Stutter Authority

Ibra shakes it off

Barcelona flew to Milan to play AC at the San Siro yesterday.

Both teams were guaranteed a place in the next league of Champions play, but though the results were irrelevant to the competition's outcome they charged head first at each other with the gnarly focus of intimate enemies.

The refs were very bad, nearly never carding the fouls and only then misguidedly. Hand balls? Not a problem. What game do they play in Italy?

Messi took a penalty to bring the team ahead 2-1 in the first half. As he approached the ball, he stuttered his stride, sent the keeper one way then dished the ball into the other corner. It reminded me of a penalty taken by Balotelli in Man City's win over Newcastle last week (although Balotelli managed to shoot without stopping step, and then glare at the keeper like a dickhead).

Leo gets a yellow card, and the shot is done over. This time he sends it clean past the keeper on the same side he just sent him.

Ibra played a very good game in his first outing against the team of his former employment. He picked up a goal in the first half and generally managed to get in good crosses and position himself in the final 1/3rd. Prince Boateng, however was an outstanding talent against Barcelona. The second half goal he marked to equalize was stunning, but it would be drowned out by a key strike from Xavi off of yet another brilliant piece of teamwork that would be the winning goal for Barça.

The Catalans played in their third kit--mint green: same as last year's away jersey.

Whatever the uniform, the talent is the fabric of the outfit.

Ball Boy

This morning FIFA announced the 23 candidates for the Balon d'Or award for the world's best individual player. Barcelona's squad featured 8 of the 23 names, including Abidal, Dani Alves, Cesc, Piqué, Villa, Xavi, Iniesta and the back to back winner of the last two years, Lionel Messi.


Last year's Golden Boys

The idea of individual achievement seems to be something of a double-edged sword for the beautiful game. As players excel, they become of vital importance to making their team perform more cohesively. Once they get a sense of their worth they are afforded certain indulgences and rapidly that excellence starts yielding diminishing returns (take a look at Carlos Tevez' ongoing soap-opera at Manchester City).

For Barcelona it seems that no matter how superb the results that their players net, if they do not subscribe to a selfless style of performance (both on and off the pitch), they will not last in Guardiola's squad.

Samuel Eto'o was Spain's highest scorer in 2008-2009, and it seems he was not sufficiently Barça in Pep's eyes, so he was despatched to Italy. The next year, Ibrahimovic scored a great goal tally for the Blaugrana (wearing the same no. 9 that Eto'o had just vacated), but he did not jive with the team's humble and light-footed philosophy and he was gone before the 2010 season started.

Messi has been the highest scorer for the squad since Eto'o left, but he has also come up with brilliant assists and shown how instrumental he is in raising the level of play of those around him. Of all the goals he scored last season, the most remarkable play he made may have been a pass to Villa for the fourth goal in the 5-0 routing of Real Madrid.


Mo and Pep react to teamwork from opposite sides of the scoreline

Above all other achievers and champions, this blog is really about Pep Guardiola. Pep has been at the helm of the ship after spending a lifetime building the character necessary to define and apply it's ethos. Now, for the third year running, Pep is nominated for FIFA's Coach of the year award and is a clear favorite to win the prize.

Originally a ballboy, Pep has come through the ranks from the bottom and learned how to embody the elusive esthetic of a squad that is "more than a club." Some successes are deliberate and willed; some are mystical.

The best are both.


Pep's early celebration at the Nou Camp

Why Italians Celebrate...

It seems like any time I see some clip from Serie A, if there is a goal the entire team explodes in the kind of celebration we are used to seeing in footage of VJ-day, or something. Dudes are pulling off their jerseys to show the messages emblazoned on their undershirts--referees are pulling out yellow-cards. The water boy runs off the bench in a back-flip.


Osvaldo gets excited for Roma, but Lazio still wins in the roman derby

I wonder why they make such a big stink from it? Even a penalty goal--which in the old days was always considered poor-form to celebrate--will get the same orgiastic response.

Well, this weekend of the 10 games played in the Italian league, a full half of them ended in 0-0 draws. By contrast in Spain only 2/10 ended goal-less. In England, Germany and the Netherlands, none ended scoreless. As for France, well, nobody watched the games so who knows how they ended?

The kind of defensive stranglehold that has become emblematic of the Italian style of play can be tough to watch. It's like a bad juju contest. For ninety+ minutes, let's get nasty. In the Italian philosophy of the game that came to dominance in the 50's and 60's, the ideal result for a game was a 1-0 win off a single goal scored as late as possible.

No, wonder they party like it's 1999 when it goes to the back of the net.

Yesterday Barça played Racing Santander and soundly outplayed them, winning 3-0.

Leo Messi was genius on the pitch, inspiring loud 'bravo"'s with each magnetic possession. The rest of the crew is still tenuously in and out with this dang'd epidemic of muscle tears.

