Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 24

My faith in La Roja,my Italian priest, and Captain Terry

The Italian priest at the end of mass this morning got me to identify myself as the only Spaniard before announcing to the congregation that the Azzurri would tonight “crush” La Roja . I replied that Santiago (St James, Patron Saint of Spain) , and the Virgin of Montserrat  (patron of Catalonia) might have had their own communication from God and come up with a different prediction.

In truth I have no certainty  which side tonight has God on its side although I did say a prayer for La Roja in thanks for its contribution to world  football , and in the hope that its below-par performance in the tournament so far – a source of delight to my aspiring nemesis Captain Terry- will be remedied  with victory over an Italy that has defied expectations and defeated Germany brilliantly.

Spain’s La Roja lays claim to being much more than a  team. Since winning Euro 2008, they have, as a national squad,  innovated in their style of playing and organisation, and in their attitude towards winning- both a project and philosophy.

This is a national team that , like FC Barcelona at club level, has prioritised passing , possession and movement in all positions, but with midfield acting as the key lubricant of defence as well as conduit of attack. I use the word ‘lubricant’ as opposed to bastion, or wall, or rock just as I describe La Roja’s players Xavi and Iniesta as bullfighters rather than bulls because of the intricacy  of their close-play choreography.

This is not a team lacking in tall men nor is it without spirit and courage, but it is team the prioritises style over virility and aggression when it in is possession of the ball, and it is more often than  very good at not losing control. La Roja is above all team ethos, a one for all -all for one, where each player is an essential element of the choreography, and the attack becomes the best defence. What marks out La Roja’s best goals is the intricacy of the build-up play involved.

This is not a team that believes in winning at all costs, that the end justifies the means, but whose self-belief is predicated  on the fact that victory is assured by holding the ball as long as possible, rather than to go out and physically annihilate  the  opponent.

 Italy’s Azzurri  have ideas and quality that draw on a more traditional organisation of play that depends on the resilience of its defence and effectiveness  of its strikers, be it with a more open, fluid play than the more negative play associated with the original catenaccio . In this tournament coach Cesare Prandelli has earned justifoied admiration for having his team play with not just skill  but with a necessary nobility of purpose in striking contrast to the match-fixing scandals of Italian club football.

In beating Germany fair and square, with superior play, the Italians succeeded where the Greeks failed, in delivering  a psychological uplifting victory on behalf  of financially stricken European southern nations. But their constituency of support has broadened to include commentators and fans who have for a while been wishing an end to Spain’s dominance of football, challenging its claim to represent the age of enlightenment. One could almost suspect them of being part of a Mourinho inspired conspiracy, such has been their determination to liquididate in one blow both La Roja and Barca.

At the most extreme level of the anti-Roja fervour generated by  its lacklustre performance in the tournament so far was the comment my last blog received from ‘Captain Terry’, who has pursued me from childhood. He wrote  : “ If Iniesta’s goal, the “Iniestazo”, against Chelsea back in 2009 was the moment that Barça reached new heights and dominated world football for 3 years, the defeat against Chelsea in 2012, when Chelsea went onto gloriously win the European Cup, should be now known as the “Drogbazo”, the moment Tique-Taca was buried, and relegated to football history. The writing is on the Wall. Barcelona & La Roja have lost the plot. They are not physically tired, but mentally demolished by the events of April this year….”

‘Captain Terry’ has never hid his life-long support for Chelsea and Real Madrid, and far it for me , a self-declared Barca convert and La Roja supporter , to accuse him of ill-informed bias, in this open  forum.  Let me just say that win or lose tonight, La Roja , has already earned a  place in history alongside Pele’s  Brazil and Holland’s Dutch- quite an achievement for a nation that, prior to Euro 2008- waited more than four decades before winning a major tournament. Only God knows how far geniuses have the capacity to endure.

La Roja keeps the faith

Vicente Del Bosque is a wise man,generally understated in public who does not believe in courting controversy But even he must be finding it somewhat irritating to find himself having to defend La Roja’s reputation from its critics. Boring, they say. A lesser man, like Jose Mourinho would have no doubt thrown not just one tantrum by now, but several.

The fact is that La Roja is a match away from setting a new record in world football. Success in Sunday’s final would mean that it will become the first national team ever to have won two Euro championships in a row, and World Cup. Spain will confirm its claim to being the best football nation in the world.

Its  progress in this tournament has been not by default but by sticking firmly to its style of play, however rough and fatigued the tiqui-taca has seemed at times. La Roja may have not destroyed its opponents, but it has shown its capacity to control them and prevail despite being identified at the outset as the team all the others had to to find ways of beating. It owes its unbeaten record to a combination of factors among which I would identify quality, endurance, and self-belief, all measures of a true champion.

And yet the problem of being champion is that you are expected to play as champions in every game as if players were gods not ordinary mortals subject to bad moods and bad luck and periods of mental and physical pain,which may be hidden from the public but which Del Bosque knows about and throws into his calculations.

