Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 25

Aguirre´s unfortunate intervention

Much as I admire the Madrid regional government´s president Espereranza Aguirre as a person, I cannot agree with her politically when it comes to football.

It is I think unfortunate of her to suggest that Friday´s King´s Cup on Friday should be played behind closed doors if Athletic Bilbao and FC Barcelona fans whistle  the Spanish national anthem.

By so doing, she has stirred a hornest´s nest of enduring resentments, and fuelled antagonisms which only radical minorities stand to gain from.

To Barca supporters Aguirre´s politics brings echoes of the regime of General Primo de Rivera who during the 1920´s closed the FC Barcelona stadium for six months and imposed a heavy fine on the club  after some fans whistled the national anthem.

Football is better without politics  intervening. Aguirre has simply contributed to politicising Friday´s match even more, while threatening to undermine the national concensus that Vicente Del Bosque has so intelligently put together in the national team La Roja and those who support it.

This blog is for my Chelsea friend

A persistent and enduring commentator on my blogs-a childhood friend who is  a Real Madrid and Chelsea fan-has emailed me complaining about my silence on the outcome  of this year’s Champions’s  League final.

Rather than be accused –as he has accused me-of self-censorship and Barca  bias (others  who might know me less but who read my blogs less selectively will notice  I am actually quite objective about whoever I write about, be it MI6 or Pep Guardiola), I am jotting this blog down for his benefit and those of any other Chelsea fan who may take occasional interest in my website.

By way of explanation –I had a car  crash last week. Not a serious one-well, thank God, it involved no fatalities , nor serious injuries to others although I got a pretty severe knock on my head, hitting the steering wheel, and still don’t know quite what happened other than that I woke up from a temporary loss of consciousness to find my car wrecked by the collision with a vehicle of sterner frame .

While  it remains an unsettling  mystery to me what exactly happened, I am under medical advice to take it easy for a few days- and I guess that means not thinking about Chelsea, while taking a few days of sun and sea and wine  in Spain.

As it is,  my first thought on waking up at the crash site was that this was a mental hang-over from watching FC Barcelona beaten by a lesser team in this season’s Champion’s League semi-finals second leg  at the Camp Nou , combined with a premonition that I might be proved wrong in my prediction that Bayern Munich would follow up their justified victory over Real Madrid in the other semi-finals (which I watched in a Catalan bar near Barcelona with my best local Brit friend who days earlier had been allowed to put up a poster of the Chelsea team that won the 1970 FA  Cup) ) by crushing their opponents in the final.

I am not sure what proved worse for my recovery-watching the final of the Champions  League between Chelsea and Bayern Munich or the build-up around it. When I am in London I live surrounded by Chelsea fans –although thankfully not all of them engage me verbally so regularly as my expatriate commentator in Spain. I tend to move around in my South London neighbourhood like a subversive ‘sleeper’ , revealing my true identity only when I go to mass or  when attending my favourite cafe where the excellence of the blend and the warm company of similarly minded latinos help fuel my exhilaration every time Chelsea loses.

I was told that many Chelsea fans who got to Munich were so drunk that they could hardly keep themselves standing as they approached the stadium for the match. I also know of a  journalist female colleague from Spanish TV who had beer poured all over her when trying to film  one group of Chelsea fans along the King’s Road.I know it because she told me how angry  she was.

But,  for the record,  let me congratulate Chelsea for reminding me how good they are at winning with a minimum flair or creativity and how much they enjoy dancing on the grave of beautiful football with the likes of Terry being allowed to take a central role in the celebrations. I want to be generous here and recognise that world football must be big enough to accommodate more than one way of playing football ,  and Chelsea score goals while a team that Barca can still get lost in their own choreography, and narcissism and lose crucial games.

And yet one of the reasons I didn’t want to devote  my debilitated faculties  on a Chelsea blog is that my tweets  were of such an increasingly negative tone  as last Saturday’s final came to its conclusion , that they served as a catharsis by two a.m on the Sunday by which time I went to bed, on my own,  and read a book about Hemingway and his boat.

Over the last fourty-eight hours  or so I have put the final behind me, and started looking forward to seeing Friday’s King’s Cup final between FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao (two teams forged by true theologians of the modern game-Guardiola and Bielsa). I also live in hope that Del Bosque’s La Roja maybe shows  Torres the respect in the Euro2012 championship successive Chelsea managers denied him for most the season .

