On Saturday, April 10, 2010, Manuel Pelligrini, coach of Real Madrid, followed the same tactics as he had all season, using the formation and team (for the most part) that had achieved 15 straight victories in front of their home crowd and had scored the most goals in the league. They had not dropped a single point, so why change?

In the post-game program on GolTV, the announcer explained how Josep Guardiola, FC Barcelona head coach, proved to be the tactical master. While Pellegrini stayed with what had worked, Guardiola presented a lineup that had observers raising their eyebrows, with players shuffled out of their customary spots: with Messi as the lone striker, Alves on the right wing in the midfield, Pedro on the left, Xavi in the middle without Iniesta, and Puyol as right-back. This formation both strengthened the defense and the attack at the same time, considering that many of Messi’s goals have come via Alves.

For such an important game, it is a given that Pellegrini and his team would have studied previous Barcelona games to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. In his post-game comments, Guardiola made it quite clear that he had both understood and respected the threat Real Madrid presented, as well as their star player, Cristiano Ronaldo.

We tried to isolate him from the play, to control him a lot, because Cristiano is very dangerous when they have the ball.  When we have the ball, that’s when he becomes very dangerous, because if we lose it, he finds it quickly and you can’t stop him. We talked a lot about the defense being very attentive to that.

Thus, when Barcelona took to the field, they were armed with a game-plan designed specifically for this match, one that provided for increased defense, yet remained true to their philosophy of ball possession and attacking football. They had prepared for the opposition’s 4-4-2 tactics with Ronaldo and Higuain up front as two dangerous strikers, and that is what they faced.

When Real Madrid took to the field, they found themselves face to face with a formation that matched none of the recordings of previous matches that they might have studied. One would assume that Pellegrini took notes during the first half to instruct his team on how to approach the game after the break. But Guardiola had that covered as well. In the second half, he switched Puyol from right to left defense, slotted Maxwell up to the midfield wing position, and slid Alves back to his customary right-back position.

The tactical genius of Guardiola, the Chess Master, is further revealed in an article published by Catalan news site Sport. According to the article, Pep approached the game with probably the same mental tactics as he had in other finals that Barcelona had faced. For this match, his words to his team, before they took to the field in the  Santiago Bernabéu to confront Pellegrini’s ‘Galacticos’ and a stadium filled with 80,000 blancos supporters, were these:

I only ask three things of you: attack, attack, attack. Without rest, always attack. Relentlessly.

Earlier, Guardiola had left his players with another pearl of wisdom to help ease the pressure: “Whatever happens, we will continue forward because neither winning nor losing here decides the league.”

The team, nevertheless, started out a bit timid, gathering the lines and wanting to ensure they could withstand the pressure of their rivals. But little by little, they began to open up spaces, and the blaugrana machine began to engage all of its pieces. The goal by Messi, through a brilliant assistance by Xavi, was the just reward in a game that Pep had drawn a thousand and one times in his head.

At half time, Guardiola etched another phrase into the memories of his men: “Don’t make even one back-pass. Keep attacking.”

As if he were the Spartan general Leonidas in the battle of Thermopylae, Pep sought the complicity of his team at the moment of facing a rival that could have inflicted serious damage. Without a doubt, Guardiola fared better than Leonidas, who ended with an heroic defeat, as he and his team achieved a triumph that opens the path more clearly towards the championship of the league.

Finally, the article revealed one last detail. It is well known that Gerard Piqué is one of the big morale boosters in the blaugrana locker room. And he was the one who instigated the betting pool to see who could guess their rival for the Champions League quarter-finals (Alves and Messi won on that occasion). However, before El Clásico on Saturday, Guardiola prohibited any such initiative, to avoid anything that might add further pressure on the already heated match.

And thus, Josep Guardiola demonstrated once again that he is the blaugrana Chess Master.