Against Portugal last night, La Roja succeeded in reducing the best player in the tournament to his worst. Ronaldo played selfishly and inaccurately, his performance marked more by negative theatrics than by genuine skill. Alongside this narcissist, the majority of the Portuguese team seemed to be playing to a battle plan set under advice from Mourinho, Spanish football’s agent provocateur. The tactics would have undermined a lesser team. La Roja for a while lost its rhythm, its passing and possession losing its apparent capacity to remain fluid and deliver. But then , somewhat belatedly in extra time,it rallied and played some of the best football in the tournament. To have lost on penalties, would have been a travesty of justice. La Roja remains the national team that generates most lines of comment, and is followed by the biggest world wide audience, and deservedly so.

In each game of this tournament , Del Bosque has selected a team that generally has risen to the challenge of defending their title, with intelligent substitutions made around which the team have rallied. There were parts of the crowd yesterday -a combination of Portuguese and Mourinho Real Madrid die-hards -who whistled La Roja’s passing game. Late they fell silent, and millions of fans celebrated another Spanish victory and the fact that Del Bosque had kept the faith.

Vicente Del Bosque is a wise man,generally understated in public who does not believe in courting controversy But even he must be finding it somewhat irritating to find himself having to defend La Roja’s reputation from its critics. Boring, they say. A lesser man, like Jose Mourinho would have no doubt thrown not just one tantrum by now, but several.

The fact is that La Roja is a match away from setting a new record in world football. Success in Sunday’s final would mean that it will become the first national team ever to have won three Euro championships in a row, and World Cup. Spain will confirm its claim to being the best football nation in the world.

Even if it fails to win,its progress in this tournament has been not by default but by sticking firmly to its style of play, however rough and fatigued the tiqui-taca has seemed at times. La Roja may have not destroyed its opponents, but it has shown its capacity to control them and prevail despite being identified at the outset as the team all the others had to to find ways of beating. It owes its unbeaten record to a combination of factors among which I would identify quality, endurance, and self-belief, all measures of a true champion.

And yet the problem of being champion is that you are expected to play as champions in every game as if players were gods not ordinary mortals subject to bad moods and bad luck and periods of mental and physical pain,which may be hidden from the public but which Del Bosque knows about and throws into his calculations.

Against Portugal last night, La Roja succeeded in reducing the best player in the tournament to his worst. Ronaldo played selfishly and inaccurately, his performance marked more by negative theatrics than by genuine skill. Alongside this narcissist, the majority of the Portuguese team seemed to be playing to a battle plan set under advice from Mourinho, Spanish football’s agent provocateur. The tactics would have undermined a lesser team. La Roja for a while lost its rhythm, its passing and possession losing its apparent capacity to remain fluid and deliver. But then , somewhat belatedly in extra time,it rallied and played some of the best football in the tournament. To have lost on penalties, would have been a travesty of justice. La Roja remains the national team that generates most lines of comment, and is followed by the biggest world wide audience, and deservedly so.

In each game of this tournament , Del Bosque has selected a team that generally has risen to the challenge of defending their title, with intelligent substitutions made around which the team have rallied. There were parts of the crowd yesterday -a combination of Portuguese and Mourinho Real Madrid die-hards -who whistled La Roja’s passing game. Late they fell silent, and millions of fans celebrated another Spanish victory and the fact that Del Bosque has kept the faith.

La Roja needs an element of Furia

,have  felt, himself

somewhat vindicated in his wisely meditated defence of  La Roja.

This was a game played at its most physical-the fooball ‘con cojones’ which the first English

pioneers brought to the Rio Tinto mines near Huelva and the port of Bilbao the

Basque country, and which became synonymous with the Spanish game as approved

by General Franco.This was what Spaniards turned into their own expression of

virility, a tough and uncompromising as Wayne Rooney’s . They called it La Furia- the Fury.

The match we saw on Sunday had various ingredients displayed

by both sides -courage, resilience, determination- that bordered on the heroic-

even if in the end there was no physical annihilation of one  side by the other, only an anti-climatic

victory by penalties which is a poor form of justice.

It was a  game not distinguished

by flair or creativity: back-kicks were way off target, there was lack of

fluidity in mid-field, and neither side’s possession or passing was

particularly inspired. No single player stood out for me, although English

goalkeeper Hart was a rock in defence-until the penalties.

To watch all this aggression resolved in the end not with a bang

but with a whimper inevitably provokes a reflection on its antithesis – the technical,patient,

game which the Spanish team have demonstrated in this tournament and for which

Del Bosque has received some criticism because it has not exactly set the

tournament on fire.

This criticism has been based on the view that Spain’s game,

for all technique, has lacked resolution in overpowering, and destroying the enemy.

It is a criticism that Del Bosque and his players find difficult to understand

given statistics that  show that  La Roja have

outperformed every other team in Euro 2012 on every measure  from number of successful passes to number of

goals

Nevertheless , with the exception of the match against the Republic

of Ireland,  Del Bosque’s team have

failed to entertain us-setting aide moments of brilliance, the poetry of the

ball has not flowed with its characteristic motion, the organisation of the

team has been well short of perfect  choreography.