There, you see, I have mentioned Chelsea again – and simply doing so brings back the other reason why I found it hard to write this blog in response to my disappointed interlocutor. As I told him in an email, trying to fend him off-“tell you the truth I am fed up to the gills  with the chortling, boasting and rat-assed drunkenness of Chelsea  fans” claiming they are deserving champions. But I didn’t want the existence or absence of my blog to take away from the  enjoyment experienced in Munich by  one of my best-loved and loyal friends.  I am sure it won’t.

Barca & Pep: Egos at play

Changes of managers at big clubs are never quite what they seem, for reasons that range from journalistic laziness or collusion to personalities and complex contractual issues- although in the end, as the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset once said, we are defined by who we are and our circumstances.

The departure of Pep Guardiola from FC Barcelona, once put down to a simple question of work life balance , and placed in a context of  solidarity and sacrifice, seems likely to have involved more complex,  less chivalrous issues than have been revealed thus far.

Far from conducting himself like a man who has lifted a huge weight off his shoulders, Guardiola is reported to be in a darker mood these days , like a mariner who has lost his bearings. People say he has not be so Hamlet-like since last season’s nasty verbal assault from Jose Mourinho and his allies, when the Barca coach was forced to publicly defend the reputation of his club- a job better done by presidents.

Indeed it is now an open secret that Guardiola ’s personal relations with FC Barcelona’s Sandro Rosell have never been as warm as they were with the previous president Joan Laporta- so it’s perhaps not surprising that Laporta supporters are using their active presence in social networks to suggest –as El Pais’s excellently well-informed Barca specialist  Ramon Besa is now reporting-that Guardiola is not happy with the way his departure has been caricatured , and his apparent succession handled as a smooth, consensual hand-over to his close friend-turned anointed dauphin, Tito Vilanova.

Exactly why Pep is pissed off is not clear yet-but potential story lines emerging include deep disappointment , if not a sense of betrayal, among key players, not least Messi, who,  more than any other of his team mates repeatedly begged Guardiola to stay despite , I am told, both being embroiled in an angry blow up in the dressing room on the night of the second leg of Barca’s Champion’s League semi-final encounter with Chelsea.

Guardiola  himself meanwhile appears to have allowed his narcissism to get the better of him by trying to suggest- so I am told- that he should have been given more of a say and control over his succession by Rosell, while demanding no small amount of money for services rendered and for renewing  his contract. One source who has known Guardiola personally and professionally for many years told me he was struggling to understand the coach’s motivation, and was worried about his state of mind.

Caught in the eye of a mounting storm   is Tito Vilanova – a man who has spent most of his life in Guardiola’s shadow as a second-rate player and competent assistant but who was never destined to take over the management of the best club in the world in such testing times.

Vilanova, who only months ago survived a cancer scare for which he thought he might not emerge alive, has been plunged into the deep-end of waters that threaten to become increasingly turbulent in the weeks ahead as key decisions  are taken about outgoing and incoming players, and the philosophical, political, and technical system best suited to a Barca without Pep. Not since Joan Cruyff’s controversial departure as manager in the 1990’s has there been a such a sense of palpable uncertainty  rocking the inner  corridors of the Camp Nou.

Messi is not a Racist

So,  that admirable totem of journalistic objectivity and fairness The Sun has run with a story suggesting Lionel Messi is a racist. The only problem is that it has got its facts hopelessly mixed up, courtesy of its main and only source Everton’s Royston Drenthe’s  apparent ignorance  of colloquial Argentine.

Drenthe-on loan to Everton  from Real Madrid-is reportedly unhappy that while playing in La Liga two seasons ago Messi allegedly said  Hola Negro to him . Messi is reportedly somewhat perplexed, not to say pissed off that this should be turned into the tabloid’s  latest ‘Argie-bashing’ tirade (remember it was the Sun that famously headlined the sinking of the Belgrano with GOTCHA!).

And I can well understand Messi feeling the Sun story to be grossly unfair.Messi is not someone that by nature courts the attention of the media for anything other than his genius with the ball.

