Pepe: The wrong kind of hard-man for Real Madrid
The back four is a curious phenomenon. Everybody will agree that it’s the one indisputable component of a title-winning team – the rest of the side are permitted to flicker in and out of form, but it’s the job of the defence to soak up the attritional battle over the course of a season or more, and ensure the consistency of the whole team. And yet, trying to come up with a list of great ones is difficult because there are so few – far fewer spring to mind than the equivalent in great midfields or strike partnerships. Sacchi’s Milan and France’s World Cup-winning side are two particularly outstanding candidates. To give two more recent examples, Chelsea and Manchester United were both a right-back away from staking a serious claim in the noughties. But history is not replete with them.
They’re undoubtedly the most difficult part of a team to put together, too. A strike pairing can be purchased in one transfer window, but a defensive unit takes years of tinkering, learning, adjustment, and other arcane arts until true cohesion exists. Arsene Wenger has frittered away time and years in an unsuccessful quest to construct one at Arsenal. Manchester City have fine defenders, but not yet a unit capable of safeguarding their goal against the very best. And at Real Madrid, successive managers have struggled to build foundations solid enough for their illustrious attacking forces to stand upon, with little success.
If the two centre-backs are taken as an isolated pairing, then the job becomes slightly easier. Like midfield and strike partnerships, with their popular attacker-defender, creator-finisher formulae, there’s a classic pairing. In this case, however, it’s less about positions or even roles, and more about mentality. The duo are, of course, the hard-man and the calm one. The brains and the brawn. The aggressive brute and the intelligent footballer. It goes by many names, but the classic good-cop-bad-cop combination is one that’s here to stay.
Yet, at the same time, it’s an oversimplification. To use the aforementioned four examples, Vidic, Terry, Baresi and Desailly – the more aggressive of their pairings – might be able to both take it and dish it out, but they are not merely lunatics. The Venn diagram of imposing centre-backs and violent madmen might have a significant overlap, but it’s not an exact correlation. Such players will always be wildcards, and it doesn’t take a tactical genius to work out that if you have a wildcard in your team, they’re best kept the hell away from your own goal. Which brings us to Real Madrid, and Pepe.
Real Madrid have made the mistake of many a Sunday League team up and down the country – for a number of years now, they have been confusing pathological violence with an ability to defend effectively. Perhaps it was Makelele who instilled the confusion – they did, after all, attempt to replace him with the very personification of this misconception, Thomas Gravesen – but there’s no change which sums it up more than their main defensive lynchpin devolving from Fernando Hierro to Pepe.
Hierro, of course, was a hard bastard. But he was also calm, cool, confident, elegant, and level-headed. In other words, his violence came from a cold-blooded, analytical knowledge of when and where it needed to be applied, not because he was a psychopath who’d been allowed onto a football pitch as part of his Care In The Community program. Pepe is violent and brave enough, but he doesn’t apply it as he should – when he needs to, whilst keeping a cool head until the moment arrives. During the war, the Germans identified this trait as ‘fire-discipline.’ Colonel Kurtz spoke about something similar, though tragically the Vietnam War, along with his role as a fictional American, contrived to cut short his career as the next Steve Clarke. It’s this quality that Real Madrid are sorely lacking – the difference is a subtle one, but it’s the fine margin between a defensive rock and an utter liability. Since Hierro left, Real Madrid have only flirted with greatness.
Jose Mourinho, to his tremendous credit, has realised that this problem is his greatest barrier to victory, and has duly attempted to solve it. Firstly, he bought Ricardo Carvalho, exactly the kind of classy, calm defender that was required to marshal the Madrid back-four. Secondly, he attempted to develop Pepe’s undoubtedly useful talents elsewhere , letting him roam in midfield, spreading terror across the whole pitch and scaring the hell out of whomever he pleases. Unfortunately, however, it has only made him marginally less of a liability, and Carvalho’s coolness has been negated by the general decline of age, and has failed to spread to the rest of what could be kindly described as a cavalier backline.
In modern football, the problem is exacerbated by the need for full-backs to be primarily offensive in order to break down smaller teams, which can then become vulnerabilities when deployed against better sides. If the likes of Sergio Ramos are going to form part of an unbreachable backline, they need to be properly led on the pitch. Real Madrid need steel, and even violence – but only applied with intelligence and calm-headedness, qualities which Pepe appears to be sorely lacking. In short, they need to find another Hierro, and Jose’s quest to find him will be the definitive factor in whether they can finally overhaul Barcelona.
Callum Hamilton
Image courtesy of WellOffside.com