As I note in my latest book on Spanish football,the  Franco encouraged the the national stereotype

as   mythified in the literary figure of Don

Quixote, the incarnation of the spirit of noncompromise , with its hopelessness

 and failure forgotten beside his nobility

of purpose. And yet for all its aggression, Spain in those years failed to conquer-instead

it underachieved. After its victory over the Soviet Union in the European

Nations Cup final in 1964, Spain had to wait until the Euro championships in 2008

before winning any other major  football

tournament. By then, drawing on the legacy of the South Americans and the

Dutch, Spain had embraced tiqui-taca, the

style that prioritised passing, patience,and possession above all else.

But let us remember too that that  tournament was won by Spain in the final

against Germany with a goal by Fernando Torres that epitomized the artistry

Spain had stood for from the outset of the tournament. As I write in my book La Roja, ‘it was the moment when the

Spanish squad’s brightest young matador dispatched an ageing bull that had lost

its fire and nobility. The Germans tried o resist a team that had passed the

ball like gods. But this was a plodding veterans’ German well- past its sell-by

date that in the end the end conceded the winning goal to a much better team,

full of promise.”

After Sunday’s game,the likelyhood is that we are once

against heading towards a Spain-Germany Euro final. Del Bosque told me once

that he knew La Roja were on  their way

to becoming World champions when they ‘lost their fear’ . and went out and beat

a rejuvenated German team in the semifinals of 2010.

I believe La Roja can

deserve set a new record by winning Euro 2012. But it needs to lift itself ,

and play with the spirited beauty of worthy champions.  

 

A CUBAN DIARY by Jimmy Burns 21/3/2008

A version of this article was published in The Tablet

Just a small group of Cubans are with us on the Air France from Paris to Havana, and they are the only non-tourists on the plane, apart from the Chinese Olympic volley ball team. They are members of the national judo team, and have just been on a pre-Olympic warm-up tour of northern Europe. While the Chinese spend the flight playing computer claims, like automats, the Cubans crack jokes, eat, and play music. Their physiotherapist has bought a Zorro suit for his young boy. He says that while it was fun being abroad, he is longing to be back on the island, with his family and friends. He offers one piece of advice: “You must meet with Cubans, learn how they live.”

Cuban sportsmen, like ballet dancers, and musicians, can afford to travel for their tickets and expenses have been subsidised by the state. They are Cuba’s cultural exports. During my week long stay on the island, I was to meet many Cubans who would have also liked to travel, but couldn’t afford to. All men are equal but some are more equal than others.

We fly in at dusk, the last of the sun’s rays and a light warm breeze catching the leaves of the palm trees. Our first romantic glimpse of Cuba in temporaily interrupted by an intruder however-one that authoritarian regimes of widely different ideologies have thrown up throughout history. The policewoman at Havana airport may not have her holster made out of human skin-like the Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s Man in Havana-but she looks as if she might have had one. With a face chiselled in a dark menacing frown, Inspector Number 15685 looks up at my face and down at my passport at least a dozen times, before finally pushing a button and unlocking the door that separates me from the island.

Minutes later our first Cuban taxi drive involves negotiating the pitfalls of a crowded  unmarked poorly lit road, with its chaotic assortment of Cubans seemingly going  nowhere in a hurry, in an array of  veteran cars, bicycles, open-roofed lorries, and rusty buses. The lights of one of Havana’s central squares remain dimmed by the time we reach the hotel. Cuba is trying to save on electricity, the taxi man explains, before we are ushered into the startling brightness of the main lobby and the multi-dialled luxury of our room.

On our first night we drift though the streets of Old Havana-its one-time single occupancy colonial buildings packed with subsidised poor tenants as part of the government’s social housing programme. With its walls cracked and peeling, and door frames and widows unhinged, this part of the city had bee crumbling as long as any resident could remember. There are streets where the government is slowly but steadily restoring swathes of a city Spain once considered the jewel in her Empire. The miracle is that some of the older untouched buildings are still standing and that there is laughter and music from their residents within and without. On one semi-derelict street corner, a band of elderly musicians are playing some salsa not for money but for their friends. It is a small impromptu party where the octogerians of the barrio have gathered. One of the women, slightly drunk on rum, dances with her dog. Another with her grandchild. Others stand around and clap rhythmically, occasionally shouting encouragement. They are joined by a young policewoman. No severity here, just a huge complicit smile and a hand that shares out cigarettes to the dancers. Neighbourhood policing Cuban style.

I am reminded, as I shall be on several similar occasions during my stay,   of something that the American musician Ry Cooder has written on the sleeve notes to the Buena Vista Social Club CD – “In Cuba the music flows like a river. It takes care of you, and rebuilds you from the inside out.” There may be a shortage of CD’s in Cuban shops, but live music on this island is as generous as the song of mocking birds and parakeets.