In truth,  Spanish football had had its fair share of racist controversies . In my book La Roja I recall that incident in October 2004 when the then Spanish national coach Aragones was overheard telling Reyes, in reference to his then Arsenal team-mate Thiery Henry: “ Tell that negro de mierda (that black shit) that you are better than him….”

Aragones unwittingly put Spanish football’s attitudes towards race under international scrutiny, exposing a culture at best of ambivalence, at worst of collective denial within Spain about the country’s  attitude towards the issue at a time when its politicians were struggling to formulate a national concensus around the issue of immigration.

But the Messi case does not fall into this category. Messi speaks like an Argentine and in his country and among his Barca team mates the term ‘Hola Negro’ is an Argentine not Spanish phrase- a term of endearment not abuse exchanged by citizens of every colour one finds in South America, unless you are blond and pink.

The Sun’s evidence of racism involving Messi is very thin indeed. Its story unjustly tarnishes the reputation of one of the great players of all time whose conduct on and off the field has proved exemplary- but for his occasional loss of temper, very rare diving,  and a short period pre-Guardiola when, as I have also related in my book,   he was reprimanded for partying too much with Ronaldinho and Deco- two of his best mates at the time.

A tale of ambassadors

Whatever the shortcomings of Spanish corporate culture-and there are many not least in the oil giant Repsol which  seems to have made a dog’s  dinner out of its investments in Argentina and is now suffering for it-the same cannot be said for Carles Casajuana, Spain’s ambassador to London for the last four years as he has struggled to counter the inevitable pessimism that his country economic crisis has generated without resorting to  crude propaganda.

Last night the Spanish embassy residence in Belgrave Square was packed as the friends and contacts that Casajuana has built up during his four year  posting came to bid a find farewell to a man who has endured one of the trickiest of postings with dignity, humour, intelligence and generosity of spirit, together with his  similarly charming wife Margarita.

Casajuana is being pulled back to Madrid earlier than would otherwise have been the case had the centre-right Partido Popular not won last December’s elections. Casajuana was judged too close to the outgoing socialist party for no other reason it seems than he has spent much of his adult life representing post-Franco Spain  loyally as a senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whoever happened to be governing.

His successor, one-time defence minister with the previous PP government  Federico Trillo is a straightforward political appointment of a man who owed his rise through the party to the late Manuel Fraga Iribarne,  the Franco minister who went on to form  a new right-wing political party after the dictator’s death in 1975.

Despite such political baggage, those who know Trillo describe him as socially engaging and intelligent enough not to undo the good work done by Casajuana in building local ties, and he is expected  to settle well in London, not least become his love of Shakespeare and all his works.  

More worrying to the Foreign Office is another recent arrival to the court of St James, the new Argentine ambassador Alicia Castro. Close friend of Chavez from her time as ambassador in Caracas, this former trade unionist and air hostess, mirrors her president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner in her potential to opt for radical rhetoric and action in defence of  populist causes like the nationalisation of Spanish companies and Argentina’s  claim to the British owned Falklands.

Gareth Williams: Conspiracy not Cock-up?

Whichever way you look at it, the case of Gareth Williams worryingly continues to raise more questions than answers.

a. Why did his employers MI6 take more than a week after William’s disappearance to alert either his family or the police?

b.Why did officers of the Met’s counter-terrorism branch SO15 delay informing investigating police officers of the existence of nine memory sticks and a black holdall found at Williams’s MI6 office until two days before the inquest into his death ended?

c. How much of Williams’ private life-the inquest revealed this included tying himself  to bedposts, visited bondage sites, and having £20,000 collection of ‘high-end’ women’s clothing and 26 pairs of designer women’s shoes  in his London flat- was known to his employers?

d. Exactly what kind of work did Williams do? We heard at the inquest that after being recruited by GCHQ, the government’s secret listening agency, and then seconded to MI6, his work involved the  design of “practical applications for emerging technologies”. He had also passed a course to become “full deployable” as an MI6 officer, was operational only in UK and not overseas, and had had contact with two undercover agents. All this tells us very little.

e. Was Williams personal life- of a kind that might have led him into unpredictable encounters-  properly  checked or overlooked before being recruited ? What are we to make of an MI6 officer, identified at the inquest only as F blaming William’s line manager, identified only as G, on a “breakdown of communication,”?

