“These are the games champions win,” began my half-time text to a couple of friends in other parts of the country, “pouring rain, miserable pitch, in Bilbao, incredibly hostile crowd, no Messi, 0-0 at the half. It’s like a novel.” The second half, of course, delivered. As I said in the text, these are exactly the sorts of games a team needs to win if they’re going to win the league. The San Mames is one of the hardest places to play in Europe, and away against Athletic is a tough game in the best of circumstances. With the conditions on the pitch, and without Lionel Messi to provide inspiration, it became a substantially tougher task on Saturday. It’s heartening to see that even with a late scare, the blaugrana are able to do what they have to do to win these matches. And the goals came from an unlikely trio, as well, showing that this club has more than enough talent to make up for players who are missing from injury, even players as important as Messi. Seydou Keita had an outstanding game all around, as did Sergio Busquets. It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking that in Messi’s absence, the goals would have to come from David Villa or Pedro but Keita, Busquets and Xavi reminded me that with this side, scoring can come from anywhere any time. Yes, it’s a good reason for optimism and could well go down as one of the most important wins of the year.

I’m always happy to see Barcelona beat Athletic anyway, because I despise the latter’s policy of only choosing Basque players. I realize a lot of people think it’s quaint and old-fashioned, but I think it’s the ugliest kind of nationalism and that it denies the global nature of the game in 2010. If any kind of business apart from a football club used this policy, people would find it offensively discriminatory instead of a demonstration of quaint local pride. Imagine a Basques-only cafe or barber shop and you get my point. From a footballing perspective, the idea that any side – any side – is better for not wanting Castillian or Andalucian (let alone South American or African) players is absurd to me. One of the things I love most about FC Barcelona is the global nature of their squad, both in terms of players and fans. Of course, they have a Catalan base to root them in their city and region, but there are players who seem to have been born with blaugrana blood no matter where their birth happened to take place. (Messi and Cruyff spring to mind.) This is the beauty of a truly global side like Barcelona (and, indeed, all the best clubs in the world,) and to see a club that wants to hunker down in its own little piece of the world and employ only its neighbors and family strikes me as alarmingly twelfth-century.

The soggy win in Bilbao was the latest in a string of matches that have shown the team has taken the lessons of the Hercules loss to heart. Hercules played to perfection the sorts of tactics that Barca will have to figure out how to break down. Their manager openly claimed to use Mourinho’s second-leg work for Inter last season as inspiration, and there will surely be more where that came from. So for Barcelona to respond as they did, by smashing a Panathinaikos side that were using similar tactics and then beating Atletico and Athletic soundly on the road (as well as sneaking a win against another negative side in Sporting) seems to show that they’re equal to the task of grinding out wins against anti-footballing sides. (I don’t mean to use anti-football for all its derogatory implications – what else would you do as manager of Sporting at the Camp Nou?) Los cules are certainly a target this season, and early returns suggest they’re comfortable with that.

Speaking of comfort, in my first article of the year (written after the Racing game,) I basked in the evident ease with which David Villa was fitting into the side. I feel I’m forced to admit that this judgment was premature. Now, everybody knows and repeats ad nauseum that ‘the goals will come.’ And they surely will, since Villa’s among the finest goal-scorers in the world and surrounded by players who are perfectly capable of setting him up several times a game. He seems to me, though, to be feeling the pressure of his lofty pricetag and sometimes pushing for the dribble or the shot when a pass would do better. Of course, you don’t want to deny his goalscorer’s instinct but I get the idea that he’d gotten so used to needing to carry the burden himself at Valencia that he hasn’t quite gotten used to the idea that he’s got the level of support he has at Barcelona. Of course, of course, the goals will come. Villa needs to be a bit more patient for that, I think. (Of course, if he’d scored every time he hit the post this year, I’d be writing an almost completely different paragraph. Maybe it does all just come down to inches.)