Sunday Mass at the Jesuit church of the Sacred Heart. The priest takes the story of Lazarus’s resurrection as an example of liberation and hope, beyond the materialism of our daily existence. At the end of his sermon he asks that any new visitors identity themselves so that they can be well received. My wife and I lift our hands as do four Cubans distributed around the Church. The congregation turns to face us, as one, before breaking into spontaneous applause. I notice that the doors of the Church are opened wide onto the busy street, a gesture of encouragement as well as self-confidence one would find  difficult to find in most capital cities in the world these days.

The amiable Jesuit priest Fr Alberto recalls that the turning point in Church-State relations came with the visit of Pope John Paul 11nd in 1998 when Castro and other senior party officials attended mass. Suddenly Cubans who had backed the Revolution while wanting to keep their Faith saw the reconciliation they had been praying for. “It allowed people to come out of themselves, to express their religiosity.”

A few days earlier an envoy from Pope John Paul 11’s successor had visited Havana and had asked that the regime allow greater access of the Church to the media and to the education system. “We are still waiting, “ says Fr Albertobefore adding: “The government hereknews it has three priorities it has to deal with, improve-housng, transport, and food. The question is how?”

The Church may be considered too collaborationist by its critics-there are no priests or bishops currently in Cuban jails – but it is positioning itself as potentially a key player in whatever reform process lies ahead.

Every embassy in town is obsessed with trying to predict what will happen next now Raul Castro has formally taken over the post of president from the ailing Fidel.  A dedicated communist long before his old brother became one, Raul is nevertheless thought of as a pragmatist who sees the need to steer the island through some kind of economic and political renewal . One experienced diplomat I share a mojito with was sceptical there would be any real process of change until Fidel was long dead and buried. Another suggested that one of the problems Cuba faces  is its lack of a structured opposition within the island capable of helping pave the way for a post-Franco style transition from the current one-party state to a parliamentary democracy. At present there are no signs of any major political shift although there are discreet diploamtic moves ging on behind the scenes in the spirit of a constructive dialogue. Despite George W.Bush demonsing Cuba as part of the ‘axis of evil’, the island has no serious drugs or terrorist, and is investing in life-saving pharmaceutcals not weapons ofmass destructin.

There are expectations that the election  of a Democratic president of the United States may lead to the lifting of the US embargo that has helped Fidel  fuel the mythology of a courageous  island under siege from the world’s big bad oppressor. However the regime fears the example of the Soviet Union where economic liberalisation was accompanied by a period of political disintegration. It looks to China not as only one of its current major trading partners, but as an example of a regime that has brought about economic growth without sacrificing its political system. Cuban  solidarity does not extend to the plight of Tibet it seems . Instead it counts Chavez’s Venezuela as its greatest friend and ally. Cuba provides Caracas with doctors in return for cheap oil.

A four hour drive across the island to Trinidad, early Spanish colonial settlements which, with its cobbled streets and wrought-iron grated windows has been preserved as one of Cuba’s most picturesque towns. It is linked to Havana by the Autopista Nacional the island’s main ‘motorway’ which the  Soviet Union began building but never completed before the collapse of  Berlin Wall. It survives poorly paved and unmarked much as the sugar plantations that once fed Russians lie covered in weeds.

While tourists have access to reasonably modern fleets of self-drive or chauffer driven cars, a majority of Cubans have to share their vehicles which range from battered reconstructed old Chryslers to small bicycle taxis-Cuba’s answer to the rickshaw, The clusters of Cubans waiting along the road, sometimes for hours, before they are picked up by a car or a bus is evidence that transport is one sector that the Revolucion has failed to deliver on.

Our driver Gustavo is one of thousands of Cubans who work for the tourist industry because it is the one sector that had can assure them something approaching a decent wage. The average Cuba salary of 400 pesos is worth about $16 dollars a month. But under the dual currency system, tourism and foreign businesses trade in a convertible peso which has a greater purchasing power. Gustavo believes that Cuba has an education and heath system it can be proud of, and none he knows  knows has gone hung hungry since the late 1990’s when the colapse of the Soviet Union forced Cubans to eat cats. But he thinks that the economy should become strong enough to pay his countrymen better, allow them market their goods properly, and give them the freedom to travel where and when they like.

In Trinidad we walk up a steep hill to astatue commemorating Bartolome de Las Casas, the Spanish Franciscan friar who defended the rights of the native Indians after the Conquest. It is believed that that this early champion of human rights in Latin America celebrated his first mass here under a Calabash tree in the early 16th century. One of Trinidad’s most beautiful colonial churches –and there are several-is next to the main school. At the start and end of their day, the school kids-impeccably kitted out in starched white shirts and pale green uniforms- run through the church’s open doors, many of them stopping off to pray along the way. Cuba seems full of young happy school kids, many of them seemingly inheriting from their parents a sense that there is no contradiction between their political and religious faith but a potential symbiosis between the best aspects of  each.

