Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 32

Tales of the Imagination

As Barca limbers up for its serial encounters with its arch rival, I thought it worth commenting on the rather worrying urban myth that has been fuelled in recent times by Real Madrid fanatics.

Out of respect to both sporting institutions, and weary of falling foul of libel laws, I will have to phrase this as delicately as I can-but suffice it to say that the quite unsubstantiated and untrue suggestion is that Barca has only managed to have got to where it has  got to-record results across three major competitions with minimum renewal of the squad and extraordinary endurance by some of its key players- thanks to some imagined help, not necessarily  in the form of Divine intervention.

Now not only does this taste of sour grapes  (and clearly false) but also demonstrates a lack of understanding of human psychology. Any team is stimulated by success, not least when it is achieved not by any one individual but by the balance and variety of talented individuals working for each other and the collective spirit that this generates. One for all and all for one.  Moreover teams can be inspired by managers who are worthy of respect themselves and solution focused.

A bit of history may be worth recalling here. The arrival in 1958 of Helenio Herrera as Barca's new manager marked the beginning of one of the most dynamic periods in the club's history. During his stint at the club, Herrera took the team and shook it to its roots. He used his powers of psychology to motivate a club that all too often had stumbled under the burden of its own history, too easily believing  that games were won or lost at the bequest of a conspiratorial government, or poor referee, rather than because of the relative strength of  the competing teams (Barca vs. Real Madrid).

The ensuing transformation in the way that Barca saw itself and confronted every match was such as to raise suspicions beyond Catalonia. There was talk of trickery, secret rituals, and drugs. Some of the more hostile journalists even dubbed Herrera the "pharmacy cup coach." The suggestion was that the team's medical staff had their bags stuffed with every conceivable performance-enhancing substance. It was all nonsense of course.

But I suspect we are in for a great deal of psychology in the comings days, and not all of it positive, as well as some extremely competitive football.   It's thus going to take, once again,  all of Pep Guardiola's genius as a tactician and motivator to bring the best out of his team if Barca is to hold off  what I believe is Mourinho's and his team's ultimate double ambition: a win at the Bernabeu on Saturday before reaching Wembley and conquering. Both sides know that in a season like this one, winning the Copa Del Rey only will provide a consolation prize. And let us not forget that it is Mourinho not Guardiola that is the Special One or so the Portuguese once claimed.

The rivalry that defies Logic

 

A long-term friend in Barcelona and wise  cule  thinks  that Pep Guardiola, having assured himself of qualification tomorrow for the semi-finals of the Champions League , should go on to the Bernabeu with his reserve team.

His reasoning? Beating Mourinho that way would make an even  bolder statement about the philosophy of La Cantera – and even if Barca loses, it would not mean losing La Liga, while strengthening the first squad for the other challenges left in the season-the Copa del Rey and the road to Wembley.

Of course Pep won't do it. He is expected to beat Real Madrid trophy hunting not just once but four times in the next month or so. Our cules mad to dream?  Probably,  but not certainly. This rivalry defies logic.

The ghost of Olivares

Let's be honest- watching Mourinho and Real Madrid thumping Spurs last night would have been an unsettling feeling for most cules.  Not only has the wishful thinking that Barca might face Redknapp's boys in the semi-finals evaporated (what a pity for us Londoners) , but its biggest rival looks like a tight army unit that has identified the main target and will relentlessly pursue it. Mourinho has clearly given up on winning La Liga and is hoping to pull off something of a record by taking yet another club to Champion's League victory.

I fear that Barca this morning will be suffering to fight off what I call the Olivares syndrome. For much of their history Catalans have been suffering the consequences of the arrogance and brutish determination from Madrid once exemplified by the Count Duke and what my grandfather the doctor and historian Gregorio Marañon called La Pasion de Mandar (the passion to order and trample on people). Barca seem to suffer from potential feelings of inferiority whenever Madrid are on the roll.

It's going to take all of Pep Guardiola's genius as a tactician and motivator to bring the best out of his team tonight if Barca is to win as convincingly as Madrid did against Spurs. He must know that he has a much tougher fight on his hands against Shakhtar

Madcap (Non) Policing

This evening the Conservative-led Wandsworth Council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee plans to agree in principle to a scheme to cease the current much loved Parks Police service and move towards negotiating an agreement with the Met as reported in yesterday's London Evening Standard.

Some Conservative Councilors are putting a gloss on things insisting that the plan will not undermine current policing levels in the popular Battersea Park. But comments by police officers in recent weeks about cuts the Met is facing generally leaves me with no doubt that the ability of the force to deliver on the deal is going to be limited by its own huge budgetary restrictions and mounting pressures on the public order, counter-terrorism and Olympics fronts.