God bless the child that's got his own...


Messi; Four sweet touches before the ball meets the ground


*** (added on October, 18)

Miroslav Klose, the German star that has signed with Roman team Lazio, has disassociated himself publicly with banners that were drawn in Nazi-esque old-German fonts.

The banners read "Klose mit uns," a play on the military mantra used in nazi Germany, "Gott mit uns [God with us]."

Lazio has perhaps the most outspokenly pro-fascist fanbase in Italy, and their ethical alignment with the WWII idea of Germany is not so surprising. Neither is Klose's willingness to run away from the pairing.

This is the thanks he gets for scoring in Lazio's 2-1 win over Roma?

How long will Germany be seen through the prism of the second world war, which ended 66 years ago?

Well, it was a doozy...

But the war is still something that Germans get their faces pushed into, like a dog into his filth by a cruel master. The wrong-doings we've done; and the goals that we meet, they get weighed and tainted through the resonance of our achievement.

As a stain and glory you wont let go.

The Turmoil of First

The club has been slogging through a wilderness of corporate compromise and astronomical injury.

This is one of the keys to the paradox of the world's greatest club. In order to remain resolutely competitive at the highest level of professional sports, the cash coffers have to be loaded. To do this requires, among other measures, the corporate sponsorship of their jersey for the first time ever in the team's history.

Not only that, but the label Qatar Foundation seems to muddy the message of a squad that has represented the nation of Catalunya so vocally. It is part of the standard sign-off for the team in public: Visca Barça, Visca Catalunya!

They accepted the deal as a counter-measure against their €550 million debt last year. They also accepted as it complied with seven conditions for consideration (chief of which being that it be the most lucrative such deal on Earth).

In fact, the €150 million brought from the deal has been spent on, among other things, new talent for the team. Alexis Sanchez, Cesc Fabregas, and Ibrahim Afelay have all been significant signings since January. The money spent on them alone is over €60 million.

And currently all three players are out injured.

Cesc is gone for three weeks after a practice scrape, Alexis is looking at another month out for a leg mishap and Ibi Affelay, the golden boy from PSV Eindhoven--the new great Dutch hope--is gone for another six months following his surgery today to fix a ligament.


Ibrahim Affelay, get well soon

The injury jinx hasn't just gone to the new boys; Pique-out. Iniesta-out. Abidal-out as of Saturday in their 1-0 win over Gijon.

The game against Gijon, in their black away kits (just as black as R. Madrid's away jerseys), was a drag for the lack of finish that anyone showed. A 1-0 win for Barça feels like a draw or worse. They keep it and move it so much that watchers expect them to take it to the hole all the time.

Nonetheless, the win put Barcelona in first place in the league for the first time this season. The top six places are separated by two points. It's still a tight race.

Carles Puyol returned to the pitch recently after being out with leg problems since around the same time as the new Qatar Foundation deal was inked. The captain has come back just as Xavi was looking really comfortable wearing the band. Puyol is still not quite match-fit though, and with the current streak of injuries depleting their notoriously make-shift defense, each game is getting to be nervous to watch.

On Saturday, the key moment of the game for me was at the end of the first half when Mascherano took a tough leg to the head from Dani Alves. As the players headed to the locker rooms for their 15 minutes, Masche was laying on the field bewildered. He is already bearing the mean brunt of central defensive duties with so many lynchpins gone. If he was taken out of the frame as well there'd be almost no one left in the back.

Have the ghosts of Catalunya been haunting the team and taking the players off the field?

Have the psychic injuries inflicted by the sponsorship just dug the hole deeper?

Are we still the good guys?


Carles Puyol; Back in Black

Willy Wonka

Ferran Adriá

Barça have announced that they have retained the services of Ferran Adriá to design the menu at la Masia, their youth academy, in an effort to "foster healthy eating and exercise."

This move, which brings together the team with the world's most famous genius of cuisine, is a daring and lovely flourish on the body of their Catalan love's labour. The brilliant Adriá has been the most followed and beguiling chef in the world from the out of the way mecca he created at his restaurant in Catalunya, El Bulli.

Now Adriá has closed his mecca and moved on to different projects; one of them being the feeding of the young athletes at the school of the world champions. On the current first team the youth academy alumni are Messi, Cesc, Xavi, Iniesta, Thiago, Piqué, Puyol, Pedro, Busquets, Valdés, and the mister, Pep.

As that line-up could probably count it's estimated worth at or near a billion dollars, the interest the club has in giving their little brothers the best food in the world is clear.

As I started gravitating toward football a while ago, one of the reasons that I became particularly interested in FC Barcelona was the fact that they represent a place that also had the world's "best" restaurant. In addition, the architectural tradition of Gaudi's mind-bending and outside status within the bounds of their own country seemed to mark the team as something larger than what they ostensibly were.

Football teams are a dime a dozen. Cheaper, even.