The high attendance of church goers, the discreet engagement of priests and catechists with social work, and the official authorisation of street processions underlines the extent to which Cuban Catholicism has revived since the hard-line Soviet days of the 1970’s and 1980’s .

Another long (seven hours) and bumpy road journey across the island, backtracking to Havana and then heading inland to the extraordinary beautiful national park of Vinales (note ed cedila accent over the n). Bulbous limestone knolls covered in lush vegetation border a valley of some 15,000 hectares of red earth where small farming communities grow an array of crops from tobacco and coffee to bananas, avocados, oranges, and sugar cane. While attracting a growing tourist trade, the area perseveres as an example of both the potential and limitations of Cuban agriculture. The Cuban regime’s enduring commitment to a planned economy has brought about some agricultural reform while at the same stifling productivity and enterprise. Cuban farmers are allowed to sell some of their surplus produce to private consumers, but the state takes the bulk of what is sown and grown, tying up financial transactions in bureaucratic bottlenecks and fuelling a parallel economy of moonlighting and middlemen.

With his greying moustache, and weathered face Vicente, is a veteran fighter of the Revolution, and now the patriarch of an extended family. As we smoke a couple of his cigars-hand-rolled and soaked, before drying, in rum and honey-he tells me how he fears his artisanship may be a dying trade as the 21st century creeps in on the island.“The young are no longer interested in my cigars or helping me work the land. They want to go to the towns and try and make more money.”

I thought about Vicente and men and women of his generation as we drive around an island. It is filled with iconic posters of Che Guevara and anti-imperialist murals, in contrast to the total absence of commercial advertising hoardings. In contrast to those who have over the years fled to Miami or Europe, there are those who chose to stay behind and have persevered in their belief that thanks to the Revolution of 1959 Cuba became and still is a better place than the corrupt and exploited US dominated whore-house  that had existed before, and that there is now, thanks to Fidel,  less poverty and social injustice than elsewhere in Latin America. It is  also true that a majority of Cubans on the island have grown up knowing no other system but the socialism Fidel has imposed contributing to the sense outsiders get of Cuba living in a time-warp, out of step with the cruel reality that is the rest of the world.

My perspective is of a system that despite its poor wages and shortages, has managed to produce one of the most integrated multiracial and relatively crime-free societies anywhere in the developing world. While the system has undoubtedly some underlying problems, it has saved Cubans from the consumerism and personal debt that is the source so much social and financial stress in free market communities.

Cuba still has too many exiles (an estimated two million anti-Castro Cubans live in the US alone)and too many prisoners of conscience (some 69 according to Amnesty). And yet, as one western diplomat conceded, it makes those committed to the system Fidel has forged over five decades feel part of a collective enterprise with a social cohesion that would be the envy of most inner cities in the UK. How to shed the worst aspects of Fidelismo while preserving his more noble achievements and not losing control to a politically destabalising free-for-all is the challenge now facing Raul and the new generation of  socialist Cubans  that hope to follow him.

The post A CUBAN DIARY by Jimmy Burns 21/3/2008 appeared first on Jimmy Burns.

Argentina’s diplomatic circus

Cristina Fernandez Kirchner told her countrymen back in February  that they should not feel collectively responsible for the national debacle that surrounded the military invasion of the Falklands in 1982. She blamed the military and the Argentine media.

Those of us who lived through that war in Argentina- and I was there as I relate in my book The Land that lost its Heroes-know this to be a falsehood. With the exception of the then leader of the Radical party Raul Alfonsin, some human rights activists,  and individual journalists, no public figure in Argentine society-let alone Cristina Fernandez and her late husband Nestor-  spoke out against the military’s ‘glorious recovery’ of Falklands/Las Malvinas at the time, even when it was clear that it was considered an illegal act by the UN and had the condemnation of the international community- notwithstanding the support offered to the Argentine junta by Cuba, Peru, and Gaddafy’s Libya.

On the issue of Las Malvinas, Argentine foreign policy conducts itself today,  as it did then,  in a planet of its own making, and worthy of a story in Borges’s Ficciones collection. For Cristina Fernandez to choose a G20 meeting that was  prioritising  finding a solution to the worst financial crisis facing the civilised world since World War 2 to try and pull off a cheap publicity stunt over a disputed sovereignty claim belittles still further her nation’s claim to be treated as a serious partner of the group.  Buenos Aires should count itself lucky that Spain has other pressing matters on its mind not to have raised the issue of Argentina’s unilateral  seizure of Repsol’s interests in YPF with a publicity stunt of its own that would have probably found more sympathy among other G20 members.

It is hard to see whose performance in front of the world cameras was more lamentable – that of the puffed-up Argentine president or that of her foreign minister Hector Timerman who is reported to have called the BBC a liar before walking off making a V sign.

