I love this quote from the Barca website: “Barca took time to find their feet early on.” Hello — did they even find their ass? Make up your own withering Johan Cruyff quote about this debacle — I would just say that, for the first time in the Guardiola era, an opponent made Barcelona look old. Shamed in midfield. Pickpocketed so often as to prompt calls to Interpol. Dominated physically and by the frightening pace of Stuttgart’s rushes. Yes, in the second half, Stuttgart ran out of gas, and Barca’s numbing possession ball chloroformed their opponent. But “fortunate” cannot be stretched enough to denote the lucky position of Barca — thoroughly outplayed, but with an away goal and three weeks to figure out how to beat this clearly more motivated and energized opponent. And, how to get Gerard Pique in the box more, obviously.
Other complaints to the increasingly strong head winds:
Busquets: A walking disaster, except for the entry pass for the goal. Invented new ways to turn it over every time he had possession.
Yaya Toure: An immobile disaster; a statue. I’d say send him back to Barca’s training staff for more rehab, but there’s their results this year to contend with…
Guardiola: Stop starting Iniesta at wing. Please. Unless you hate him and want to make him disappear and reduce Xavi’s effectiveness by 40%. If the idea is to start anybody instead of Pedro over Henry…that can’t be your idea, is it? Whatever the idea, it hasn’t worked all year, and it threw up on itself tonight.
She alters the lyrics early, slightly — a small thing, but it unlocks the door. Instead of “I start for the corner, and I might end up in Spain,” it’s “I go to the corner/And I end up in Spain,” and at once you believe it, you see it happening — because it’s screwy Fiona Apple; and because she sounds like Fiona Apple, fragile, strung out, but resigned and defiant, too, sinking into herself beautifully; and because this perfect Fiona Apple song is our song as well, we misfits and key-in-door-leavers. She redeems us. We no longer wish to be redeemed.
I could just rerun my last post — but hell, he gets paid to say the same thing, so maybe you’ll believe it this time. From today’s Guardian:
Trouble is, while it would be unfair to attack Barcelona – a team so consistently excellent, so adept at making the extraordinary routine, that they hardly warrant writing about until they eventually lose – that’s not the whole story. Because if everyone knew this day would come and some even knew when, the way it came is troubling. Who, what and where is one thing, how and why another. Because last night Barcelona did not just lose; last night Barcelona played badly.
Because Atlético were startlingly comfortable. Because when Barcelona had to react in the second half, they couldn’t – creating just two chances. “We weren’t right with the ball,” Guardiola admitted. “Normally we make a lot of chances; tonight we didn’t.” Because, unusually, Xavi lost possession 15 times. Because seven muscle injuries in nine days is worrying and the threat of more lingers, Iniesta admitting: “I’m not doctor but it can’t be chance.” Because Guardiola’s concern over tiredness was palpable. Because much as Ibrahimovic, in Juanma Lillo’s words, “performs footballing mouth-to-mouth, resuscitating dying moves”, his inclination to hold, wait and turn back nullifies the through ball. Because Barcelona have a small squad and, conceived and constructed upside down, defending from the front and playing from the back, they really miss key players – without Piqué, Abidal and, particularly Alves, they don’t construct or surprise as well. And because, as one journalist, smelling blood, was quick to inform Guardiola, Madrid’s destiny is now in their own hands.
Second halves are rarely at the midpoint of anything. You know they are upon you not by a calendar, but by a set of unseen cracks in your very fiber and standing that seem to widen all at once — for a man, for instance, it’s the pretty girl who now looks right through you, the sudden back spasm, the name of that childhood sports hero suddenly no longer on the tip of your tongue. You can survive a second half for a while, even thrive, but there is nothing to prepare you for that first gust of chilly wind, the blow to your confidence delivered by the quick loss of things you took for granted.
For Barça 2009-10, we can now declare the real first half of the season over — the unbeaten one, the largely injury-free one, the one in which we were serene about the smallish gap between ourselves and our perpetually fretful archrival. (You would thought that 5 points was 50, so unconcerned did everyone — except Madrid — seem about the rest of the season.) Players are now going down like Columbus has brought smallpox upon them: Now Xavi is out for 15 days and Keita a month — throw those logs on the pyre along with the bodies of Yaya Toure, Dani Alves, Abidal and Chygrynskyi. The lead is down to 2 points after yesterday’s universally foreseen loss to Atletico — a 6-6-9 team that shockingly dominated Barca in midfield and made Carles Puyol look about 75 years old on their counterattacks. Phil Ball says neither Barca nor Real would be “suicidal” if they lost La Liga, so long as they won the Champions League…but if you thought Messi cried after failing to defend the Copa del Rey, they’re going to have to build an ark to navigate the sea of tears if Real’s smash-and-grab spree is vindicated in the end over the patient tutelage of La Masia. Death Star is in our rear-view mirror again, and gaining fast.
