THERE is a wonderful old line about the freedom of speech, apparently originating from Voltaire's biographer, which notes: "I disapprove of what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it". It's how I feel about Chelsea's negativity against Barcelona in the first leg of their Champions League semi: I didn't much care for the Blues' playing style, but I will defend forever their right to play it.
The Spanish don't think so. They reportedly continue to think Guus Hiddink's team was too negative, too physical, footballing heathens who didn't deserve to be on the pitch with heavenly Barcelona.
I can understand their fury. Chelsea was clever and disciplined and hard, but unenterprising and dull. They figured that if they were ugly enough they could stop Barcelona being beautiful. Let's just say it wasn't the finest advertisement of a sport that is romatically seen as "the beautiful game".
Most of us like sport played stylishly and imaginatively, we are instinctively drawn to players and team who marry the athletic and the aesthetic. We enjoy Roger Federer, John McEnroe, Michael Jordan, Brazil, Nadia Comaneci, VVS Laxman, Barcelona because they move us, they touch places within us that are usually reserved for Keats and Michelangelo and Mozart.
Barcelona in full flourish are flowing and expressive. Surely, football should be played like this. But here's the thing: there cannot be only one way to play sport.
Sport needs its artists but football is not a painting exhibition. "It's a man's game", said Hiddink, and while there is nothing manly about being brutal, Chelsea were hardly that.
Football has to have a place for toughness, for part of its appeal, which separates it from tennis and golf, for instance, is that it is a game of muscular ideas. Even while players are inventing, their bodies are colliding, which makes it a formidable test.
Chelsea did what they had to, they came to the Nou Camp to earn a draw, not to make friends. The very theatrical, and legendary, tennis player Bill Tilden once wrote: "The player owes the gallery as much as an actor owes the audience." It is true, we look to be entertained, but professional sport is also about results.
Hiddink frustrated Barcelona, and this is what thinking managers and players sometimes do. If they cannot outplay, they annoy. It's like tennis players feeding opponents balls with no pace and grinding out rallies. It can work so well that Brad Gilbert, a tennis overachiever, once wrote a book on it called Winning Ugly.
I want Barcelona to win the second leg because I enjoy their football. And I definitely don't want a repeat of the dull first semi. But if Barcelona fail, the fault is theirs, not Chelsea's. They need to show they are brilliant and inventive enough to be equal to any challenge. It is time to create not crib.