During my years as a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires I developed a warm personal and professional respect for the late Jacobo Timerman  -a giant of a newspaperman who suffered cruelly for being a Jew and standing up for a free press  under the anti-Semitic military junta. Jacobo had enormous respect for the BBC and for British and US journalism generally. It pains me to see his legacy reduced to such diplomatic buffoonery and gratuitous  insult.

I believe Jacobo would have recognised that the best and only way forward for his country is to demythologise the Malvinas, restore constructive bilateral relations with the UK  and accept that the world in the 21st century takes seriously issues like self-determination and the ability of nation states to respect this as an essential human right.

With or without its military, Argentina  should wise up to the fact  that after being militarily defeated by the UK thirty years ago it cannot just bully its way back into the Falkland  islands on the basis of a 19th century claim, just as Paraguay cannot claim back its territory from Argentina, or Venezuela move to throw out the French from certain islands. The world has moved on from old territorial disputes, and the Falkland islanders are absolutely in their right to vote on their own future next year- and should be allowed to do so without harassment from the South American mainland.

No doubt  yesterday’s antics at the G 20 by the Argentine delegation will have done little to influence that vote in any other way than to ensure the islanders back their wish to remain British.  It would also have won Cristina Fernandez  praise from her supporters who couldn’t care less what the  rest of the world might think of them , even as their country risks sinking back into a failed and mistrusted state.

La Roja : no conspiracy, just insufficient self-belief

Let the Italians keep their conspiracies. I never believed Spain and Croatia would go into their Euro 2012 Group match having agreed to play for a draw. You would have to have turned Poland into Argentina run by a military junta and swapped  Peru for Croatia to have made that one stick.

If Spain from the outset seemed to lack their usual sparkle, and fluffed too many passes it was partly their own fault for coming  out and thinking not of themselves as champions  but of Russia, a team that showed real promise in their opening  game, but subsequently  exited from the championship, showing their true mediocrity losing to a poor team.

By contrast Croatia was not a poor team. They came out and did exactly what they said they would do to frustrate and disarm the Spaniards, building up solid lines of defence, pressing, and taking their chances with an occasional counter-attack. They  could have , at one point, been leading Spain, by two clear goals had it not been for the brilliance of Casillas, the only Spanish player, with the exception of Alba, to really give it his best, in response.

Credit nonetheless has to go to Vicente Del Bosque for bringing on Navas  to replace a thwarted Torres so as to stretch the Croatan defence when it was already tiring and forcing  a number of threatening corners, before scoring the winning goal. It was just as well the Spaniards kept celebrations to a minimum. The goal when it came in the final  minutes  involved probably the first piece of successful creative play by La Roja in the whole  match: Cesc (another late substitute)  exploiting a gap in the Croatian defence , passing to Iniesta who, after drawing out the goalkeeper,  passed it to Navas for a final tap in, in a characteristically  faultless interchange of passes.

The goal brought cathartic scenes among the Spanish fans who had looked increasingly tense and gloomy as the match proceeded,suspecting  that just one Croatian goal would mean the end of the tournament for them just as surely as Don Quixote breaking his lance on a windmill.

When  the fonal whistle went, Del Bosque looked like a man who had been made to suffer for 90 minutes, and his players,  shattered. The BBC commentator at one point blamed  the heat- an absurd suggestion given the high temperatures  Del Bosque’s players are used to playing in back in their native Spain in spring, summer and early autumn. The players were I think as shocked as their manager was at how close they were to defeat, and all because they did not play as they know they can- so much better than tonight.

Nonetheless Del Bosque, who is a a wise and enduring man, will know how to turn this game to La Roja’s advantage, just as he did after morale hit a low point at the end of the the opening match against Switzerland in the 2010 World Cup. Del Bosque will let the players ask questions of themselves and trust them to put it right. The Spanish media will no doubt call for changes in the team. There were cries of ‘Lllorente, LLorente’, from the fans. I suspect Del Bosque  will once again resist laying the blame on Torres, or any other individual player for that matter. It was a collective failure not to have won with more conviction. La Roja is collectively strong enough to bounce back.

Bad sportsmen

David Nalbandian, the Argentine  tennis player, disqualified from the AEBOG championship at London’s Queen’s Club, joins a not unimpressive list of Argentine icons made legendary by their ‘unsportsmanlike  behavior’- only they happen to be footballers.

Back in 1966, Argentine captain Antonio Rattin was sent off in the England World quarter finals match against England for his alleged ‘violent tongue.’ Rattin did not leave gracefully but rather bid a defiant farewell, taking his time to leave the stadium, and wrinkling a British pennant before finally departing. Twenty years later Diego Maradona scored his first goal against the English in the quarter finals of the Mexico World Cup with his hand, knowing full well he had cheated, and for years, subsequently, celebrated the fact that he got away with it.

That England’s own Wayne Rooney is only belatedly entering Euro 2012 tomorrow-as a result  of previous  match bans for unruly behavior – serves as a reminder that the Argentines do not have  a monopoly of rough stuff . However Nalbandian’s violence  and graceless  attitude subsequently makes the temper tantrums of  a young John McEnroe seem rather tame by comparison. Just goes to show that as sportsmen get richer, they don’t necessary learn manners, even if Argentines-like Italians- like to blame conspiracies.

