In the second leg against Real Madrid, the Portuguese showed us all his uniqueness.
I have a theory. Even if we live in the era of coolness, in which we forge our tastes on Instagram timelines and visual culture has become predominant, any opportunity to escape from this hyper-aestheticised and pre-packaged system is an unrepeatable experience, unique in its own way. The brace of Bernardo Silva at Real Madrid, and in general his all-encompassing performance, full of fine passing and dribbling, pausing and rhythmic controls, was a revolutionary act of this kind.
to look at it well, Bernardo Silva is one of the less cool players that you can focus on. Her hair is increasingly sparse, an announcement of premature aging; his unkempt, well-groomed beard gives him an air of a clerk; the oversized shirt, into which his small bust could disappear at any moment, associates him with a playmaker from the 2000s. Even his gait on the pitch is rather anonymous and, if it weren’t for the genius of some choices, all in all we could think that Bernardo Silva is a right winger like any other. Perhaps it is no coincidence that at the end of the game, when for some reason the journalist asks him if he is a fan of an Argentinian team, Bernardo Silva he admitted to be a great admirer of Pablo Aimar. He has just received the award of Man of the Match by UEFA, yet nobody seems to give it much importance. The other questions already concern the final against Inter or his possible future at Barcelona.
Effectively too little is said about the uniqueness of Bernardo Silva, of his purely creative way of being on the pitch in the most tactically rigorous team in the world. In the semi-final second leg against Real Madridthe first minutes were enough for Bernardo to reduce the whole match to his one-on-one with Eduardo Camavinga, until last night the revelation of the Real season in the new role of left-back.
Yesterday we witnessed the best first half of Guardiola’s Manchester City. A geometric and intense game, in which the connections between the offensive players (Gundogan and Grealish on the left, Bernardo and De Bruyne on the right) have disintegrated the Real Madrid defence. In a tactical context bordering on perfection, however, it is difficult to avoid emphasizing how among the eleven on the pitch there was one who shone in a different light. Against Real, Bernardo Silva attempted 6 dribbles – of which 3 succeeded – and completed 90% of passes – 52 out of 58. From the very first minutes, his receptions close to the touchline sent the scoring system into a crisis Blancos. Bernardo Silva is above all an intelligent player, the most faithful apostle of Guardiola’s positional game, and therefore his movements off the ball were also elusive.
As he showed us his unmarking behind Kroos on the occasion of the first goal, Bernardo Silva has a unique ability to recognize the space to attack. At the end of the game, Pep Guardiola commented on his performance with his usual silly phrases that seem to say everything but say almost nothing: «Bernardo Silva is one of the best players I’ve ever seen». It’s a banal eulogy, yet it contains a truth that we didn’t fully recognize before last night. Bernardo Silva as one of the most decisive players in the world, an attacking midfielder (or winger, or midfielder, in short, we understand each other) refined but concrete, decisive both in the quarter-finals against Bayern Munich and in the second leg against Real.
Some might note that to score a goal like the one that gave Manchester City the lead, you need a genius of the game like Kevin De Bruyne. A midfielder capable of tearing Maya’s veil of reality to see beyond the most banal pass. That’s it. But as they say, deep down the true recognizes the trueno?
However, even if he has already scored a very heavy goal, Bernardo Silva’s game only gets better. In the 36th minute City attack the Real Madrid box from the left. For the first time Grealish was free to lead the ball and, having reached sixteen metres, he found Gundogan entering behind Valverde with a minimal pocket. The German kicks rather timidly, giving Militao time to close the diagonal. The ball suffers an unnatural bounce, and seems to be about to stop about ten meters when Bernardo Silva coordinates by arching forward.
Bernardo is not that short – second Wikipedia he reaches 173 cm – but the puny build makes him almost a hobbit in contemporary football. Maybe that’s also why we just saw him hit that loose ball with your head we thought it was a joke. What does this small and defenseless player want to do in the heart of a defense dominated by the power of Militato and Alaba?
Instead, Bernardo Silva’s idea was brilliant. Camavinga and Kroos had hurried to cover the goal left free by Courtois, who in turn had come out to block Gundogan’s shot, and if Bernardo had crushed it, the two Real defenders would have denied him the goal. That’s why he chose to hit the ball slightly from below, to give it a poisonous effect, a sweet yet tense lob, which got stuck in the goal just above Camavinga’s head. “I’m small but I’m good with my head, huh?” Bernardo Silva joked at the press conference. It is essentially an easy goal, but made unique by the artistic inspiration with which Bernardo Silva adorns every ball touched.