If we accept the coroner’s verdict that Williams was on the ‘balance of probabilities’ unlawfully killed by being placed in a holdall, padlocked, and suffocated, then the ‘cock-up’ theory looks pretty thin although cock-up along the way, there may have been .

If, as I suspect, there has been an attempt at a cover-up by MI6 and compliant police officers, then  one can only assume that Williams’ work was of a more sensitive nature than has been revealed so far and was the prime motivation behind his death.

To me, this case has uncomfortable echoes of the death of Jonathan Moyle, the Editor of the magazine Defence Helicopter Work who was found dead in his hotel  in Santiago, Chile, in March 1990, hanging in a wardrobe. An inquest into the death  of Moyle , who had been investigating sensitive arms deals at the time of his death, found that he was unlawfully killed.

Let me make clear that I am not suggesting that MI6 is culpable for William’s death. Perhaps there is suspicion although no evidence that a foreign agency was involved. I do believe however that the intelligence world’s ‘silo’ mentality-where secrecy breeds a culture of non-accountability-is evident in this case. The public interest deserves more answers than questions. The case cries out for an urgent and focused judicial enquiry whose terms of reference should include the conduct of MI6 and the police-for this may help unlock the key to the mystery.

Is Tito really the right man for the job ?

I can’t recall a Barca victory having such a bitter-sweet taste about it as last night’s crushing defeat of Rayo Vallecano.

It was good to see Barca scoring goals, with Messi breaking his own drought, as well as watching  substitute goalkeeper Pinto make some dramatic saves-but Pujol  showed himself a true captain when he urged  Alves and Thiago Alcantara to desist in their celebratory Brazilian dance .

Sure this was a match that Barca needed to win if only to lift some of its shattered  morale after losing the La Liga title to Real Madrid and failing to reach the final of the Champions League. But this was a victory over a weak team, which served to remind one just how easy FC Barcelona and Real Madrid have had it for much of the domestic  season. The sheer volume of goals moreover was evidently days too late to translate into anything more meaningful.

Only the  site of Tito Vilanova and Pep Guardiola sitting for most of the match discreetly in the dug out gave mixed messages about the future. Vilanova looked pale and tired compared to Guardiola, a reminder that the man appointed as the new manager of FC Barcelona is still recovering from a major operation, and that there is no scientific certainty about his longer-term future.

There is no doubting the strong bond that has existed for years between Vilanova and Guardiola. Both came from similar poor backgrounds with their Catalan identity and love for the kind of beautiful game Cruyff brought with him ingrained from an early age.They  shared a bunk room in La Masia. Vilanova was two years older than Guardiola, and became a kind of mentor.

Vilanova never really made it as player, however. He stayed in the  lower divisions while Guardiola was promoted by Cruyff to the ‘Dream team’,  and also played for Spain.  Nevertheless Guardiola never turned his back on his old friend.  When it came to managing the first team Pep called on Tito to be his assistant and has remained one of his most trusted friends ever since.  But a dressing room of an ambitious  team like Barca can  not be built simply on personal loyalty  and sentiment.  Cruyff and Guardiola always were characterised  by strong personalities and the respect earned through their playing years.

Much has been said of how Vilanova’s appointment will ensure continuity at Barca for he shares Guardiola’s faith in a football of style and grace. But I have my doubts whether Vilavonova  has it in him to be his own man, and to be more than just a holding operation as Barca struggles to hold together amid the changes to the team that will by necessity have to be made in the coming months, while Mourinho consolidates his power base at Real Madrid.

A new generation of Barca fans have got used to winning under Guardiola, losing the inferiority complex their  fathers grandfathers suffered for so many years. But after last week’s debacle, the club need a no less strong personality to ensure that the legacy is not squandered. I wish Vilanova the best of luck. But something tells me Barca’s long term future may involve Guardiola’s return whether  in  person or in the reflected football philosophy and personality of  a foreigner like Marcelo Bielsa. Barca will need more than just politics and friendships to resist Real Madrid’s return to dominance under the ruthless Mourinho.

Pep Guardiola’s catharsis

We will probably never know for certain when exactly  was the moment when Pep Guardiola  decided to quit as manager of FC Barcelona. But the Guardiola  who spoke to the media after Barca’s defeat by Chelsea on Tuesday was I think no longer committed to another season. Some commentators suggested he was exhausted. To me, Guardiola looked liberated.

