but be reminded of the famous story from Greek mythology of Heracles who, to accomplish the second of his Twelve Labours, journeyed to Lake Lerna to face the deadly Hydra: a mythical beast with the body of a serpent and nine fearsome heads of which if any was severed another would grow in its place.

With players like Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Dani Alves, Thierry Henry, Carles Puyol, and Gerard Pique (to name a few), likening Barca’s squad to this menacing creature of lore is not too great a stretch of the imagination and as Barca have shown throughout the season, when a head is severed i.e. a player is injured, another is ready to spring up in its place with equally deadly efficacy (Pedro Rodriguez has shown himself to be a very impressive example of this regenerative quality).

Against Real Madrid in Sunday’s Gran Clasico, the number of heads that Barcelona’s Hydra had baring its teeth may well have been 11 as the often-criticized Victor Valdes came up with a number of crucial saves in the match, including a stunning stop in a one-on-one situation against Cristiano Ronaldo that was so providential, Heracles himself may have found a way past the Barca keeper to be an impossible task.

I first likened Barca’s high-pressure, attack-from-all-sides, style to the Greek Hydra back in April in an article that foretold the Blaugrana’s eventual crowning as the king of the Champions League. Now, with five titles under their belt in less than six months, Barcelona’s Hydra almost has enough trophies as it does heads... and it may still be hungry for more.

Barca's many 'heads' swarm the Precious

In fact, at least four of those heads could contend for a trophy of a lustrously aurous nature: the Ballon d’Or. A football fan’s dream of a spectacle, Sunday’s El Clasico featured an astronomical six Ballon d’Or finalists on the pitch: Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Ibrahimovic, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka. The rest of that list is comprised of Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba, Steven Gerrard, and Samuel Eto’o (a former Barca player, the Cameroonian made the shortlist because of his performances and goals for the Blaugrana last season in a Triplete-winning campaign).

For many, Messi is the far and away favourite to win football’s most prestigious individual award, but it bears mentioning that three of Barcelona’s best, Xavi, Iniesta, and Ibra (and particularly Xavi and Iniesta) could not be far behind the little Argentine in the voting. Against the best team in Italy, Inter, a Messi/Ibrahimovic-less Barcelona were supposed to have to fight an epic battle for the right to play in the Champions League knockout stages - a match that was highly touted as potentially weakening the Barca squad with fatigue before yesterday’s Clasico.

The way the Inter match played out could not have been farther from that speculation. With passes that resembled a surgeon performing delicate surgery, Xavi and Iniesta cut through the Italians, switching the field of play, slotting in through balls, and dictating the rhythm of the match in a dominant display that saw Barca sentence the encounter within the first 25 minutes of play with goals from Pique and Pedro.

Is Messi the Golden Head of the Hydra?

While Sunday’s Clasico saw Barca play with the added advantage of having Messi feature for the full 90 minutes, the match was contrastingly different in that the two star Spanish midfielders found time and space hard to come by. Real Madrid’s principle objective was to neutralise the threats posed by Xavi and Iniesta and Xabi Alonso and Lassana Diarra doggedly pursued the Barca inventors with, at times, reckless abandon.

The result of effectively frustrating Xavi and Iniesta? It seems that two of the Hydra’s heads are a little slower to regenerate. The match was a nail-bitingly close encounter that Madrid were unlucky to have lost and one that Barca were able to take three points away only through a pinpoint-accurate cross from Dani Alves and a thundering close-range volley from Ibrahimovic.

Another reason why the masterminding heads of Barca’s Hydra should be very seriously considered for the Ballon d’Or is their accomplishments on the international stage where both Xavi and Iniesta together comprise the cerebellum of the Spanish national team.

La Furia Roja is by no means short on midfielders. With Xabi Alonso, Cesc Fabregas, David Silva, Sergi Busquets, Marcos Senna, and others distributing the ball, Spain certainly have the ability to field a second national squad whose midfield would still rival some of the better national teams in Europe and the world.

But Xavi and Iniesta bring something else entirely to the field of play; a sense of vision, deft finesse, and subtle trickery for which there is no substitute and the credit of Spain’s dominance on the international stage and Euro 2008 title can largely be attributed to the duo’s sublime performances. After all, Xavi was not named the Euro 2008 Player of the Tournament for nothing.

So while Messi will likely lift the Ballon d’Or trophy on December 1 by nothing less than his own merit, it must be said that Xavi and Iniesta should at least be on the stage with him. While they are at it, a few more of the Hydra’s heads could probably stake a claim to a sliver of that golden trophy as well. To some extent, it is a shame they cannot give the award to the whole monster.

Cyrus C. Malek, Goal.com