I’ve been watching Aguero on video ... he won’t get past me this time!
IT stands eight feet high and is eight yards wide, just like on every other football pitch in the world but, according to Victor Valdes, ‘sometimes the goal at Barcelona doesn’t really measure what it measures.’
That might sound like good news for Manchester City, who have to score three times to stay in the Champions League, although this is Valdes reflecting on 12 years spent in Barcelona’s first team more than on tomorrow night’s last-16, second-leg tie.
‘It is not something that you notice only during the 90 minutes, it’s everything,’ says the 32-yearold, looking out on the nets at the club’s Joan Gamper training complex.
‘You are analysed down to the last centimetre; that you moved too much or too little. And if you can’t isolate yourself from that, then it can end up affecting you.’
Barcelona’s players woke up to headlines about how they had embarrassed the club at the weekend after the 1-0 away defeat by Valladolid on Saturday left them third in the La Liga table.
Having one foot in the Champions League quarter-finals and both feet in the Spanish Cup final cuts them no slack. Neither do the three European Cups they have lifted in the last eight years, all of which were won with Valdes in goal.
If he manages to win a fourth he will become the first goalkeeper ever to do so, yet is already the most decorated player in that position in the club’s history. But underlining the size of that goal he has to fill, he believes his career with the club could
It can be exhausting not touching the ball and I can end a game dead on my feet
have come to an abrupt end in 2006, when he played his first European Cup final against Arsenal in Paris.
‘I went into that game knowing that the day after the match I would not be the goalkeeper of Barcelona because of all the criticism that I had received during the season,’ he recalls. ‘It actually seemed to liberate me and I gave the performance of my life. We lifted the European Cup and everything was reconsidered. I won the Champions League and won a career at Barcelona.’
Performances that helped Barcelona reach the f i nal would not have been enough without the performance that inspired them to win it.
This is a club where everyone has a voice and a platform from which it will be heard. Players were harangued as they boarded the flight back f rom the Valladolid defeat — and the f ollowing day’s headlines showed no mercy.
‘You can’t knock it because it is part of our history. It’s one of the reasons why this is more than a club,’ he says.
Valdes joined Barca’s La Masia academy aged 10, although he missed his family, who had recently moved to Tenerife, and left to rejoin them, not returning until he was 13.
Once reinstalled, he soon got used to being the keeper of the best team in Catalonia. ‘I would have played lots of matches as a kid where I would go home afterwards without having touched the ball,’ he remembers.
It was a good grounding for becoming the goalkeeper of the best club side in the world.
‘Mentally it can be exhausting when you are not physically involved, because you still have to stay completely focused,’ he says. ‘I have finished games where I have hardly touched the ball, yet reached the dressing room dead on my feet.
‘You think to yourself, “Why?”, and it’s because, psychologically, you have to be completely immersed in the game despite not being physically active.’
He says the constant adjusting of position according to how high the team is up the pitch is one way of retaining focus. He also admits that this season things have not been quite t he same. ‘Teams are attacking us differently,’ he says. ‘If you look at the stats, they’re getting to the edge of our area more, they’re taking more shots. It’s not all about the one-onones any more. They are shooting from closer in. It’s my last season here and I’m having a good time because I’ve got more work to do.’
That will please Manchester City fans more than it will Barca coach Tata Martino. It also belies an enduring enthusiasm for simply making saves, coupled with the passion that saw him confront Jose Mourinho as the Portuguese jigged round the sprinklers at the Nou Camp after I nter Milan had knocked out Barcelona to reach the 2010 Champions League final.
In fact, you can’t help thinking Valdes would be far more at home in the Premier League cauldron than in front of 3,000 spectators at Monaco.
THEFrench Ligue 1 club remain in the driving seat for his signature, but no deal is closed and he says: ‘I’ve always identified with your football, the way the supporters live the game and the respect they show they players. It is one of the
biggest leagues in the world, with the best clubs in the world and, without doubt, it’s a very good option for me.’
Wherever he goes, he will miss a club that he first served as a ball-boy, positioned, of course, behind the goal. That was where he first saw at close quarters his biggest role model, visiting Bayern Munich keeper Oliver Khan.