However much the Council tries to tell us  it can pull the strings, it knows that the Met Commissioner has responsibility not just for the policing for the whole of London but also overarching responsibility for policing counter-terrorism nationwide and those are his priorities. Funds are limited. Police financing moreover is  a complex matter  as to who in the end really gets what,  with the Met's main funding lines coming from a cash strapped Home Office and  a similarly stretched Mayor's Office. T

Those planning to pull some Met officers off the streets and let them loose for a while on our green spaces seem willing to sacrifice the very unique role that the existing Parks Police have developed over the years precisely because of its local and community based status- contributing to the safety and security of citizens  with its close liaison with local residents and organizations like The Friends of Battersea Park.  Without the Parks police, Battersea and other parks face a very real possibility of a less fluid flow of vital intelligence, as well as absence of the kind of park-based permanent presence of officers ther has been until now. Life is on the brink of becoming  less safe and less secure for a majority of decent  park users.

The Council is telling us- 'don't worry it's al been agreed with Boris'- and the Met will look after existing bylaws and regulations in the Park. But the issue has nothing to do with regulations, but everything to do with enforcement. Whatever might be Boris's good intentions to make London safer, neither his budget nor the Met's is limitless. The justifiable overrding fear among park users is that give  this mad scheme a maximum of couple years and Battersea Park will be a dangerous free-for-all for every nasty thug in the capital, whether on two or four legs.

A noble colleague

Today's FT includes a thought-provoking and beautifully restrained piece by my former colleague Charles Clover who was expelled from Libya at the weekend and is now back in his Moscow bureau.

Apart from being a thoroughly nice human being, Charles is an experienced journalist who has reported with excellence on  other hot spots of the Middle East. But he knew he was taking a professional risk by writing a very personal eyewitness account of the incident that led to his expulsion.

Charles was breakfasting in his Tripoli hotel and meditating on the surreal coverage he and other journalists had been complicit in-every move monitored and controlled by Gaddafi's thought police with pro-government demonstrations and allied bombing 'atrocities' cynically orchestrated to serve the Libyan leader's propaganda. Then in came a woman pointing at her thighs and screaming that she had been raped repeatedly by a group of Gaddafi loyalists.

Rather than permit an impromptu press conference during which the assorted media could have made their minds up whether the woman was genuine or out of her mind or a combination of both, hotel catering and security staff turned into a heavy mob. The ensuing brawl had one journalist being punched, and Charles himself thrown to the floor and kicked before he issued a formal complaint to the hotel management.

Now safely out of the country, Charles suggests that Gaddafi's men  scored an own goal by deciding to not only rape the woman but then stop her from telling her story in front of a crowd of journalists in a way that had the story magnified in headlines around the world. But his conscience pricks at the thought that the only person to really come out losing was the woman herself, bundled away to an uncertain fate, once the journalists had given up physically fighting on her behalf.

The story of course gets us no nearer to shedding light on the supporters and leaderships of the anti-Gaddafi rebels that NATO and Qatar has geared up to help. But this is a worthwhile read by a journalist who is sensitive and intelligent enough not to completely put himself at the heart of the story. It tells us a thing or two  about the real dilemmas facing correspondents in time of war when the first casualty is truth.

A Better Recipe for demos in London

Former Met senior officer Brian Paddick has provided some worthwhile advice to his former colleagues about how to better control the  next anti-cuts demo and prevent it from descending into  headline grabbing violence.

He suggests quite rightly that prevention rather than reaction is the best remedy and those suspected of planning to turn a peaceful march into a riot should be required to show their faces and be thoroughly searched before hand, and, if necessary 'taken out' by being arrested.

These are the kind of tactics-together with more focused intelligence gathering-that have worked well in diminishing the kind of mindless punch-ups that used to be such a regular event among football hooligans.

But I would add a further suggestion. It should not be beyond the remit of the main organisers of future demonstrations – the TUC's Brendan Barber , inter alia, please note – to put in  place a much greater measure of self-policing or stewardship with the great majority of participants exercising their citizen's right to identify and isolate the small groups of potential trouble makers at an early stage. A march attended by over a quarter of million peaceful protestors should be able to contain a group of less than three hundred lunatics and not simply stand by watching and waiting before public and private property is trashed and police officers brutally assaulted.

On the subject of intelligence, it does not take a rocket scientist to find evidence of what the violent fringe may be planning on any given day or indeed the loopy politics that informs  their actions. Among the garbage littering  parts of the West End after saturday's demonstration were copies of the 'anarchist paper' Resistance. Its front page covers a split headline equating the rights on London's streets with the demonstation in Cairo's central square, where the movement to bring about a change of regime was hatched.

To equate one with the other is of course a travesty, an insult to the thousands of Egyptians who won the hearts and mind of law-abiding  democrats  around the globe through their non-violent action and spirit of resistance in the face of repression.

The 'anarchists' who broke through doors and windows and threw bottles of ammonia on Saturday may kid themselves into thinking they are on a cusp of a revolution in the UK but the reality is that they have more on common with fascist storm troops of the kind that Mosley used in London' East End during the 1930's and Mubarak used more recently at one point to try and break up democracy in Cairo's square.

