Andres Iniesta interview
ANDRES INIESTA ON 35 TROPHIES AT BARCA, HIS WORLD CUP SWANSONG AND A LOVE OF SIR ALEX
Can England and Spain meet in the final? asks andres Iniesta as he gets to his feet at the end of the interview. We’ve got high hopes, andres, but maybe not quite that high.
Spain’s greatest ever player is laughing now, stood before a wall covered in photographs of retired internationals. He will join the hall of fame soon, once he’s played his fourth World Cup finals.
and yes, if Gareth Southgate’s team and Spain top their groups, they could meet in the final.
England making it to Moscow on July 15 would be an incredible achievement. Spain being there would mean a glorious goodbye for one of the game’s grand masters.
That is certainly the farewell he has in mind. He’s had enough of the tributes that have marked his last season after 22 years at Barcelona, winning 35 major honours. ‘It has been emotional,’ he says. ‘But now to the football and one last challenge.’
at times his departure from Barcelona has overwhelmed him. He cried on the substitutes’ bench after being applauded off towards the end of the Spanish Cup final.
and he sat alone in an empty nou Camp at the end of his last league game. ‘I’ve played my whole life in Barcelona and saying goodbye isn’t easy. You never really expect so much affection.
‘I sat out on the grass alone after my final game, it was an intimate moment between me and that pitch where I had played so many matches. It was me saying goodbye to my home. Every corner of the nou Camp has a memory for me. The tunnel, the showers, the lockers, everything. It’s brutal.’
In Russia there will be no more tributes, no more adulation. Cristiano Ronaldo, no less, will be waiting for him in Spain’s first game in Sochi on Friday. Iniesta is magnanimous about the Real Madrid player who he once famously shushed in a fiery
Clasico but who he said deserves every one of his five Ballons d’Or.
Of an era in which his own exploits have not been enough to win a Ballon d’Or because of Lionel Messi’s duel with Ronaldo, Iniesta says: ‘I don’t know if we will ever see anything like this again.
‘It has been an incredible era, and everything I have had around me, both on my side and against me, has made me a better player. I’ve made the most of it. We’ve all made each other better.’
Ronaldo was still at Manchester United when Iniesta won the second of his four Champions League medals, against him, in 2009.
‘I have shared almost my entire career with some of these players,’ he says. ‘ They were starting out when I was starting out.
‘It’s inevitable that the solidarity between professionals goes beyond the rivalry. Everyone finishes with their own baggage, but also with their own trophies. and when you see your opponent’s medals, that generates a lasting respect.’
He knows that for all the World Cup scripts written for him to bow out winning in Russia, there are plenty of alternative endings.
‘It could be that none of us play any more World Cups after this one,’ he says. ‘This is my last one, I know that much. If that’s the case for the others too then that makes it even more special.
‘and everyone will be out for themselves. It will be great for some that Leo [Messi] ends up winning it, others will want me to finish up winning it, others will be for Cristiano. It would be a wonderful way to go, but it’s hard.
‘There’s a world of difference between saying “wouldn’t it be nice” and it actually happening.’
He won it for Spain against Holland in 2010, scoring in extratime and leaving a picture that will go down as one of the classic World Cup images.
It is the one of him celebrating by tearing his shirt off to reveal a white vest emblazoned with the black marker pen message: ‘Dani Jarque, always with us’. Jarque was Iniesta’s best friend in football.
The sudden death of the Spain Under 21 defender at the age of 26 in 2009 left him in freefall, feeling vulnerable and empty.
‘That’s the only time I have ever written a message under my shirt,’ he says. ‘Why did I choose that night? To write the message, then score the goal, and then remember to take off the shirt… in a moment like that it’s possible you get swept up in everything and it doesn’t even occur to you. There was something there that made sure it all went that way.’ His eyes glaze over slightly as he relives it.
He admits more tears were shed when he realised the effect his gesture had on Jarque’s young
widow Jessica Alvarez who was watching at home. Her pain had been too much for her to even turn on the TV to watch another match until she sat down for the final with her 10-month- old daughter Martina, and her mother, Maria.
She told Iniesta’s biographers: ‘I knew something was going to happen seconds before he scores. By then I’m not watching, my hands are already over my eyes.
‘The goal came and then the celebration made my mother shout: “Look! Look! Look!” Andres could have dedicated that goal to anyone but he dedicated it to Dani.’
Iniesta is moved once more by the recollection. ‘There are certain situations that make your hairs stand on end,’ he says. ‘It makes me proud of who I am.’
