Monthly Archives: April 2012
Ibra, Messi, and the art of bullfighting
As I savoured the memory of last night’s Barca Champions League victory over AC Milan this morning’s surf landed me by pure chance on the Italian club’s supporters’ website Forza Rosseneri. It was an old page, now slightly dated but which nonetheless gave one an insight into the shortcomings of a club that once claimed, not without justification, to be the best in Europe. Alongside flashing advertisements showing semi-naked models promising that more would be revealed, the club’s CEO Adriano Galliani paid tribute to club owner Silvio Berlusconi- “These 26 …
Guardiola, Bielsa, and Maradona
Two images stand out from from last night’s game between FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao whose final score failed to undermine Real Madrid’s increasingly unassailable leadership at the top of La Liga. The first has the two ‘misters’ Pep Guardiola and Marcelo Bielsa, like the philosophers of football that they are , directing their pupils as if the nature of existence itself was being defined there and then . It is a study in contrasts- Guardiola intense and ephemeral as an El Greco saint, Bielsa ‘El Loco’ , a cross …