Bad losers & Good Lovers

 

There is nothing worse in life but a bad loser, but then there is nothing better than a productive love match.

Wenger continues to cry foul over the match at the Nou Camp, thus in denial about the extent to which Arsenal were systematically out played on all fronts. Not only were they pressed successfully by Barca everytime they tried to hold the ball, but struggled throughout the game to contain every avalanche of attack from the opposing side, not to mention their inability to destroy a skilled game of possession and passing through the resort to brutal tactics. On every conceivable statistic, Arsenal lost to Barca , outpassed, outcarded, and finally earning the dubious distinction of failing to aim one successful shot at goal.

Meanwhile I am delighted to see that Pique's love affair with Shakira is now well and truly out in the open, with photographs in this week's Hola magazine showing player and singer tenderly holding hands and sharing a car together.

As I have reported before, this star-studded match, not only in terms of the popular international coverage it fuels among the young and old, but also in terms of the club's strategic relationship with the world of philanthropy should perhaps be seen only in the best of light. Shakira not only is a great dancer with a good voice but also aspires to have a noble personality. She sponsors programmes for underprivileged kids in Colombia. What with this week's further announcement of Barca's  promotional agreement with Latin America's development bank, and the continuing  success of the club's young  Latin American-born  players, this is the biggest and potentially most lucrative Hispanic-American movida since Columbus set sail from Palos and left us with his eternal statue  near the port of Barcelona.

I suspect that privately Barca's high command must be hoping that Pique will not be excessively distracted by the demands of his relationship. Pep Guardiola  will need his whole first team firing on all cylinders over the coming testing months as the club faces the demands of La Liga , the King's Cup, and the Champions League with the weight of  its reputation as the world's best on its shoulders. Let's hope , for his team's sake, that Pique's heart and soul is in the right place. Fingers crossed.

Suffering in the Nou Camp

I caught up with the Arsenal fan at Gerona airport as we were waiting to catch the plane back to London. He was at the news stand thumbing through a report in an English newspaper of his team's defeat at the Nou Camp. He seemed a quieter man than the one who, with his mates,  had pranced about near the stadium two hours before the match, rat-assed, and singing 'We've got Cesc Fabregas' over and over again. I felt kind of sorry for him and thought of nothing better to say than , 'Sorry about last night mate, but the best team won  didn't they?" To which he gestured  with an upright finger ,saying as he went, 'we were robbed by the referee.'

Wenger clearly thought so. He  spent most of Tuesday night blaming everything on the referee and will no doubt defend himself before UEFA. As for his players –it was not just a Dutchman who played-well, like a Dutchman.   This was an Arsenal team  that came out, like the Dutch  did in the World Cup final against Spain, seemingly intent on snuffing out Barca's play with brute force. Wenger's boys  were   lucky to get away with conceding just one penalty. One thing is certain though: Respect is no longer  a word equated with Arsenal-Barca ties. The gloves have been taken off.

Thankfully for some 93,000 Barca fans Tuesday night will be remembered for something else-for suffering and resurrection. In the lead-up to the match Pep Guardiola's stress-related back injury had personified a team that was showing signs of exhaustion under the burden of a gruelling schedule of triple trophy hunting and having Mourinho at Real Madrid.

Pujol couldn't make it although he would have played on a stretcher if called to do so. But Pep was there in the final hours,hiding his pain and staying with his players so that a team came out motivated enough to play with some of its style in-tact ,  and win . My man of the match was Mascherano who played like a noble gladiator in the lion's den, before limping off, having given it his all. They used to call it 'Sweating the shirt' in the old days.

This was no carnival, more a football Via Crucis, suitably played on the eve of Lent.

Miss hits

 

Some great ball control, wonderful passing movements, and a nice build up to the good Keita goal but only 1-0 in the end- and against Zaragoza. I lost count of how many lost chances.

It was great to have Valdes back. But  his anguished look every time he was involved in a clash with an opponent made him look fragile. As for Pep, God knows how many pain killers he was carrying in his bloodstream to get him on his feat.

We need to make the most of Pujol's return on Tuesday and find our way to scoring goals. Let's hope that Lionel is not just on fire, but can deliver on target.

I am a cule supporter of La Roja

The other day I travelled to Arsenal's  Emirates stadium in the company of friends from London's Penya Blaugrana and some late arrivals from Barcelona. Half-way between the Embankment and Holloway station, we were joined by a group of Arsenal fans. At one point they tried to annoy us with the chants  'We've got Cesc Fabregas, We've got Cesc Fabregas' . Much as I wish that Cesc was at Barca I felt more annoyed hearing a young Catalan tell the Arsenal fans that Spain's World Cup had left him cold.

I remembered the exchange last night, watching the Mestalla stadium give Iniesta an ovation when he was substituted  during the Valencia-Barca match. Did cheering Iniesta's  goal in South Africa mark me out as anti-Barca? I don't think so.  Let's enjoy our football, respect our players, and really demonstrate that the values of FC Barcelona include civility and tolerance.