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Graham Hunter, Spain writer
Should it take Luis Enrique’s fancy on Wednesday, he could line Paris Saint-Germain up against Barcelona with three forwards who have played in, or won, World Cup finals. Those would be: Kylian Mbappé (most goals ever, four, in finals of World Cups), Ousmane Dembélé (winner in 2018, runner-up 2022) and Randal Kolo Muani (runner-up 2022 and scorer in the final shootout.)
If PSG’s Spanish coach wanted to mix things up a bit, as he has done this season, he could leave out Kolo Muani and play someone who has won three Champions Leagues, scored in the 2017 final and who’s beaten Barça eight times across his career: Marco Asensio. He could select Gonçalo Ramos (Portuguese champion last season and scorer of a 50-minute hat trick against Switzerland in the last World Cup), Lee Kang-in (Copa del Rey winner, U19 World Cup runner-up) or lightning fast winger Bradley Barcola (€45 million transfer from Lyon last summer.)
Take your pick.
Side note: The last time Mbappé faced Barcelona in the Champions League, he scored four goals in 180 minutes. It was like watching frozen, startled rabbits caught in his headlights.
At about 7:00 p.m. CET on Wednesday, 17-year-old Pau Cubarsí will be told that he’s starting his second-ever Champions League match at centre-back for Xavi Hernandez’s Spanish champions, making only his 12th Barcelona first-team start, and being asked to repel these fearsome Parisian stars in blue and red. His experience deficit will be gigantic, he can only stare in awe at the trophy haul those opposition forwards boast, the smallest age gap between him and the youngest of those PSG forwards is four years (Cubarsí only turned 17 two months ago) and most tuning in to this tantalizing tie will be reckoning “potential Achilles heel for Barcelona there …”
Cubarsí is an absolutely exceptional footballer, though, easily one of the most intelligent, outstandingly gifted and admirable 17-year-olds I’ve ever witnessed. His football brain is remarkable, not only for one so young, but in general. His peripheral vision is gifted and, perhaps most importantly in terms of how important he’s become to Xavi, Cubarsí is the ideal defender for this version of FC Barcelona.
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Football being as capricious as it is, we might see this kid who originates from a tiny Catalan village of about 200 residents meet his match or have a bad night in Paris. Much stranger things have happened.
Don’t count on it, though. And if that does happen, he’ll dust himself off and start all over again, with the very real prospect that he’ll get playing time as one of Spain‘s centre-backs at Euro 2024.
Every so often a young footballer emerges who not only possesses one or two important and thrilling elements that make him stand out, but who’s vastly advanced in maturity, emotional intelligence, self-confidence, speed of learning and the ability to compete with hard-nosed, often mean-eyed grown men.
Whether at elite level or even the anything-goes amateur game, football is a school of hard knocks. Youth and inexperience are looked upon as tempting weaknesses to be pounced upon, exploited, punished — ruthlessly.
However talented a prodigy might be, however skilled and exciting, opponents will be queueing up to trick, bully and expose him. One of the things that stands out about Cubarsí, so far, is that he couldn’t care less about all that.
This is a footballer whose eyes and mind take snapshots of information before he receives the ball, calibrates whether his next pass must be short, simple, daring, risky, long distance, and then his psyche completely blanks out both the level of threat an opponent’s press might bring and what type of bill there might be to pay if he were to get it wrong. Cubarsí will deliberately offer for the ball in an area that he knows will draw the rival press, that he knows will serve his team’s purpose in terms of playing out, and then he’ll usually try to beat that press with a pass between two or three rivals, a pass across the front of onrushing opponents, or try to use his Paul Scholes level of mid- and long-distance distribution to unleash a Barcelona counter-attack.
He’s that good. When you see it all in motion, it’s poetic.
While the playing characteristic that best describes him is to say that he’s a fine mixture of Gerard Piqué’s elegance, vision and ability to play out from the back; plus the ferocious, competitive, aggressive, thou-shalt-not-pass attitude of Carles Puyol; there are definitely elements of Andres Iniesta in there, too.
Watch Cubarsí between now and the end of the season, if you’ve not already been stunned into total fascination by his play so far, and you’ll see what I mean. I guarantee it.
