Football is an incredibly fast-moving game. The ball, the players, time when your team is losing or clinging to a one-goal lead, football makes a mockery of chronological reailty.
But for some players, football moves slowly, so slowly that they have time to consider, time to choose then time to act. Those players are rare, and often not appreciated until someone who doesn’t have the same time-shifting capabilities supplants them, or someone explains about their almost supernatural capabilities.
The game has had a number of those mutants, from Zinedine Zidane and his otherworldly control, which gave him extra time on the ball, to Xavi and Iniesta, magicians each in their own distinctive way, who used possession to extend milliseconds into seeming hours.
Messi would hunch his body over the ball, using movement as a way to extend time, able to do what he wanted at the end of that arc. Busquets, Kroos, Modric — it seems weird to be talking about a kid having those same kinds of capabilities, but precociousness can be fun.
When Xavi Espart debuted late in the season at RB for FC Barcelona, not sure people will remember that one of his first actions, when an attacker was running at him, was to pause. When he acted, it was with directness and clarity to stop the attack.
Another time he took a diagonal line to cut out a pass, a veteran move because usually, young players know straight lines. It takes a while to learn that a diagonal can be the fastest distance between two points.
His actions were defensive in nature because fullback is a defensive position, but all of his shifts were at fullback. Naturally, when people talked about him over the summer, they mused about where he would fit into that RB rotation, disparaged him by saying he would be found out in Champions League, too slow, not physical, etc, etc.
Then Flick put him in midfield, more his natural position if not his best position — certain players have the capability to make whereever they play their “best” position — and he sparkled, and sparkled again.
“Pffft. It’s pre-season, everybody looks good in preseason. Just wait until the real matches start.”
In the first match, Flick played him at LB. Flick didn’t just play him at LB, Flick started him at LB and what did Espart do? Held that flank down like he had been there since the beginning of time. Even more interesting is because Elche’s principal attacker occupied that space, they were coming at Espart time after time after time, and got nothing.
Espart not only defended, but was able to read play and distribute balls, knowing when to move up and when to sit back, none of his actions being automatic or seeming without thought.
“Yeah, but that was Elche,” said his detractors because that is what you do when something is happening that isn’t supposed to happen.
Then came the first home match against Athletic Club, when things were supposed to return to normal. Cancelo had a proper training period, Balde was going to stay and fight for a spot and made the matchday squad.
Flick started Espart at LB. Again. And Espart played LB like he had been there his whole career. Again. From the first minute, distributing a pearl of a pass, to late in the match where an Athletic Club attacker had a running start at him only for Espart to recover, whereupon he did something really smart: Instead of trying to DO SOMETHING, an instinct typical of a young player, he understood that the best course of action would be to just stay between the attacker and the goal, action by inaction, so that space and time could do what they do.
Later in the match, Flick subbed on Rodri and Cancelo, the latter moving to LB. Pedri subbed off and Espart moved to midfield, where he worked with Rodri in the name of command and control. And whether at LB or in midfield, every action of Espart was defined by intelligence. Like Pedri, he holds off for a beat just to be sure, because he has time. He knows that he has time even if the game doesn’t.
He has a sense of when to release a ball quickly, off the first touch, or when to hold a second to let a defender’s body weight shift so that it will be more difficult for him to jump a passing lane.
The great Ray Hudson used to talk about players such as Xavi playing as though they had already watched a replay of the match, already knowing how everything was going to go in real time. Pedri plays that way. So does Xavi Espart, and it’s weird to watch because it doesn’t make sense for one so young.
He isn’t fast, isn’t tall, isn’t physically strong, like Pedri, or Xavi, or Iniesta. He isn’t fleet of foot, but neither was Busquets, another player who could stretch time like taffy. His most powerful quality is his brain, a computer that seems to be able to decipher football in a way that allows him to have time.
Having time allows a player to see things. Pedri offloaded an assist to Raphinha for the first Barcelona goal, the kind of pass that harkened back to the glory days of tika-taka and magical mids, but he took a little pause before the ball was released, just to allow things to settle, but not so much that Raphinha would be offside.
Later in the match, Espart offloaded a similar ball to Gordon, a direct diagonal that shot through space with the correct weight and placement, eliciting praise for the moment, rightly so. My reaction was, “Xavi Espart, what are you doing,” because it doesn’t make sense for a damn kid to have already figured out how to play a fast, complicated game in a way that makes it seem slow to him, that gives him time.
It is beautiful to watch, even more so because he is another product of La Masia, a genius factory that accounted for 70 percent of the starting Barcelona XI against Athletic Club.
Espart is going to have bad matches, because they all do. Human bodies aren’t computers. How people react to those matches will depend on so much, including the omnipresent entorno. But when you watch him play, there is an ease to his game, an assurance that consistently leads to the right action. On a team when lost possession can so often spell danger, having a player on the pitch who understands that forcing things is bad unless it’s safe, is invaluable.
Flick, after the match, singled Espart out for praise, saying he was surprised at how well he played LB, lauding his preparation and capabilities, and rightly so. This is another special one, that you hope the injury gods protect, that Fate will be kinder to than it was to Marc Casado, who lost that crucial step after his knee injury and is now on the way out of Barcelona.
The game needs special players, time shifters, and it only seems right that at a club where such qualities are held in such high esteem, another one would pop out of the academy just in time for people saying, “Man, I sure wish there was a midfielder who was good enough to let Flick give Pedri some rest,” to watch him and say, “Oh. Okay. Cool.”