So one defeat can turn a major chord minor; yes, it can. Which is not to say that Barça shouldn’t have won the match — they should have, handily. The one difference between last year and this year hides in plain sight: goal scoring. 68 after 22 matches last year; 53 after 22 this year. Goals came in swarms last year, in Everlasting Gobstoppers. The chances are there again this year, not quite as many…but the strikers are now missing; Pedro blew about four yesterday, and Ibra fumbled his customary two or three. As the old saying goes, strikers are paid to miss; but not this much, and not over the course of a season. We’ll have to wait for a new second half for that to change.
(Image credit: piterart/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
The zero or two or four things we think we know for sure about Cesc Fábregas, Arsenal’s captain and sublime midfielder:
He hates London’s weather and yearns to return and play someday for Barca, the club of his youth and the capital of his native Catalonia;
He is fine with London’s weather and has no intention of leaving Arsenal;
His “return” to Barca is just part of the Machiavellian posturing of those who hope to succeed Joan Laporta as Barca’s president;
Arsenal has already agreed to a £60m transfer fee from Barcelona, a transaction to be consummated this summer.
It is now clearly illegal for the professional soccer press to write anything about Fábregas that does not reference at least two sides of this magic square. Goal.com would evaporate if it didn’t have the Cesc/Barca soap opera to poke daily. He has ceased to be a player and become solely a transfer window rumor, lighter than those horrible, nodding windsock puppets that went out of style at some Winter Olympics 10 or 12 years ago but are still in use at the Camp Nou.
So, bravo to the Guardian’s Paul Hayward for, if not ignoring the whole where-will-Cesc-go question, turning it ass over tea kettle — blaming the mess not on Barca’s meddling or Fábregas’ homesickness, but on the cult of devotion Wenger has created around his project and himself at Arsenal…and Fábregas terrible burden as chief altar boy, at the potential expense of his own career. Money quote:
Fábregas is 22 and much too young to be Wenger’s lecturer on the field. He has his own potential immortality to attend to. Arsenal’s campaign, meanwhile, is tantalisingly poised between a possible late-season flourish in a run of 12 winnable Premier League games and the discrediting of Wenger’s fidelity to this group of players. Too few warriors is a persistent diagnosis. The team’s most gifted artiste will know by May whether to pack up his Hampstead home or renew his vows to Wenger’s dream…Plainly the time has come for him to decide whether he is part of an unfolding miracle or a manager’s hallucination.
The religious metaphor is lovely, grisly and apt. The Arsenal Rapture has been once again delayed; and Wenger showing the strain of false prophecy (e.g., his inability to compliment any opponent this season, his eccentric backing of kick-ins to replace throw-ins). Any question about an Arsenal player now isn’t just a question about the player, and it’s not even about whether Wenger was wrong about the player — it’s always a question about whether Wenger is wrong, period, whether he can be trusted, whether he’s still a genius or was ever one, and whether we should gather yet again inside his church to await the Second Coming because this time, by God, he’s got the date right. The smell of Grape Kool-Aid is getting stronger at Emirates Stadium.
Except that this time, it really is about Wenger, and Fábregas’ faith in him. Maybe. If so, Barca will win him. He can captain Barca Lite in the fog and damp, or he can enjoy the real thing. Faith is nourishing, for a while. Barceloneta’s paella fills you up and keeps you coming back.
(Image credit: wonker/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
Nine months after the week Barca won at Real Madrid and Chelsea to help secure the most dramatic and successful season in European club soccer history…birth rates across Catalonia are up 50 percent, reports The New York Times Goal blog.
Watch Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge above in five different languages, and then tell me you don’t feel just a little warmer.
In Hell, Brett Favre is doomed for all eternity to short that throw.
And I am consigned, century upon century upon century, to watch him do it. And then condemned — forever — to read and write about it.
We all get what we deserve, apparently.
and
Anyway, by comparison [to Meyer's hypocrisy], Brett Favre is as reliable as a German bicycle and his blindered devotion to his own ambition is appalling but refreshingly honest.
Thus does our NFL industrial complex have its narratives inscribed for the Super Bowl fortnight. The Saints will play for the 9th Ward and Bourbon Street and redemption, for le bon temps and love and loss, and the Colts and Peyton Manning will play for vindication or validation or in spiritual service of the Midwestern recession or rectitude or something.
Come the great moment two weeks from now, some of you will be happy and some of you will be sad.
This, thanks in some unknowable measure to Brett Favre, and to his myopic selfishness and his awful ambitions, his single-mindedness and his stubborn arrogance, his passion and his fortitude. Think of him then, we owe him that, in the moment of your joy or sorrow, his armor clanking and on the run, as old and foolish and beautiful as Quixote.
I didn’t say it made any sense. But it is nice for somebody else to call bullshit on the Whole Thing — not just Favre, but Favre as the metaphor and simulacrum for the perpetual motion machine of hysteria and amnesia and false drama that is sports today. Even if the next click just takes you right back to Rick Reilly.
