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Barça`s Main Man May Not Be Messi
Aside from shagging their spouses and owning a fancier car, a truly excellent way to get on a footballer's wick and penetrate their solid gold shield of smugness is to fail to pay them enough respect.
When becoming a figure of fun through another poor pass or a sliced shot, footballers become all too human with irate reactions to accusations that they are deeply crap, even if their salaries and egos suggest otherwise.
These responses can be a middle finger to fans, pointing at their names on the back of their shirts or foul-mouthed fly pasts of the bench with suggestions that the manager is quite wrong to base his opinion on a striker from unfair figures of one goal in 287 games.
This failure to show sufficient respect has not been a problem with much of the Barcelona squad of late, after the side won pretty much everything possible in 2009.
Leo Messi is quite rightly being hailed as the greatest player of our generation after another masterful campaign.
Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta have popped up in all the 'best of' lists, although the latter may struggle to repeat the feat having experienced fairly indifferent form this season.
But there's one footballer in Pep Guardiola's side who - if using Bobby Zamora's respect-o-meter as a guide - should have a city-sized blimp lit up with his name in gold tethered above the Camp Nou and choirs of buxom mermaids singing songs of his heroic deeds. But he doesn't.
Instead, Victor Valdés gets on with his job of helping his side to be sensational without any fuss and nonsense, despite being the most under appreciated footballer in Spain.
Even with two Champions League trophies and three la Liga titles to the keeper's name, some of the most fanatic but boneheaded Barça fans will still scoff at the thought of Valdés with the complaint that "he's not Iker Casillas."
Three years ago, that would have been a fair summary of the gaff-filled, more-obsessed-over-his-quiff Catalan keeper.
But in recent years, Valdés has been outstanding and improved enormously in every aspect of his game from shot-stopping, to his dominance of the box to his excellence in one-on-ones - a very useful skill for a goalkeeper supporting the attacking stylings of Barcelona.
While Iker Casillas has shown worryingly wobbly form ahead of the World Cup, it is Valdés who has been a rock behind Barcelona's back four to rack up 23 clean sheets in 42 games to help his defence to a remarkable record of just 18 goals conceded in la Primera, a fact that negates the tiresome, often English notion that Barça are inherently dodgy at the back.
Nevertheless, the Barça number one still has many critics who doggedly maintain that these statistics are flawed.
They are often same who claim nonsensically that the side's defence is weak, but it was Valdés who won Spain's best keeper award last season, having conceded less than a goal a game in the club's title winning campaign.
And it was Valdés who kept Barcelona alive in the opening ten minutes of last year's Champions League final where Manchester United were very much on top.
The shaven-headed stopper has been key for the club in recent weeks too, with Barcelona trying to keep pace with Real Madrid at the top of the table and fulfil their wettest of dreams of a Champions League victory at the Santiago Bernabeu in May.
In the 3-0 win over Valencia two weeks ago, Messi made the headlines after a stunning hat trick, but Valdés played a vital role in the victory with a stop from Nikola Zigic with the score at 1-0.
"VÃctor's save was worth the same as the three goals that Leo scored," noted Gabi Milito, a central defender who is back to his nasty best after 18 months on the sidelines.
In a rare midweek game in la Primera at home to Osasuna on Wednesday, Barcelona were desperately flat but it was Valdés who kept them alive in an encounter which they eventually won 2-0 with a cracking stop from Kristian Vadocz after four minutes.
"The save by Valdés was just as important as Ibrahimovic's goal," admitted Osasuna coach, José Antonio Camacho, after the game.
On Saturday night, in a particularly dangerous match against Mallorca in the Ono Estadi - a stadium where the home team had won 12 from 13 this season - Valdés was on fine form once again to pick up another clean sheet in the 1-0 win over the fourth-placed side.
Valdés superb form over the past two seasons has seen continuous calls - especially from the Catalan press - for the keeper to be rewarded with a place in the Spain squad, something that he has not enjoyed since 2005.
But these calls have gone unheeded with Iker Casillas, Pepe Reina and Villarreal's Diego López set for South Africa.
Whilst Valdés himself simply says that his country "has got a lot of good goalkeepers," and avoids complaints or controversy, others suspect that the reasons why a reigning Champions League winner continues to be overlooked may not be sporting.
Some suggest that his admittedly surly attitude outweigh the benefits of having the top stopper as a third-choice keeper in a long, stressful tournament whilst others maintain that something more political is going on.
"Valdés is just lacking good PR," claimed 'Sport' columnist, José Maria Casanovas, after the goalkeeper missed out on Spain's most recent squad that faced France.
"He's not as camera friendly as Casillas, nor does he have a father who played with the selectors like Reina. And nor is he content just to be a spare-part like Diego López."
While the critics may mock, the fans covet Casillas and Vicente del Bosque continues to dodge the call-up issue by claiming that the Valdés question is an inherited issue, the Barcelona keeper continues to be the rock at the back that allows the side's attacking talent to strut their stuff.
The challenge for Arsenal on Wednesday night, isn't just about finding a way to manage Messi, a theme that is sure to dominate the build-up to the quarterfinal clash.
It's also about paying their respects to VÃctor Valdés and realising that beating Barça's man at the back is no easy business.
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