Much has been said of Guardiola  as a person who , both as player and manager, had always chosen his next move on his own terms.  And yet circumstances I think combined with the ego to make of that game a particularly cathartic experience: the realisation that in that evolution in the history of FC Barcelona, of which Guardiola had been such an integral part, the time had come for a different manager to take Barca into the future. A great team like Barca looked tired and lacking a winning formula.

Guardiola over the four seasons he has been at the helm has given Barca his life and soul. Winning seventeen titles has involved blood, sweat, and tears, with Mourinho proving a particularly taxing opponent, showing little respect, stirring animosity, suspicion, envy, fuelling hate- not the football Guardiola wanted to be involved in  then, now, or in the next season, but one he found himself forced to face up to in defence of his club’s integrity.

The Guardiola  years have brought moments of extraordinary joy and satisfaction, but there has been suffering too- and that is football . And yet Barca under Guardiola may have got to such a level of excellence , immersed  as it was in collective adulation, as to lose sight of its hidden frailties. Such was its narcissism.

But none of this should take away from Guardiola’s huge contribution to Barca’s greatness, and the development of Spanish national football. At his best Guardiola  showed  a rare combination in football of grace,  style, and nobility touched with mysticism, like a beautiful, illuminated apostle of the game,  painted by El Greco. Without him Barca will struggle to regain  such heavenly heights despite Guardiola’s unwavering belief that those youngsters, like himself and Tito Vilanova , who emerge from La Masia have an indestructible Barca strain in their DNA.

A great Bayern victory

Never thought I would end up supporting and praising a German team, but I did last night. The precisoun, flow, spirit, and energy of their assault on Mouirinho´s Real Madrid contributed to making last night´s semi-final the best game so far of this season´s Champion´s League. I doubt the final will come anywhere near this. If Bayern  repeats this performance, it will destroy Chelsea.

In Sitges last night the sports bars were mostly empty. Those that were not,  resonated to ecstatic cries of celebration. For Barca fans,  seeing Ronaldo´s blunder in the penalty shoot out was a sweet moment. It helped overcome the dissapointments of recent days.

But in fairness to Real Madrid, they too played a great offensive game, full of spirit, which should give Barca further cause for thought about why they have found it so difficult to score goals of late.

Meanmwhile international football this week has given us an indication of what we might expect from this summer´s European Championships. The Germans are looking strong, but so is Spain if Vicente Del Bosque can work his alchemy on Barca and Real Madrid players whose collective morale has taken a knock this week.

Barca´s nightmare night

So I eat my hat. Barca are not through to the Champions League final in Munich this morning as I had predicted days ago they might be, and sitting here writing this in Sitges, I share in the collective Catalan hang-over.

My heart and soul tells  me that Chelsea did not deserve to win. That a team that played for much of the game just defending their own goal line against a much more skilled and talented team that simply was unlucky on the night will make the final a more boring occasion than would otherwise have been the case.

But in the cold light of today one has to accept that there was something heroic in Chelsea´s resistance, showing a kind of spirit that was lacking in some of Barca´s key players, not least Messi and Alves. And that the Chelsea goals when they came showed quality.

For Barca fans it was another night of frustration,after losing to Chelsea in the first leg and Real Madrid atthe weekend,  watching missed opportunities by a team whose overall star status was badly let down by its evident lack of effective fire power. And yet the chant in Catalan of Óla, Ole, to be a Barca fan is the best thing on the world´ that went rund the Camp Nou after the end of the final whistle, suggests that cules still believe in their team´s greateness, and quite rightly so.

Chelsea may be briefly dancing on the grave of beautiful football, but it will resurrect soon enough this summer when La Roja play in the European championships.

Football is of course  more that just about technique and style. Its also about stategy , tactics, and spirit, and all three simply were not there in sufficient quantities in the Barca team last night.

Today is Johan Cruyff´s 65th birthday. He made Barca great by combining all the elements necessary to produce a beautiful football that could win. Pep Guardiola has learnt a lot from his mentor and helped develop Barca into the great team we have seen in recent years. But there was no dream team last night, just a rather tired group of hugely talented players  unable to resolve the nightmare of losing to a lesser but more deserving opponent.