Barca fall for Madridista magic, once again
Tuesday 09 March 2010 12:00
La Liga Loca learned two things during its cheeky visit to the UK over the weekend, and one on its return to Spain.
Brighton appears to have morphed from a pleasing, chill-out crusty-friendly paradise into a neo-fascist dictatorship with haranguing instructions to its citizen-brothers plastered on every surface imaginable.
One pub was cheerfully informing its clientele, for example, that they were being watched on CCTV and ordered them to refrain from talking on their ‘intrusive’ mobiles and informed them that smoking within 100 metres of the front door was illegal and that they should leave the establishment in total silence under pain of death once their fun quota has been reached.
And not to drink too much, either. Or eat anything that had not been locally sourced.
The city authorities have also imposed a directive forcing any male under the age of 26 to dress like a member of Vampire Weekend.
Brighton - you are being watched...
But to continue the weirdness, the blog has returned to Spain to discover that Barcelona is no longer the super-sexy, stylish wonder club that completed its glorious global conquest just a few short months ago.
Instead, it has turned into a giant, blubbering, Kleenex-clutching jellyfish. In a pinny.
The weekend’s draw against Almeria still sees Pep’s Dream Boys side-by-side with Real Madrid with a good 13 games to go.
Indeed, with 25 matches played in la Liga, Barcelona are actually two points better off than last year’s rather handy team.
But rather than giving a superior smile, a nonchalant shrug and telling the Madridista camp that we’ll all see how things look come May, the league champions have gone more than a little crazy.
The local Barcelona press have always been fairly sensitive souls and that’s exactly why their trouble-stirring counterparts in Capital City engage the same winding-up tactics on them every single year, with the same desperately predictable results.
Around this time, every season, the Madridista press accuse Barcelona of being in the process of - or about to - bottle it big time.
And every time, every season, the local papers do little to counter this accusation by getting their Catalan panties in a right old bunch in response.
Mundo Deportivo have reacted to Barca’s campaign in la Liga where just one game has been lost and a positive goal difference of 45 has been achieved, by claiming that the Dream Boys need to completely reinvent their signing strategies with Tuesday's headline shouting “Sign Goals!” over a picture of David Villa - a striker who was busy not scoring in the previous evening’s encounter between Valencia and Racing.
Pep - less cool than 12 months ago...
The paper also has a massive wailing blub of what they perceive to be Real Madrid’s dastardly tactics, complaining that the club is ‘the leader in tricks’.
“The agitation and propaganda of the Madridista football regime has worked efficiently and ended up terrifying the referees and creating a climate of persecution,” complained a hysterical Lluis Fox in Tuesday’s edition.
“It wasn’t necessary to mount such a hostile campaign against Barcelona,” continues the columnist whilst scooping up his cojones which had just dropped to the floor and rolled under his desk.
Sport are also on the conspiracy bandwagon by screaming on their website that Juan Jose Gallego Galindo, the linesman who caused the sending off of Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Saturday night, was a Real Madrid fan - a claim based on the damning evidence of a comment from Santiago Canizares’ Twitter site.
They too are forgetting that the current battle at the top of the table is due to Real Madrid being a little better than last season's side, having spent all the money in Spain on a new team, rather than any existential crisis in the Catalan camp.
Mundo Deportivo are quite right to call the Madridista naughtiness of late ‘tricks’. The problem is that they are falling for them, all over again.
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About Tim Stannard
La Liga Loca is the playground for the evil, more childish half of Tim Stannard’s psyche to be let loose. The other 50% is a contributor to FourFourTwo magazine, Football365, Sabotage Times as well as other publications such as UEFA Champions Magazine and When Saturday Comes. He is also a regular guest on Real Madrid TV’s Extra Time show and works as a TV producer extraordinaire for hire. To contact Tim directly email laligaloca@yahoo.co.uk