Barca the dream team

Guardiola was installed as Barca manager in 2008   When Pep Guardiola settles into his seat in the final moments before kick-off in the Champions League final at Wembley, the Barcelona manager may find it hard to stop his mind drifting back to a night at the same venue 19 years earlier when his club's European dreams came true at last.
Guardiola is rightly feted for his role as the guiding light for a group of players widely regarded as the among the best of their era.
But he first made his name two decades ago as a tenacious midfielder whose tough-tackling and astute reading of the game allowed him to become a key component of Barcelona's first golden generation.
Barca's then coach Johan Cruyff had assembled a team true to his purist principles and the likes of Michael Laudrup, Hristo Stoichkov and Ronald Koeman played with such style that they were christened 'the dream team'.
On 20 May 1992, their fantasy football reaped the ultimate reward on the same Wembley stage to which Guardiola returns to face Manchester United on Saturday.

The English national stadium remains hallowed ground for Barcelona after Koeman clinched their first European Cup by blasting a superb free-kick past Sampdoria goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca with just nine minutes remaining in extra-time.
It was a cathartic moment for Barcelona as they emerged from the long shadow cast by Real Madrid, who often taunted the Catalans for their failure to emulate their bitter rivals' success in Europe's elite competition.
No-one took more joy from the triumph than Guardiola. A Barca fan from his childhood in Santpedo, just an hour's drive from the Catalan capital, he had been nurtured through the youth team and served as a ball boy before Cruyff spotted his potential.

Guardiola may not have been the headline act in that side but he learned the lessons of Cruyff's commitment to stylish success.
By the time Guardiola returned to the Nou Camp as youth coach, Cruyff was retired but he remained a keen Barca fan and could see his former player had become a guardian of the Dutch 'total football' ethos he brought to the club in the 1990s.
He recommended to president Joan Laporta that Guardiola be installed as Barca manager in 2008 and the appointment proved an inspired move.

Guardiola infused the team with a fluid passing and pressing game that tormented opponents and in his first year they won La Liga, the Copa del Rey and beat Manchester United 2-0 in the Champions League final.
Two more league titles have followed and, aided by the development of Argentine forward Lionel Messi from gifted prodigy to the genius of his generation, Guardiola has created Barca's second dream team.
Humble as ever, he has no doubt where the credit for success should be directed.
"All the coaches I had in my career were important but Cruyff was the most important of all," Guardiola said.
"He was without equal on training and tactics and he helped me to understand the million details that decide why some matches are lost and some matches are won."

If Barca can emulate that 2009 final win against United this weekend, they will be ranked alongside legendary European champions like Real Madrid, Ajax, AC Milan, Liverpool and Bayern Munich.
With history in their hands, Guardiola wants his team to seize the moment.
"In 1992 we thought that we would never play a European Cup final again. I want my players to feel the same. We cannot waste this opportunity," he said.

Guardiola's old team-mate Koeman can compare both great Barca eras from a more neutral perspective and he is convinced Messi and co are ready to join the immortals.
"This Barcelona team is more complete than ours," Koeman said. "We played fantastic football for periods, but we could not maintain the high level every week, every month for a whole year.
"This Barcelona team can do that. They never drop their standards, which is amazing."