The morning after the Italy game I received many messages and calls praising the team’s play. What I liked the most was the WhatsApp by Álex Grijelmo, who honored his status as a refined linguist: “In the debate on the new style of Spain, I contribute my definition: it is the tiqui-taca with pitons.”
I phoned him immediately and asked to borrow the expression, which he generously gave me. “You don’t need to quote me.” But how not to do it.
The tiqui-taca gave us three enormous titles (Euro-World Cup-Euro) in a chain between 2008 and 2012. It was a discovery by Luis Aragonés, coach at a time when sensational midfielders abounded. He started with wingers, but Vicente was injured and Joaquín and Reyes had a too relaxed attitude towards football, so he decided to do without them and make a team of control and precision. It was a new and perfect work, which Guardiola was able to transfer to Barça because the axis of everything was the Xavi-Iniesta couple.
That football put rivals to sleep, who chased the ball like a shadow, and produced continuous victories, but it was criticized for lack of dynamism and lack of finishing. Especially among the Madrid ranks, because the core of the formula was Barcelona and Barça itself was as happy a beneficiary of it as La Roja, in which to make matters worse the novelty coincided with Raúl’s forced retirement as an international. And in any case, the Real Madrid player has always been more in favor of energetic and fast football than of calm football. At the Bernabéu every back pass was always called. Cruyff already imposed it in Barcelona in the nineties, with Bakero, and he came in better. But it wasn’t just Real Madrid; Let’s say that the team’s tiqui-taca was accepted for the glorious victories it obtained, but not fully understood. Normal. He enjoys Western cinema more than arthouse cinema. That happened (I was a devotee) and it left us nostalgic. We have finally found a style, let’s not lose it, we said. But we had lost Xavi and Iniesta. And Silva, and Busquets… The national team and Barça embarked on looking for guys who ‘played…’, but what each player really does is his own.
De la Fuente has encountered two extremes. Not recently, his team was covered by wings Asensio and Olmo, but their injuries and the emergence of Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams changed things. They have altered the system, although it retains elements of the previous one.
Players with good footing continue to be chosen, valid for forward pressure and to handle themselves well in the opposing field, but with a less mannerist game, with more intention to break, and also more shooting from outside. The idea of the tiqui-taca was that the play did not have to be rushed, it appears alone when the ball moves from one side to the other, and behind it the attention of the defenders, who in their coming and going could leave a gap through which slip the ball to Villa or Torres. The first leg now is not to wait so much for the play to appear, but to force it frequently from the sides, with those two facing wingers, skilled, fast and wise who have become the talk of the Euro Cup after two games.
These two parties, especially that of Italy, have overcome the nostalgia of tiqui-taca. In order not to completely bury what he made us so happy and of which traces are preserved, Grijelmo proposes this tiqui-taca with pythons that I enthusiastically embrace. We do not know how the Euro Cup will end, it is to be feared that Germany will reach the quarterfinals, but right now there is a satisfaction and pride similar to those of those days in Vienna, Cape and kyiv.
Football belongs to the footballers. Good coaches are those who make their design based on the best players at their disposal, not those who fall into the opposite. Two Luis isAragonés and De la Fuente, two formulas, but the same principle: the player.
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