Remembering my friend Cassandra Jardine

It’s never too late to grieve those who have a special place in our lives.

If I write this tribute somewhat belatedly to Cassandra  Jardine it is because I have only just discovered on the web that she died just under two weeks ago while wondering how she was.

My search for some update news on her had been prompted by the discovery that an article in the Telegraph  I had expected would have been just up her street on the celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebration in Battersea Park,  had been penned by someone else.  When the truth hit home, it was not unexpected-although the sadness it provoked in me was no less.

It was in Battersea, in my favourite neighbourhood cafe, that we had last met almost  exactly a year ago. ‘Cass’ for that is how I called her, had contacted me through facebook, after years during which our personal and professional lives had led us in different directions. A cousin of hers –an old male school chum-wanted to get in touch, she wrote. I  wrote back and suggested she and I meet up as by then I had read about her illness and wanted to know more.

A couple of weeks later she emailed when the opportunity had come up. She was interviewing Harry Hill who lives in Battersea  and looked forward to meeting me if her deadlines allowed. “Should be fine, unless work suppers it,” she wrote. Thankfully, on this occasion,  it didn’t.

The first time I met Cass some 25 years ago she was also fussing about deadlines for she was always a conscientious journalist as well as an enduring friend. On the kind recommendation of Antony Beevor,  she had generously agreed to take me in as a temporary lodger in a house in Wandsworth she lived in before her marriage. At the time,  I was writing my first book-The Land that lost its Heroes- and the house I lived in was full of builders, two young children, a wife, and a nanny from Argentina where I had just ended a five year posting with the FT covering the Falklands war and its aftermath.

Cass offered me a necessary daytime haven while she went off to work at her then employers,  Business magazine. We became friends during the chats we’d had at day’s end, over a late tea or drink,  and she introduced me into part of her circle of talented writers, publishers, and actors , including her future husband.

 I  remember her humour, the interest she took in her subjects, and the energy she threw into researching and writing about them. Only once when I was her lodger did she flag-when she collapsed in bed for a couple of days with flu, and I tried my best to keep her spirits up with conversation and an array of drugs purchased at the nearest chemist.

At our last, more recent meeting, she was clearly struggling with  a far more serious illness and yet she gave me no sense of submission or self-pity. She was disarmingly open and calm about her chances of survival, and talked courageously about how she intended to go on with her work and her commitments as a mother and wife.  Far from being self-obsessed, she wanted to know about the latest book I had written.  I felt humbled in her presence as I gave her a signed copy , in tribute to her friendship. She said she looked forward to reading it on her summer holiday, then checked her phone text, and said she had to dash back to the office but hoped to arrange supper at home soon- after the vacation. It was the last I saw of her.

A few weeks later, and with the promised supper yet to be arranged, I got in touch with her again by email with a story suggestion for an article I knew would interest her about Council plans to cut the Battersea Park police force. She wrote back saying she had just got out of hospital and was barely able to read “after a brush with pneumonia and septicaemia.” I replied immediately: “Dear Cass- Bad timing on my part-so sorry. take care. much love x j.”

I write this with a huge sense of loss for a courageous friend I should  have found time and space  to see more of. My prayers are with her husband and her children.

For those who haven’t read it- this is the link to a fitting tribute from her last employer, Telegraph Newspapers. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obitu...

Del Bosque’s choices

To be or not to be?- or rather to have a centre-forward or not?

Vicente Del Bosque knew he was taking a gamble when he decided to dispense with a recognised striker at the start of Spain’s opening Euro2012 game against Italy-but it was a calculated choice for this serene and wise man from Salamanca.

The Italy he was facing-  an ambitious 3-5-2 line-up- was not the defensive ‘lock down’  that most Spaniards have come to expect. It opened up the prospect of a fast-moving game, with Spain being pressurised inside its own half, and Italy going for goals. Del Bosque chose to rely at the outset on six recognised mid-fielders, with one of them , Cesc Fabregas, playing a nominal false ‘9’ centre-forward, dropping deep to unsettle the opposition defence.

That was La Roja playing with  a system we have come to identify with FC Barcelona –which has  Messi and his talent to create havoc amidst the opposition, and score goals. And perhaps that was what risked showing up as the crucial difference, as Spain’s quick-passing intricate play and possession failed , for much of the game,   to find a creative deliverer, while leaving the team dependant on the quality of its captain and goalkeeper Casillas to save it from Italy’s succession of dangerous onslaughts.

Only when Italy finally scored, did Del Bosque’s system come into its own with some intricate passing, worthy of the best of Barca, involving Iniesta-who stepped up his rhythm- , Silva, and  Cesc, who delivered the equaliser. From then on Spain seemed to grow in confidence, even if their passing suffered at times from a ground that was too dry.

