Gerard Pique: why I lied to Sir Alex Ferguson: When Ferguson asked Pique about whether he had played full back often, he lied to his manager that he did.
Ian Hawkey
One of Uefa’s proudest boasts is that no club has ever won successive Champions League titles, at least since the European Cup was renamed 18 years ago. An altered structure made it at once more elitist, but so competitive that to defend the prize has proved impossible. To pick up two medals on the trot, an individual needs to shift shrewdly in the transfer market. Three men have done so.
To find out the names of the other two, read on patiently. In the meantime, enjoy the company of the most recent. Gerard Pique is the youngest of them and he now stands 270 minutes from history. Should Barcelona make good on their status as favourites, he will pick up his third Champions League gold medal in as many seasons on May 22, barely three months after his 23rd birthday.
“What has happened to me over the past 11 months feels incredible, like a dream come true,” Pique says of his soaring success, from a fringe professional at Manchester United to a first choice at Barcelona, the club he grew up supporting, and for Spain, who head to the World Cup fancied to at least reach the final.
There, they call him “Piquenbauer” — alluding to Franz Beckenbauer — and do so not just because of his precocity and authority in central defence, but on account of the elegance and confidence he brings to the position, his readiness to advance with the ball, his ambitious and reliable distribution. To watch Pique in this gifted Barça team is to see not a junior player but one who takes initiatives. To hear from his colleagues is to recognise that his combination of self-belief and leadership spreads easily from pitch to dressing-room.
“In football, it is sometimes not easy to make real friends,” remarks his club captain Carles Puyol, “but Gerard is one. He is a lively colleague, always with a smile and positive energy, and from when I first met him, I knew that part of him was completely sincere. As a footballer, he has everything, a great athlete with a winning mentality.”
Pique is bright with it, articulate and literate enough that he has just written an account of his early years, Viatge d’Anada i Tornada (Return Journey), in Catalan, one of three languages in which he is fluent. And he has really written it, rather than have it ghost-written for him, which is unusual in his profession.
His background is uncommon, too. He grew up in a comfortable Catalan home, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. An affection for Barça, the football club, was obligatory given that his grandfather was a club director. Soon enough, he enrolled at the fabled La Masia academy and found himself in the same junior teams as Cesc Fabregas and Lionel Messi, teams so successful that he could add the adventurous flourishes to his strong defender’s game without fear of defeat. His bumptious, cheeky streak also emerged. Fabregas remains the butt of pranks when the friends meet on international assignments. Recently, he enjoyed Fabregas’ cartoon display of disgust when the Arsenal player gulped down a yoghurt drink Pique had filled with vegetable puree via a syringe. Evidently Pique puts a good deal of planning and endeavour into his japes.
His progress over the past two years could, at first glance, look like a long, uncluttered rise to pre-eminence. It is not so simple. When he left Barcelona to join Manchester United, aged 17, it felt like a great leap ahead. It also felt as if he was deviating from his natural destination, an eventual place in Barcelona’s first team. After three years at Old Trafford, one of them spent on loan at Real Zaragoza, he then had the feeling that a breakthrough there had crept beyond his reach.
“I am pleased I came back, of course,” he reflects, “but I will also be grateful for my experiences at United.”
He feels especially thankful to his manager there, Sir Alex Ferguson, whose readiness to let Pique return to Barça in 2008, for a fee of more than £5m, should be interpreted not only in the light of the player’s subsequent success but equally in the appreciation Ferguson felt for the player and his family’s roots in Barcelona.
When Pique refers to Ferguson as “like a second father”, he means “someone who taught me not just about football but what is important in life. People sometimes think he is frightening. In fact, he’s very close to his players”.
Time was that the young, eager Pique was not so scared of his boss that he wouldn’t turn sly to advance his own cause. His earliest first-team opportunities as a teenager were rare, via the Carling Cup or “dead” European games. He remembers Ferguson asking one day after training how often Pique had played at full-back, rather than in the middle of the defence. “I lied,” Pique recalls. “I said, ‘Oh yes, lots of times in the Barça junior teams’. So I got drafted in at right-back for a game against West Ham. Fortunately, I did okay.”
An autumn 2007 defeat at Bolton left a different impression. “I misjudged a header and Nicolas Anelka scored for them, and we lost 1-0. I looked back at that day when Ferguson lost some confidence in me. He didn’t say so, but I sort of felt then I would be moving on. Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand were, and are, such an excellent pairing I could not see a way past them, and there were also Wes Brown, John O’Shea, Jonny Evans and Mikael Silvestre.”
Manchester, though Pique made good friends there, never felt quite like home. “The weather, the language, the food took getting used to.” Especially the food. He was never won over by Anglo-Saxon cuisine, and the vividness with which he remembers a warm lemon pudding served to him soon after he had moved into his digs suggests he never will be. “It was really acid, and hot, and though I’m a polite guy, I just couldn’t bear it.” He thought English tastes were even odder when a fellow apprentice professional, a young goalkeeper who has since left United, showed off his party trick: eating shaving foam.
Pique played 23 times for United, and was an unused substitute in the Champions League final of 2008. “I’ll never forget that moment. The penalty shootout was like the scene in the Woody Allen film Match Point, when the ball bobbles on the net and you don’t know which side it will drop. Everything can change in that tiny moment. It was great to see the faces of the fans there when we were suddenly European champions.”
A year later, like Marcel Desailly (Marseille in 1993, Milan in 1994), Pique was on the winning side again in a Champions League final. And like Paulo Sousa (Juventus in 1996 and Borussia Dortmund in 1997), he achieved his second triumph against the club he had recently left.
More old allies stand directly between his Barcelona and a third final, in the form of the Inter strikers he will directly mark in Tuesday’s semi-final first leg in Italy. “I played with Diego Milito at Zaragoza,” Pique notes. “He is one of the best forwards I have seen, and we all know what Samuel Eto’o can do.” Eto’o, twice a European champion at Barcelona, left for Inter last July. “I bumped into Samuel at Milan airport in the summer,” recalls Pique, “and he said to me, ‘Remember, I helped you achieve what you have.’ It’s true. All my teammates have.”