He still misses his friend and will never forget the way a sportsman in his prime was taken with no warning. Just this week he has become an ambassador for a campaign for more research into sudden death.
Jessica was not the only one who did not see his goal. Iniesta’s anxious father Jose Antonio has a fear of flying so he was not in South Africa. He had nervously turned the telly off in extra-time.
His wife Mari was watching it with the rest of the Iniesta clan in the bar below their house. Her screams told him Spain had scored, he rushed down to join the celebrations and found out the goal had come from their son.
‘He can hardly bear to watch a normal game, so imagine a World Cup final,’ says Iniesta, who still holds out hope that his dad will be in Russia. ‘It’s a very long way to go by train. And by plane? Ha! That’s very difficult for him.
‘He has taken some long train journeys to see me. If someone puts a chauffeur on for him he could get there!’
One place Iniesta’s dad did reach was Stamford Bridge in May 2009.
‘There are certain games that mark your career and for me, at club level, there are no bigger moments than that,’ Iniesta says. ‘Stamford Bridge was the most magical night of my club career.’
Such were the celebrations in the city after his 92nd-minute goal knocked Chelsea out and sent Barcelona to the Champions League final that, according to official records, the birth rate in Catalonia spiked nine months later. The 2009 final was against United and Iniesta played the game with only one good leg.
‘I had a [thigh] problem that prevented me from shooting, but I could play short passes and I could sprint and that’s enough to play football,’ he says of the 2-0 win.
There is a lot of respect for that United team — for Wayne Rooney who he admits to having loved watch play over the years, for the two ‘shining lights’ Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes — and for Sir Alex Ferguson.
It was Ferguson who always said that Iniesta and Xavi were the ones who made Barcelona tick, turning rivals dizzy on their passing carousel.
‘You have to give huge respect to Ferguson,’ he says. ‘Not just for the career he had, but for the way he did things. And not just for all that he won but for the fact he won most of it at the same club.
‘There is enormous merit in that. It was always a pleasure to play against the teams he built.’
The second final at Wembley in 2011 was no fun for United as Barcelona toyed with them.
Eric Abidal heard United players complaining: ‘That’s enough, stop f**cking about. We’re dead.’
Iniesta admits: ‘There were some things said during some games. I don’t remember which players, but things like that were certainly said to us from time to time.’
He has had a lifetime of keeping the ball, often from more physicallyimposing rivals. Does he feel like a role model for the smaller boys who might get overlooked?
‘Maybe I can be an example to the players who have my physique. I don’t see football as a game just for people who are 1.80m and 75 kilos. In the end, everyone has to exploit their virtues and improve defects. And you are in a team after all — it’s a mix, a balance.
‘I always enjoyed playing against, and beating, older, bigger boys. If there is a head of recruitment who only believes that football is for one type of player then your pathway can be cut off but that never happened to me.’
Looking at him now, sinewy, not an ounce of body fat, and having just seen him glide through another season, it’s a wonder he’s quitting at all. Could he not have gone on? Come to England even? ‘It would have been nice to play in England,’ he admits. ‘A good experience. But I never imagined I would be better off anywhere else.
‘ Now I’m leaving Barcelona because my body is asking me to.
‘It takes longer to recover and there are the mental demands I put on myself. It’s exhausting. I’ve squeezed out every last drop, there’s nothing left.’
Pep Guardiola would certainly have found a home for him at Manchester City. Iniesta still admires the man whose poster he had on his bedroom wall and who first spotted him as a future star.
‘When Guardiola arrived on the scene, the moment that happened,’ he says with pause and emphasis, ‘there was another step forward taken in the evolution of football.
‘Years later we still see teams that have tried to copy things that we started doing back then.’
So how is it all going to end? Is there perhaps a parallel with Zinedine Zidane who also walked away at his peak, squeezing in one last World Cup final as he went?
‘I hope not,’ he jokes as it is pointed out that it might not be best to follow Zidane’s last match to the letter with a head-butt and a red card. ‘I’m going to Russia with huge desire to enjoy every single moment but it’s a bit contradictory because I want to live it like it’s my last, but I want to compete like it’s the first.
‘I don’t want to treat it like a testimonial. I want to win it.’
Spain have a chance. And Iniesta believes there really is a parallel with Zidane 12 years ago.
‘There is that sense that it’s the last night of the tour,’ he says. ‘I want to show that just because I’m no longer at Barcelona does not mean I’m not up to this. When this World Cup ends, that’s the end of the great challenges for me. That puts me in the right frame of mind to face this World Cup for what it is — the final show.’
One thing is guaranteed — he will leave us all wanting more.