The Booty Foul Game
And so there we sat, the footballing world, huddled inside on a still freshly enjoyable evening, lips pursed, bums squeaking, fingers poised with intent over the twittersphere, primed in anticipation and wet with giddiness at the prospect of watching the pinnacle of the beautiful game in all it’s glorious fruition.
The two biggest sides, the two biggest players and the one biggest head in football battling it out for a place in the biggest game in the world’s biggest sport. Unmovable object vs. irresistible force, brains vs. beauty, Coke vs. Pepsi, dogs vs. cats, El Classcio Supreme. Add your own orgasmically gushing Tydlesly-esque superlatives here. This was going to be a feast of utterly unquestionable awesomeness surely? “This is it!” – as Michael Jackson once prophetically announced before dropping limply to the floor in agony, prompting a wave of bizarre conspiracy theories and a worldwide sense of deflated disappointment. And if you can find a more obscurely accurate metaphor for the events that transpired in the Bernabeu last night, you might as well stop reading here, it isn’t going to get any better.
Quite why anyone actually thought we were in for a grand spectacle in the first place is slightly peculiar, considering the last two installments of El Quatro Classico had been typified by tense, bitty, low scoring grindhouse football and one of the teams was managed by Jose Mourinho. But alas, many of us nevertheless did. Just as we’d done before the last game to raise such global expectation – the World Cup Final – swayed a little too romantically by the stature and grandiose of the occasion before it descended into a cheat off between thuggery and theatrics.
Not long after Ronaldo had fired his first customary shot into the Sun it became painfully obvious what the housewives favorite in the dashing coat had set his team up for, and what the heavenly ordained Princes of perfection and Guild of the guapa would do to counter it. In case you missed it, or nodded off somewhere around the 30 minute mark, it essentially went something like this:
Foul, dive, foul, dive, hysterical shrieking arm waving. Foul, dive, dive, dive, foul, imaginary card, foul, dive, synchronized arm waving in the referee’s face, dive, foul, big girly non-fight, dive, half time, fight.
Sandwiched somewhere in-between the handbagging and entirely pointless super slow motion footage of players gesticulating to each other or falling over were indeed some sparse attempts at semi competent football. Both Ronaldo and Villa had decent efforts saved but the actual playing highlights to that point could have easily been condensed into a novelty seaside gift shop flick-book or diagrammed on the back of a fag packet.
Barcelona’s customary tactic of complaining en masse about absolutely everything continued unabated off the pitch as their ludicrously haired reserve goalkeeper Pinto (a player who once – brilliantly – managed to halt an opposition attack by imitating the referee’s whistle) got himself sent off for waving his arms about in someone’s face (a recurring theme throughout the evening and possibly – given the neutral nationality of the officials – simply the Spanish equivalent of speaking slower and louder in English in order to get your point across to a perplexed foreigner.)
Despite this complete embarrassment to the occasion the second half started as if neither team had seen anything wrong with it, and in fact, thought it could stand to include a hell of a lot more. Pedro, obviously taking inspiration from his teammate – the eminently dislikable Sergio Busquets (or ‘Crumbling Biscuits’ as I prefer to call him) – decided to pull out the old Rivaldo “Oh my God I’ve been hit in the chest but the pain has inexplicably manifested itself in my face” routine and everyone bar the kit men ran onto the field to protest this startling medical irregularity and wave their arms around in peoples faces again. By this point it had gone well beyond descending into farce and could have genuinely – contrary to all common sense – have been improved by the addition of Lee Evans doing his Norman Wisdom but somehow fooling people into thinking it’s Lee Evans shtick in the center circle.
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Then Pepe got sent off.
Depending on what side of the fence you’re sitting on Jose Mourinho’s one (very successful and feted) man against the world persecution complex is either endearingly arrogant or narcissistically infuriating, and considering most people in English football sit quite comfortably in the “OMG isn’t he amazing? And look how wonderful he looks in that coat!” garden, the anti-brigade are often quick to get riled up by the man. But even the most ardently anti-Jose observer must surely find the startling regularity at which his players seem to get sent off against Barcelona a perplexing occurrence. After the aforementioned medical marvel Sergio ‘Crumbling Biscuits’ and his amazing face pain come ‘peek-a-boo’ antics against Inter last year, it’s only natural that any manager would’ve raised his concerns over retaining 11 against 11 in future encounters. Can anyone really see Ferguson or Wenger not tub thumping the issue if they’d had a player dismissed in the last five successive matches, seven in all?
In true Ferguson style, Jose had presumably assumed his broaching of the subject would afford his teams a degree of protection from self aware referees, but instead they seem to have had the opposite effect, and after Pepe had been unjustly dispatched (though being a nasty player/looking like an evil Kiwi fruit probably counted against him) Jose bypassed the arm waving and took the tried and trusted route of speaking slower and louder in English to the perplexed foreign officials and was promptly dispatched himself, to sit in a cage and pout angrily whenever the camera came near him.
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From then on his rope a dope tactics were futile and the game, by extension, was beyond Madrid. Thankfully however, buoyed and assured by their now customary player advantage, Barcelona were free to stop waving their arms around in front of people’s faces (and their own) and play some kind of football which, blessedly, resulted in the ever mercurial Lionel Messi scoring one of those goals that should finally convert the last in the ever dwindling number of people still trying desperately to claim Ronaldo is the superior player. It was lovely to watch, but – like the cherry on top of a particularly moldy piece of salmonella chicken – couldn’t rescue the game from what it was, which was, by all accounts, a horrible and ugly advertisement for world football. While Messi continued to confirm his glittering reputation, smudges may have appeared, for many, on Barcelona’s.
The last time Manchester United met Barca, in the Rome final of 2009, Guillem Balague (though it could feasibly have been Gabriele Marcotti, I always get them mixed up, like Ronaldinho and Trisha) pitted it as all that was wrong with the corporate, materialistic global game against all that was right and beautiful with it, right down to their contrasting shirt sponsors. Yesterday he spent his evening fiercely defending the arm waving, face-clutching gamesmanship of the Spanish Champions (and their opponents) to a vanguard of angry, self-righteous tweeters (is there any other kind? – [N.B, why not follow me on Twitter?!]).
Despite all their undoubted elegance and beauty with the ball, the once small movement decrying Barcelona as anything but the bastions of the beautiful has started growing, albeit only a little. This time around (assuming both sides don’t implode cataclysmically in their second legs) there may well be a fair few converts to the evil, corporate, materialistic side of the football beast. The Champions elect and diminutive demi-gods have certainly gone ever so slightly down in my estimation. And I say that with my hand on my heart. Or is it my face? No, heart, no, wait, which is which again?
Follow Oscar on Twitter here, Twitter/oscarpyejeary where you can witness him being throughly self-righteous almost constantly.
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