‘I will never forget the first time I saw him. I just thought, “This is my keeper”. He had an immediate impact on me in everything that he transmitted. And with the passing of the years I came to understand more and identify with him and his personality.’
Andoni Zubizarreta was a hero closer to home to whom he gave his shirt f rom the Wembley 2011 Champions League final, 19 years after his predecessor had won the club’s first European Cup, again at the home of English football.
He prefers shirts as keepsakes to the pieces of netting that Barca defender Gerard Pique cuts from the goalposts and distributes in the dressing room after big matches.
‘I always think it’s best not to touch the nets,’ he says. ‘As a keeper, you spend the whole game trying to avoid anything touching them.’
Zubizarreta is now Barcelona’s sporting director and is charged with finding a replacement for Valdes, while his predecessor, Txiki Begiristain, is busy trying to build a similar version of the club in the Premier League with Manchester City. Can it be done?
‘You have to work very hard from the bottom up,’ says Valdes. ‘There are Under 17 players here who have an understanding of how we play, more so, say, than a player who has been in the first team for two years but has come from another club.
‘The goalkeepers know how to come out of their areas because since they were small that is what they have had to do.
‘We grow up playing with three at the back. Imagine a game with three defenders, where you are practically the sweeper. I’ve taken part in position and passing drills since I joined when I was 10. You have to give orders on the pitch, so if you don’t understand the system, what kind of orders are you going to give?
‘There is no big secret, you just have to work hard on the identity you want to have.’
If City do manage to stage one of the most remarkable comebacks in Champions League history tomorrow night, it would be a huge leap forward for the Manchester club and Valdes is anxious to guard against complacency.
‘Two-nil is a good result, but it is not definitive and even more so with the power that they (City) have,’ he says. He knows all about
Yaya has some shot on him ... I learned that in training!
the calibre of Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero: one a former friend from La Liga, the other a foe.
‘It was great to see Yaya again,’ says Valdes of his reunion with his former team-mate at the Etihad. ‘He brought about seven pals on to the team bus and we were about two hours posing for photos. It was as if he was still in the team.’
Valdes is not surprised that City have nurtured Toure’s attacking qualities, adding: ‘ Here, Yaya started as a holding midfielder and he had a way of playing that suited what Pep ( Guardiola, Barca’s f ormer coach) wanted f rom a central defender, so he played there, too.
‘But his strength is carrying the ball forward and that ultimately means you have to be playing further forward. He protects the ball so well — and now you are all discovering something that I already knew only too well: he has some shot on him. I learned about that in training a long time ago!’
And if Valdes knows what it is like to be beaten by Toure in training, then he will also have plenty of memories of being on the wrong end of an Aguero goal.
‘He moves intelligently to get the wrong side of defenders and he gets his shot away very quickly,’ he says of the former Atletico Madrid striker who scored seven goals against him in five seasons.
THEkeeper will have studied Aguero in the build-up to this game, just as he studied Thierry Henry’s every move before that 2006 final in Paris.
‘I had spent the whole week leading up to the game watching videos of Henry, and Arsenal in general. They were the most in-form team in the whole of Europe at the time.
‘I watched Wayne Rooney before Champions League finals, Ronaldo before El Clasicos. I don’t like surprises; familiarity guards against that. You get in a one-on-one situation and you only have tenths of a second to decide, so it comes down to your intuition, but also the fact that you have analysed how the forward usually reacts comes into that.’
Valdes visited Henry, who later became his Barca team-mate, in New York last Christmas and American Major League Soccer will be another of his options. When he hangs up his boots, you can see him near to the coast, spending his days following his passion for windsurfing.
‘Ninety minutes out on the board feels like a week’s holiday for me,’ he says. ‘You are out on the water, with dry land far off in the distance and nobody and nothing to bother you apart from the occasional fish swimming past.’
All that solitude: it sounds a bit like life as Barcelona goalkeeper has been sometimes, although with the threat of Toure and Aguero on the horizon, there are other similarities worth noting, too.
‘You need maximum concentration at all times,’ he grins. ‘Otherwise you end up in the water.’