Being decisive for Manchester City’s victory in the Champions League shouldn’t be a new sensation for Bernardo Silva. In April, in the quarter-final against Bayern Munich, he had played two other outstanding games. In our eyes was the action in which, around the 70th minute of the first leg, he slipped away to Davies and de Ligt on the short side of the penalty area. Bernardo Silva’s constant swerves came from hyperuraniumwhere football is played by dancing on the corpses of the defenders, human beings too big and awkward to be able to enter the same interstices of reality.
Then in the second half he demonstrated his decisiveness again with another header – this time a goring from a real centre-forward, which made the score 2-0. In that game Bernardo Silva had not only dominated the duel with Alphonso Davies, turning around his athletic disadvantage with control of the ball and timing. Barney Ronay had written on the Guardian of his movements off the ball thanks to which the Portuguese has now become a key man of Manchester City in the Champions League. From this point of view it is fair to underline how much Bernardo Silva’s thought on the pitch is original. This year Guardiola has deployed him as a false left-back or half-back in the Premier League, and he has offered the team his intelligence, that subtle ability to read the action at least a couple of passes in advance.
When he arrived at Manchester City, Bernardo Silva was a dribbling attacking midfielder, but also a fragile one. His work with Guardiola has accentuated his technical control over matches, and today we can consider him to all intents and purposes a total midfielder. In the first-half tactical masterpiece played by the Citizens against Real Madrid, which in the future we could remember as the apogee of football as an aesthetic-organizational manifestation, Bernardo Silva appeared to our eyes as the first among equals of this system. Unlike Messi in Guardiola’s Barcelona, that is, Bernardo’s talent swells and overflows within City’s tactical structure. In some ways, we could define him as the ideal player for Guardiola, the one that the coach would have created if he had put himself in the laboratory to personally produce the most suitable player for his game.
In an article published a few hours after the semifinal on The AthleticDaniel Taylor he analysed the movements of Bernardo Silva and his intelligence in the search for free space: «Take the ball, love it, treat it as a friend. Pass it to a teammate, keep moving, make yourself available to take it back. Repeat” he wrote. “It’s a simple formula, but it also takes something special to perfect it to this level. And Bernardo, of course, is special.”. But I find that there is also something mysterious in Bernardo Silva’s footballin his geometric and artistic interpretation together, which allowed him to become Pep Guardiola’s favorite disciple.
Let’s take the best play of the game. In the 65th minute, Real Madrid kept possession of the ball in the City’s frontline. Kroos received a few meters to the left of the midfield circle, filling the space left by Alaba, who as a left full-back concentrated behind pressure from De Bruyne. The German looks for him to create superiority between the City lines and Alaba manages to verticalize for Benzema. The spaces in which Real are forced to dribble are claustrophobic, however, and the Ballon d’Or misses the hook. At that point the celestial construction of Guardiola’s City restarts but, rather than hastening the times, Gundogan gives the break to let his teammates breathe and starts again from Ruben Dias.
Manchester City dribbled in the area with the same confidence with which they found finishing in the offensive phase and, despite being pressed by Benzema, Stones tried a central blow that found Bernardo Silva. The Portuguese barely touches the ball with his heel; he strokes it like a child afraid to break his favorite toy. Kroos only sees the ball after it has passed between his legs, and when he turns around, Kevin De Bruyne has already flown towards the Real Madrid trocar.
As Roberto Bolaño once wrote: «Among the various happinesses that literature can offer, the highest is invention». I don’t know if Bernardo Silva has ever read Bolaño, he certainly put that purely creative vision into practice with this play.
It’s not just an exceptional technical gesture. Of course, Bernardo Silva just had to let the ball pass under his left heel to get out of Kroos’ pressure with such a simple pirouette that made you jump on your chair, as if it were all so natural for him, and so he opened the field for the restart of De Bruyne as a tin. A useful play, in the worldview guardiolesca in which a good play is always a worthwhile play, which produces a cascading advantage for the entire team. Yet there is something more, in that very minimalistic gesture, which transcends the system in which it is performed.
With that back-heel Bernardo Silva established the greatness of his creativity, of the irrepressible inspiration that accompanies him on the football field. It was a moment in which we found ourselves faced with a lightning technical omnipotence, as if we had become aware in a flash of how decisive, irrepressible Bernardo can be. Or, like he’s become a Marvel villain, like this ineluctable.