Arsenal vs Barcelona: Gerard Pique finds desire to return but has fitness worries

Pique has returned from poor spell to become arguably Europe's best defender once more

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Gerard Pique was left out of Barcelona’s win over Las Palmas on Saturday after the readings on his GPS training vest suggested he was dangerously close to physical overload. The needle was on the red. It seemed without a fuel stop he would be in that zone where players’ mental and physical tiredness make them susceptible to both mistakes and injuries.

Wind the clock back a couple of years and any suggestion of fatigue in Pique would have led to snide replies that he had spent too long at the poker table or that being one half of a celebrity couple with the singer Shakira was taking too much out of him.

There was a sense that having won everything in football Pique had moved on. The defender had set up a thriving video games business, he was becoming a fixture at poker tournaments, he had become the face of a leading Spanish fashion label. He was beginning to behave like an ex-footballer.

When Pique was involved in an altercation with Barcelona traffic policemen outside the city’s casino in October 2014 and was forced to apologise he seemed to have bottomed out. Sixteen months later it is impossible to think of a more in-form central defender in Europe. Barcelona won without him on Saturday but only just, and there are palpitations among fans whenever his absence means coach Luis Enrique must patch together a replacement back four built around Thomas Vermaelen, Javier Mascherano or Jérémy Mathieu.

Behind the front three he is perhaps the team’s most important player and certainly the one man Luis Enrique does not want to lose between now and the end of the season.

“I started my career very young and I was lucky enough to win a lot very soon,” Pique told El Mundo in an extensive interview at the weekend in which he said he slipped from those early heights but never lost his desire to get back.

“I cannot be somewhere just for the sake of it. I want to shine wherever I am. I want to be successful. If I’m not successful then it feels as though it’s just not worth it. In 2014 I said that I wanted to get back to where I had been before and that if I could not do that then I should do something else [away from football]. Now I feel at the height of my powers. I am enjoying my football more than ever before.”

He is enjoying life off the field too. Of partner Shakira he told El Mundo: “Shaki gives me perspective in my life. As a footballer in the beginning it feels strange to see that your partner is more famous than you. But we understand each other’s work. Your idol should be your partner and mine is.”

And of his son Milan he added: “He puts his socks above his knees and will only wear long sleeve shirts because his dad plays that way. The other day I caught him spitting and when I told him off he said: ‘It’s what Leo [Messi] does.’ What could I say?”