(Image: Google search volume for the term “Brett Favre” by state, 2008-09. Graphic credit: DavidErickson/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
My colleague and Packer-fan-in-arms Michael Cade is through with Brett Favre, disgusted, after a long love affair. It’s a nice piece. If you haven’t been a Packer fan your entire life, it’s hard to imagine how some of us feel about what’s happened this year. Hatred, bitterness, disbelief, shame, despair — all of these; more. [...]
“What draws a powerful man to pay for a women outside of marriage? It’s not the sex. In fact, sex is the beard, if you know what I mean. By paying money for the excuse of sex, they don’t have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I am growing older. I am not [...]
“In retrospect, [Managing Director of FT.com Rob] Grimshaw said it was a ‘huge mistake’ for publishers to give away their product. So why did they?
“Grimshaw said newspaper publishers realized they did not understand the Internet, so they hired Internet experts and ‘let them do whatever they wanted and whatever they said was the right thing,’ [...]
If you’re not a baseball fan, or a former baseball fan, such as myself, you will be lost in this close analysis of the steroid era by Joe Posnanski, a writer for Sports Illustrated and one of the best sports bloggers around.
But not lost enough to relearn an essential truth: Nothing is ever one thing. [...]
…as envisioned by Forrester Research’s James McQuivey on PaidContent.org:
Make free content sell the value of paid content. But even in these free pages, find a way to let free readers know there’s more to be had, not just elsewhere, but even on those free pages. For example, at WSJ.com, comments can be organized to show [...]
“We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny… An inescapable network of mutuality… I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.”
(Hat tip: Andrew Tobias)
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
Fascinating FT piece on the 35,000 stray dogs of Moscow, which have been in the city for centuries and are reverting to wild status — including about 20 who ride Moscow’s Metro trains in systematic ways as a means of broadening their territories.
Steve Rubel posted late last month about his dissatisfaction with RSS (”RSS today feels slow and it’s clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels ‘very 2005′”) and his yearning for a hybrid between RSS and Twitter. Twitter lists have killed RSS for him, but he still wants some filtering of the [...]
ESPN’s Matthias Krug reports that Guardiola played golf with old friend and teammate Ronald de Boer in Doha after the Club World Cup and told de Boer he’s not burnt out at all, loves the team, and thinks there’s more success ahead.
You know what that means. So let’s move on Mark Hughes, shall we, before [...]
Votes for Catalan independence. The Club World Cup. The Champions League. A Spanish conspiracy to keep Barca exhausted by forcing their flight to Abu Dhabi to stop in Turkey, meaning they’ll be on the plane for 11 straight hours. Amidst all that melodrama, who has time for a little derby (which, Joan LaPorta said earlier [...]
As a Barca fan, of course I adore this animated pass-shot-goal graphic feature from ESPN Soccernet of Xavi's equalizing goal last night, a mesmerizing hymn to the innate superiority of the Barca way (and also something of an analog to the bullfight) — the chronic, monk-patient triangles; the fluttery, midfield prestidigitation, with increasingly close-in passes [...]
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Has Leo Messi plateaued? Everyone is thinking and almost writing that, while also protesting that it's almost churlish to think and write that, as they pull up short and blame Maradona's mind games. Messi's second in La Liga in goals scored — despite Maradona, despite exhaustion…isn't that everything? He scored twice yesterday and brilliantly [...]
You never know which Dani Alves is going to show up — the good elf whose free kicks are sprinkled with fairy dust, or the bad elf whose crosses sail into orbit (or dent the Stamford Bridge Shed trying), who flops and whines and collects yellows like baseball cards. But in a match of boy [...]
So where the hell has that been for three months?
I think we have the answer: just get rid of Messi, Ibrahimovic, Toure, Marquez…and play a bunch of flatliners. That was easier than Malaga…
(And is there any conceivable reason left to watch a Serie A match? Seriously — torture your cat, recycle your dead batteries, [...]
What Pep Guardiola started with his lineups out of a hat, H1N1 and thigh injuries are finishing. It looks like Ibra, Messi, Marquez, Abidal and Toure could be out of the Inter match next week. We got another taste yesterday of what the patchwork lineup can do — all foreplay, no climax, except for that [...]
"He's running like he's got 1,000 crickets in his pants." — Ray Hudson on Lionel Messi.
(Only Ray knows how did the crickets got from singing Messi's praises from the trees to inside his pants…)
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
It’s de rigueur to say that Thierry Henry’s reputation — as a sleek, sweet, sophisticated sportsman who floated somewhere slightly above mere mortaldom — is in permanent tatters after his double handball against Ireland. (It’s in fact de rigueur to reach for French phrases to describe Henry’s crime.) Some now argue he never fully deserved [...]