Del Bosque brought out Torres, his most controversial striker,  in the final stages of the game, when Italian energies were flagging and more gaps available to exploit. I have suggested before that Torres has come to this tournament  ‘hungry’ to prove himself after feeling badly used by Chelsea for most of the season and have predicted that  Del Bosque would want to test him in this first game. What we saw was a Torres with the capacity to disrupt the opposition almost with immediate effect, but lacking that edge that made him such a powerful force in Euro2008, and seemingly doubting too much in himself to strike effectively. Torres has taken  to looking up to the heavens and pleading- I suspect he is asking God to give him speed, as well as luck. Doubt is a terrible thing for any striker to have.

Many managers would I think now drop Torres- but I suspect that Del Bosque will think long and hard before doing this since playing him against the weaker sides of the Group-Ireland and Croatia- could set him on course for the kind of goal-scoring spree that restores morale. On the other hand, using Negredo or Llorente, or the first line-up used against Italy should I think defeat both Ireland and Croatia without major problems.

This was a tough test for La Roja, but its 1-1 draw against this excellent Italian side was a much better start to a major  tournament than its opening defeat by a mediocre Switzerland in the World Cup of 2010. This Spain was neither tired, nor lacking quality or inspiration-although Arbeloa was the least impressive of its players.

For me Spain’s best player and the man of the match was Iniesta, hugely creative in mid-field and a constant challenge to the resilience of Italy’s defence. He was unlucky not to get a winning goal, and one of the  reasons why I retain faith in  Spain’s ability to do well in  this tournament, if not win it.

The numbers and enthusiasm of Spanish fans in the Gdansk stadium yesterday was testimony to Del Bosque’s  great achievement in helping make Spanish football something his fellow countrymen can take real pride in, for all the humiliation of having to see their elected government having to go  to  Europe, cap in hand, to save the nation’s  banking system.

Whither Spain in Euro2012

Let me make an admission from the outset. I am approaching this Eurochampionships with one hope only-that Spain will clinch the title. I hope that I am not tilting at windmills.

As those of you who might have read my latest book on  La Roja  will realise I’ve watched a lot of Spanish football over the years, and researched into history, to get a sense of how a country has weathered its political storms and deeply-ingrained club rivalries to produce a coherent national squad capable of playing the most beautiful  and entertaining  football in the world.

Two seasons ago, this achievement came close to unravelling when Mourinho waged psychological warfare on Real Madrid opponents, not least FC Barcelona, threatening to drive an irrevocable wedge between players who had won the World Cup of 2010. In my book I call Mourinho Spanish football’s agent provocateur .

I remember meeting Vicente Del Bosque at the height of it all, while researching La Roja, and how worried he was about the impact Mourinho was having on some of the Real Madrid players, and on Pep Guardiola-a  man for whom Del Bosque seemed to have great respect both as a player and a manager.

Del Bosque is a wise man from Salamanca, a good listener, and a good conciliator and he did much to mend bridges, as did Real Madrid’s Casillas and Barca’s Xavi , personal friends who command huge respect within the teams they play for.

I have been asked in recent days whether Spain’s chances in the coming days will be undermined by what is alleged is an enduring grudge affecting certain Real Madrid and Barca players. I have to say I have found no evidence for this. I expect Pique and Ramos to form a formidable partnership as central defenders , if called by Del Bosque to do so, regardless as to whether Pique  shows off his girlfriend Shakira as much as  Ramos boasts about his skills as a bullfighter.

As for other players,let me make just a few additional points. Casillas is not just a great  goalkeeper-he is an inspirational captain; players like Iniesta, Xavi, Busquets, and Silva  have matured and in my view capable of playing better than they did in South Africa; Torres has come to this tournament as hungry for success as he was in the Euros of 2008 after feeling hard done by Chelsea for most of the season. Del Bosque believes in Torres  in a way that no Chelsea manager has , but I expect the Spanish coach to test the player early in the tournament, hoping that he still has it in him to succeed.

I will be surprised if against Italy on Sunday -a potentially crucial game psychologically-Del Bosque does not opt for Torres as the main attacking option with the support of Silva, Iniesta, and Xavi. Much has been said about the absence through injury of La Roja’s record goalscorer Villa . But Llorente and Negredo have height , aggression, as well as flair, that Del Bosque can call upon as other attacking options.

Among the relative newcomers to La Roja , Valencia’s agile defender, Catalan-born  Jordi Alba could prove one of the new Euro stars-don’t forget that like that other member of the Spanish squad-Cesc Fabregas – his talent was nurtured in Barca’s youth ranks, and he fits effortlessly into the quick-passing, fluid play we associate with the best of Spanish football.

I hate predictions in football- It a sport quite unlike any other in its capacity to bring forward winners by default or bad luck rather than merit. But if Spain plays at its best, it deserves to win this tournament, and the Gold medal in the Olympics. Such a result should make up for the travesty of Chelsea winning this season’s Champion’s League.