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Xavi or Andrea Pirlo: A Close Comparison of the Midfielders
Published: March 4, 2014
What separates these two playmaking midfielders, the finest of their generation, is not substance but style. That is what Pirlo has.
Both conduct the game: the Spaniard in staccato, the Italian with broader strokes. Both play with rhythm. Both are 34, and we can only enjoy them for a little while longer.
And yet the way Xavi plays is not the way Pirlo does. Xavi is cloaked brilliance, often doing stuff on the field that goes undetected, invisible, the little passes here and there that propel the play. The ball goes through him, as it must. He once told British soccer magazine The Blizzard that he must touch the ball at least 100 times a match, and for the most part he does. His passing is always among the most accurate, marked in the 90s like a student acing every exam.
He is not so obvious. Sometimes the ball only travels a few yards from his foot to another. Other times he has set up goals that won competitions: one pass for Fernando Torres through a couple of defenders in the 2008 Euro Cup and another perfect ball for Lionel Messi's header in the 2009 Champions League final. Once Xavi put up four assists against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu. All told, he has 113 assists over the past decade.
It is as if Xavi wants his teammates to take the credit. He moves the ball quickly on. The ones who score the goals, such as Messi and Andres Iniesta (and Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o before them), take the headlines and the awards. Xavi claims Iniesta is better, per Simon Kuper's book Soccer Men. Messi keeps winning individual awards.
“Individually, I’m nothing,” he tells the journalist Graham Hunter in his book, Barca: the Ma...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - International Football
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