Is This The Best Barça Ever?

It is early days still to begin to judge Pep Guardiola's Barça; however, the statistics speak for themselves: after 11 league games Barça have made their best start ever to a league campaign - nine wins and a draw = 28 points which is one more than Bobby Robson's team won in the first eleven games of 1996/97 (eight wins and three draws).

The current team have now won nine league games on the trot. The team of 2005/06 hold the record for concecutive league victories having won 14 straight games between October 2005 and January 2006. Many of you may remember some of the fantastic football played at that time including the 0-3 win at the Bernabeu with Ronaldinho at his unbelievable best. That team went on to lift La Liga and the Champions League trophy so until Pep's boys do the same perhaps there can be no comparison. But just for the hell of it I will compare the figures. In the 14 wins of 2005/06 Barça scored 38 goals (an average of 2.714 goals a game) and only conceded seven. In the current run of nine games Barça have scored 35 (an average of 3.889 goals a game!) while conceding six.

There is still quite a road to climb to equal the fourteen wins, the next five league games are Getafe (home), Sevilla (away), Valencia (home), Real Madrid (home), and Villarreal (away); if we come through that lot victorious we will only have to beat Mallorca at home at the start of January to break the record.

As we all know records count for nothing at the end of the day, and the only really important thing is to win some silverware at the end of the season, Bobby Robson's team, for example, ended up in second place to Madrid at the end of the 1996/97 season. Also to really go down in history you expect a team to consistly win things over a period of three or four seasons as Johan Cruyff's famous Dream Team did between 1989 and 1994. Cruyff's team played some incredible football in that time but they also had their off-days and in the end won three of their league titles (1992, 1993, 1994) thanks to the slip-ups of their rivals on the last day of the season.

We cannot see into the future but the signs and sensations so far this season are all positive, we are bound to have some bad games: no team can win always. However, for now we should enjoy the ride, it is not often that you can see football played at such a high standard as we have seen in the last few weeks. We must hope we can continue at this level for when we face the likes of Real Madrid, Villarreal, Sevilla and Valencia, I look forward to these games with relish at the prospect of tearing these teams apart. For now they are just my dreams, but I really can't wait to see those dreams coming true.