A while back I thought I'd stumbled on something interesting. Watching Spanish football on television I noticed the chanting of "Olé" in appreciation of a lengthy passing move was subtly different to the same process in England. Here "Olé" comes when a player actually receives the ball. In Spain the "Olé" seemed to come a microsecond earlier, as the pass was being made, a celebration apparently of the pass itself and not so much of the baffling miracle of it actually reaching its target.

Instantly all sorts of wider themes began to thicken and swirl: historic differences, the existential preoccupation with action over outcome, an entire blood-red social history opening up out of this single conceit. Perhaps this was The Big One: a best selling book, a follow-up (The Olé Paradigm: Reloaded) a documentary film, and after that the carousel of self‑propelling celebrity from university fellowships to appearances on Question Time in the loudmouth-maverick role ("I'm joined by the chancellor of the exchequer, an oddly compelling far‑right columnist, and billionaire author of the Olé Code and one-time Guardian football nobody …" my name already eclipsed by the overheated cheers and whistles). Yes. This was all definitely going to happen.

I sat on it for a while, letting it thicken and foment in secret. Then in an unguarded moment I finally outlined the basic tenets of the Olé Dynamic to a friend who happened to work in television, sat back and waited for the … Oh … Oh I see …

In fact, it turns out, the reason the Spanish Olés appear to emerge on the pass rather than after the pass is something to do with TV feeds and sound loops. It's not the cultural whatnot. It's a business of satellite broadcast disjunct. In reality it's pretty much the same. They Olé. We Olé. Whatever.

Moving on from this collapsed world of grand, strolling monocled literary fame there has been some consolation since in the relative disappearance of Olés at football.

For whatever reason, the Olés have been soft-pedalled in recent times, although I did think of them again this week while watching Juventus lose at home to Bayern Munich in the Champions League, a match that might even turn out to be a last real headline European appearance for one of the great modern passing footballers, the creaking, baroque, gorgeously decaying Andrea Pirlo.

Still the same floating, mooching figure, the kind of footballer who seems somehow to be playing in cowboy boots and a safari suit, it was only last summer Pirlo managed to fool England and Germany into thinking he was simply a very slow old man, even while toddling about removing their wallets and watch-chains and bowing them out through the exit door.

With this in mind it was jarring to find first-hand evidence of a genuine fading away, something unseemly in seeing Pirlo harried and chased, like witnessing the Queen Mother being jostled during an appearance at an agricultural fair. Particularly because for 20 minutes in the first half, drawing himself up to his full knock-kneed height, he was briefly and brilliantly Pirlo again, cranking his ancient Ford into life, leather goggles in place, and juddering off around the familiar old dust roads, silk scarf flying.

There were the little dancing steps, those beautiful lofted medium-range passes and above all a lingering sense of familiar persuasive rhythms being laid down. It is fair to say that if Thomas Müller is a raumdeuter, or "space interpreter", then Pirlo is a space conductor, flourishing his baton with a sense of deftly fingered command, swirling on his plinth, filleting out the spaces between the people.

Not that there was anything to show for it. On Uefa's analysis of the match Pirlo's No21 blob basically doesn't move from its central lurk-hole. Even his pass completion statistics were unusually low, tribute to the simple fact of playing in a hugely outclassed team. In spite of which there were still some luminous Pirlo moments, including one lovingly ushered back-spun miracle of a pass out of trouble near his own corner flag, and the usual temptation simply to marvel at what an unusual footballer he is: plus of course a distinctly, almost definitively un-English one.

In this country we've never really trusted the space conductor, insisting always that he is at least encumbered with a proper job, making the passing midfielder fill time by clashing the cymbals, parping the bassoon, clanking together the tambourines taped to his knees, just as in his successful late period at Manchester United the Space conductor manque Michael Carrick has become a top-class defensive interceptor, a brilliant sub-editor of a football match where he might once have hoped to become the leader-writer.

In this respect Glenn Hoddle also springs to mind, a constant source of hand-wringing fury over his lack of bark and snarl and snap, and reduced to trudging around English football of the 1980s like some prog rock virtuoso mistakenly corralled into a punk-metal band, still performing his frilly-shirted harpsichord solos, soaked in snot and spit, pint glasses flying past his head as he turns, drowned out by the surrounding thrash, to his triple-necked electric lute.

Although watching Pirlo again this week, the thought occurred that while it is tempting to paint Pirlo as part of a wider, more sophisticated flaneurial world beyond the ken of our own panic-ridden midfield fight-men, in fact he is an oddity in the wider world, too. The space conductor has long been a dying breed, replaced by the upgraded and refined modern-day pass-specialist: the space-probe, the space-shuttle, the lateral wiles of the space destroyer.

Pirlo really is the last unicorn. There are no ranks of hunched and strolling spring chickens ready to slope centre-stage and set about dinking the world into submission. With good reason, too.

It wasn't that Pirlo passed poorly against Bayern but more that, like the tiger, his natural habitat has frittered away, his pastures shrunk by the newly built-up architecture of the pitch. Little wonder you don't hear the Olés so much now when the extended pass-about is often simply marking time, recalibrating the tempo, the best passing midfielders looking to create space by concerted manipulation rather than maverick invention, a craft that finds its glorious acme in the unrelenting hypnosis-football of Barcelona.

Similarly in Turin the central presence once that interlude had run its course was Bastian Schweinsteiger, also an expert passer but beyond this an expertly bothersome presence. The only Pirlo out there was Pirlo himself, present almost in tribute form: Vegas Pirlo, still taking the cheers for his 10-minute sets, toting about his fading‑star wattage on a stage too cramped and oppressively well-lit to provide those hidden pockets in which he flowers.

And really we shouldn't blame the conductor for any of this. In the end, it's just the spaces that got small.