But when something you are looking at becomes transformative to more, somehow.

When the game is no longer simply something that is played, but elevated to a medium for the most wild of possibilities to be made real.

That is the key to enlightenment through any endeavor.

A cherry on a plate or ball on a field.


Great minds...

No Shirt, No Service

either way...

On the 24th of September, the Barça club members will have a vote to potentially abort the vastly lucrative €150 million deal their president recently signed with the Qatar Foundation. The agreement, which saw the team put a corporate sponsor on the front of their kit for the first time in the 111 year history of the club, has been widely reviled by the more 'romantic' supporters of the team.

Johann Cruyff himself came out as calling it "vulgar," and the decision to put the chest real estate for sale has shaken the confidence of many--myself included--who took the crest of being 'more than a club' as symbolic also of a moral high-ground that the little giants held in the world of sport beyond their athletic achievement.

Barça had paid UNICEF nearly €1.5 million a year for the privilege of bearing the organization's mark on their chest. It was a clear reminder of the persecution that the team had faced during the Franco-era and their commitment to human rights in it's wake. UNICEF is still on the kit, but as a tramp-stamp along the bottom of the back.

For their parts, Pep Guardiola and club pres. Sandro Roselli have been vocal in their support of the Qatari sponsorship, but with the ballooning club debt and increasingly astronomical operating costs of the world's greatest team clearly at the forefront of club logistics, it seems like they are simply trying to put the best face on an unsavory situation.


Alexis seems to have a problem with the shirt

A few weeks back, during the 5-0 routing of Villa Real, new signee (and €26 million brick in the wall) Alexis Sanchez scored in his first Liga appearance for the squad. Hot with excitement from his victory, the Chilean forward pulled off his jersey during his celebration like a regular mook.

The bench looked furious; the players looked annoyed. The team huddled around him, partially to cover him from the ref's view in a vain attempt at avoiding a yellow card, and partially to talk some sense into him. You could see Iniesta delivering some words.

Even with the Qatar Foundation corporate mark on the jersey, it still means something.

Wear it with pride.

Avocados

"...So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados..."
-Aristotle by Billy Collins

In Mexico, the price of avocado is climbing ever-higher and putting the squeeze on people who often eat only a select amount of vegetables to begin with. The Mexican parliament has officially re-designated many vegetables as 'meat' in order to get people to eat more of them. People are pissed.

Here's something I did not know before today:
Aguacate, Spanish for Avocado, is derived from a Nahuatl word for nut. Like testicle-nut. Not like a brazil-nut. Like, a ball. Thank you BBC.

In Spain the focus of the shitstorm of la Liga politics has returned to the owner's hands after resolving the player's strike--a strike which delayed the season a week. Currently on the bitching block are tv broadcast rights and revenues.

Madrid and Barça split almost half of all revenues (though they get 3X the viewership of all other teams) and the other teams say that the additional money helps them reinforce their choke-hold at the top of the table. This issue isn't a threat to play, though.

On the field,the season is sputtering into gear and focus as the Champions league tournament is set to start. Barça will play AC Milan in their group's first round. They last played them in the Gamper cup right before last season. It was not a game as much as an embrace between Ronalidnho and Barça two seasons after his leaving for Italy, and a kick in the backside to Ibrá, sending him back to Milan after a mal-tempered, though mostly successful season. His last game at the Nou Camp.

Tomorrow there will be no Ronaldinho, having gone back to Brasil to teach Neymar how to play, and even Ibra has pulled out citing a practice injury. It seems a little auspicious since Ibra was traded away from Barça after costing a net loss to the team of around €40 million. It's poor form then to go and play against them in their home.

The Italian league, Serie A, just started this past weekend after being--you guessed it--on strike. Serie A and by extension AC Milan should be out of form for a while. Barça would have been presumably in good shape to win, but they drew 2-2 at Real Sociedad on Saturday.

Up in the Basque country games usually are pretty spirited. The history of Spanish football has always had a very strong corner in the northeast. Though Athletic Bilbao is more decorated, Sociedad have shown that they can bring heat to Barcelona and after capitalizing on two weak defensive plays to equalize in the second half, they managed to hold the stunned champions of europe to the draw.

Barça, two games into la Liga, are in fourth place behind Madird, Valencia, and Real Betis. I'm happy for Betis. they were elevated from the second division recently. Enjoy third place while it lasts.

Another cost of the game was Alexis Sanchez tearing a thigh muscle and now being out for about two months. Inversely, Carles Puyol, our team captain, is looking set to play after being almost entirely out of commission since January.

So many players, so many people are pressed into the middle of a struggle between opportunity and time. People are aware of their decay, and fear the deadlock of inactivity while their sell by date comes running to them.

Squeezed under a mountain of avocados,
that nobody can afford.


Ronaldinho vs Neymar, summer 2011