Major mismatch

The Red Devils were red in the face after a woeful display against Barcelona. Alaa Abdel-Ghani explains why Barca played and why Ahli played dead

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The festivities showed on the faces of spectators, some of whom decided to peel off the unnecessary

More than a week on, people are still asking why did Ahli, the team with a 100-year-old-storied history, and which is just one football trophy shy of its age, play so ineptly against European champions Barcelona, ending up limp losers in such embarrassing fashion.

Facing off against the Spaniards in a commemorative friendly in Cairo was supposed to be not just a fitting tribute to Ahli's illustrious past but also to their newly-acquired status on the international scene. In December, Ahli had finished a respectable third in the World Club Championship in Japan. Barcelona finished only slightly higher, in second place. So what happened just four months later? How did a club which just a short time ago was a game away from making a finals appearance in what is in essence the World Cup for clubs, trip and fall so badly, 4-0, that it was hard not to wince when watching?

The reasons had mostly to do with what was playing in the mind, followed by the playing on the field. For starters, Barcelona took the game seriously while Ahli took the game too seriously. In the build-up to the match, memories of Ahli's improbable 1-0 defeat of the then European champions Real Madrid in 2001 were brought up regularly by fans and media alike, to the point where instead of the Real win providing the impetus for another Spanish giant-killing repeat, the feat against Real began to weigh heavily on Ahli. The win against Real suddenly started to look like a problem, not an achievement. By the time Barcelona came to town, Ahli players had simply put too much unnecessary pressure on themselves, wholly forgetting that the game was, in the end, just a friendly.

Paradoxically, along with the uncertainty which prevailed in the Ahli camp, came confidence which bordered on overconfidence. The club made, for example, too much of its performance in Japan last year. Ahli is not, as many like to suggest, the third best team in the world. It merely finished third in a six-team tournament. The difference is huge.

Ahli trumped up a trite too much its famous victory against Real. While it was genuinely deserved, the Galacticos of Zidane, Figo, Raul and Carlos contributed in no small measure to their downfall. They came to Cairo to strut their stuff as individuals, forgoing their usual chemistry as one entity in favour of showboating, which is always a crowd pleaser but not conducive to winning games. Barcelona came to Egypt to show why they are the best in Europe; they did not come to show off.

Real Madrid painted the town red, at least during the day, visiting the Pyramids, then the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, all in one go, all under a hot August sun. Their sightseeing tour ended just a coupe of hours before game time. By the time the match had started the efforts of the day were clearly evidenced by legs too heavy to make any discernible impact on the pitch.

Barcelona, too, went to the Pyramids on the day of the match, but for a strictly scheduled half-hour. They hurried back to their hotel where they were ordered by their coach, former Dutch international Frank Rijkaard, to take an at least three-hour nap before journeying to Cairo Stadium.

The Egyptian public also perhaps gave the game inordinate attention -- for days nobody was talking about anything except how Ronaldinho and company would razzle-dazzle but how Ahli would ultimately prevail. And that again wound Ahli up into a bundle of nervous anxiety. There is nothing wrong in building up a game but in Ahli's case, the adrenaline was being pumped in the wrong direction, for the purpose of flight, not fight. Barcelona's assistant coach, Dutchman Johan Neeskens, of the legendary total football that Holland invented, said they had been "a little surprised" by all the excitement the match generated in Egypt when it barely rated a mention in the news back in the Catalans.

The pressure to do well against Barca, even beat them, told on Ahli. Anybody with even rudimentary knowledge of how soccer works could see that against Barcelona from the outset, Ahli was a frightened lot. "The players played as if they never experienced any football action before," Ahli's Portuguese coach Manuel Jose said after the game. "We should have played better especially that we were facing the best team in the world but strong fear dominated my players which is a very bad habit in Egyptian football." Jose rightly stated that what happened against Barca was similar to the experience Ahli had in their first World Club Championship participation in December 2005 when fear got the better of the players.

On the pitch, Rijkaard came with two teams; one played in each half. Instead of fielding his star players in the first half and substitutes in the second, he reversed the trend.

Rijkaard incorporated five reserves in the first half for good reason -- to save his best for both Ahli and a La Liga dogfight down the stretch. Before the game, Barcelona was leading the league with 59 points with seven games left, just one ahead of Sevilla and two abreast of Real.

Ahli arrived with only one squad. Apart from injury which kept dynamo midfielder Mohamed Barakat out of the line-up, the Cairo club suffered a depleted reserve bench even though it has many more players than were on hand. Why they were not around remains a mystery because Ahli knew that among the terms of the game agreed upon was an unlimited number of substitutions.

The five Barca reserves in the first half meshed nicely with Javier Saviola, Eidur Gudjohnsen, Hernandez Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Gianluca Zambrotta and Victor Valdes (as a general rule, subs take whatever opportunity comes along to show they should be promoted). They and the permanent residents all proved more than capable of stifling the strike force of Mohamed Abou Treika and Emad Miteb while providing their own potent offence downfield. Saviola headed home from a corner after just 16 minutes after which the newly acquired 16-year-old Bojan Krkic doubled Barcelona's lead after 25 minutes as he buried a shot from 18 yards out.

The two-team strategy played some more psychological voodoo with Ahli. What must have coursed through the minds of at least some Ahli players following the first half was: "If Barcelona's reserves can do this to us, what will their leading lights do in Part II?"

By the second half, with the introduction of Ronaldinho, Carles Puyol, Samuel Eto'o, Lionel Messi, Deco and Lilian Thuram, Ahli were losing by two goals, had run out of gas but had to keep running against 22 fresh legs, and were clearly shaken by what happened in the first half and the thought that the worse was still to come.

Such circumstances made Ahli perform worse in the second half. A full-blooded chance by Osama Hosni, and that towards the end, was all she would write while at the other end goalkeeper Essam El-Hadari was busy saving three sure breakaway opportunities.

The big Barca guns were, on the other hand, in cruise control, their movement off the ball more impressive than with it. They played without frills and with few thrills but got the job done anyhow. Eto'o was set up twice all alone on goal and netted on each occasion.

In all, Barcelona, eight years older than Ahli and which received $2 million on the night for playing the Egyptian red shirts, produced solid football but without the flair, steady but minus imagination. Ronaldinho did not play like the two-time Player of the Year. He did not look like he makes a total annual income of LE177.5 million; Ahli's entire budget is LE148.2 (he did make up for a sub-par 45 minutes by entertaining the crowds at half-time, purposely hitting the crossbar with successive precision shots from outside the penalty area). Messi did not come near to scoring a goal like the one which left Getafe players sprawling and is being favourably compared with Diego Maradona's famous strike for Argentina against England in the 1986 World Cup.

But Barcelona won and scored four times along the way. Ahli, meantime, became a victim of its own hype and weighed down by the expectation thrust upon it, stood frozen as Barcelona ran the game at will. Quipped the cover of the sports magazine Al-Riyadia : "Ahli players, coach and fans have a wonderful time watching Barcelona".

The proud owners of a treasure chest of domestic, African and Arab trophies, Ahli tried to jump to a hitherto minor presence in soccer's global limelight but failed to increase their "limited fame in the West," as sports analyst Alaa Sadek put it. Worse, the Barcelona scoreline will undoubtedly be remembered as the defining moment of Ahli's 100th anniversary celebrations when that was not what the club had intended at all.