OK, OK, you’ve reached the stage where you’re reading this and saying, Too much! This is too soon!
I’m telling you: “No, it’s not.”
This fabulous kid isn’t yet at the levels of those three in their absolute primes. He’s only started 11 first-team matches, so of course he isn’t. Nor, given how capricious the football life is, can anyone 100% guarantee that Cubarsí will go on to emulate or outstrip these all-time legends.
That’s not my point, though. It’s all there right now, waiting to make him one of the dominant footballers of the next 15 years.
I remember interviewing Iniesta after, coincidentally enough, Barcelona beat PSG 2-0 at the Camp Nou in 2015 — almost exactly nine years ago to the day.
The little genius was given the ball deep in his own half, about 10 meters outside the Barcelona penalty area, with Yohan Cabaye thundering in to press him and the Frenchman getting there almost simultaneously to the ball hitting Iniesta’s right boot. Barca’s No. 8, without pausing, swivels through a corkscrew ¾ turn to escape from Cabaye, feints to go one way but then goes the other to completely send Edinson Cavani off in the wrong direction, and then drags the ball away from a diving lunge from Marco Verratti. It’s scintillating.
When Iniesta received the ball, he was in such isolated space so close to his own penalty area that misjudging, or simply being caught, would almost automatically have meant PSG scoring. Instead, his daring, instinctive slaloming run took him right up the pitch and let him slide rule a pass into the path of Neymar who, on the run, slotted home for 1-0.
It was one of the all-time magical Barcelona goals, and it was heart-stoppingly daring.
Afterward, I asked Iniesta: “When you take a risk like that so deep in your half, with an opponent pressing right on top of you, don’t you worry? How on earth do you make millisecond decisions like that one?”
“It’s instinct, it’s programmed into us,” he told me. “You make millisecond decisions all over the pitch in order to gain time and space, but there’s usually not time to actually think about it. You have a vision in your head and you try to automatically do the thing which is best to the team’s advantage and the threat of risk or consequences can’t stifle your creativity or you’d never try important things under pressure.”
It was a terrific answer, which he gave with that enigmatic smile of his, playing around the eyes, the smile I’ve always taken to mean: I don’t mind occasionally explaining these things to mere mortals.
If you can encapsulate that brilliant move from Iniesta, plus the logic behind it, then watch the decisions that Cubarsí takes, the vision he shows, the stress-proof attitude he’s been born with, then you’ll easily see the comparison.
This is a guy from a family, in fact from several generations, of carpenters. It’s in his DNA, thanks to them, that he’s always viewed precision, detail, planning and seriousness as vital.
There’s elegant wooden furniture all over Catalonia that bears the Cubarsí name, and you can bet your life it’ll last, it’s pleasing to the eye and it precisely meets the specifications that the customer gave to whichever of Pau’s ancestors received the commission.
This is about to be, by far, the sternest football test of Cubarsí’s young life; after all, he began this season not even in Barcelona’s B team but playing U16 football.
Beyond his skillset, there are several things that have helped him vault this far this quickly. He’s a great pro. He’ll be first into training, last home, first out to the tunnel to start stretching and mentally preparing for the warmup: calm, focussed, oozing big-time temperament.
Cubarsí is a great believer in visualization: opponents’ habits; stress moments he’s likely to encounter in a match; whether the rival team will suffer more from his mid-length, long-distance or short passing; and which rival presses in which manner?
Pre-match, no matter whether it’s an apparently stress-free LaLiga match at home against minor rivals or monster challenges like what awaits him in Paris, he avoids his mobile phone all day on matchday. No distractions, no messages to and from loved ones. Focus.
The sum total is that whether he’s Man of the Match, as UEFA’s technical observers named him when Barcelona eliminated Napoli, or suffers a tough evening against Mbappé & Co., this isn’t a guy who should be treasured and enjoyed only by Barcelona fans. Pau Cubarsí makes watching football a total joy.
As former Barcelona great Samuel Eto’o said: “I’d have Xavi and Iniesta in my football team every single day of the week because they had the incredible gift of making football, which is incredibly complex and difficult, look simple.” It’s a gift that Cubarsí, coached by Xavi and making decisions like Iniesta, shares.
Watch and be entertained.