Writing Nonsense

Yesterday morning as I was browsing through the NY Times during a break at work I stumbled into this piece written by Rob Hughes in which he claimed that the Inter - Barcellona scoreless draw on Wednesday was far less entertaining than the S. Liege - Arsenal game.

He started saying that: "Goals, it’s true, do not by themselves denote quality. But they are the purpose of the game" making here a normal mistake for many american soccer wannabes. He then went on calling "Rubbish" Mourinho's explanations that the game had been a tactical war between him and Guardiola aknowledging the superiority - at this point - of the Barcelona team. For Hughes the S. Liege team "sent the fans home with the knowledge that they tried, they dared to take on superior foes, and they just ran out of stamina and luck in the end" while implicity saying that Inter and Barcelona fans, plus the billions of soccer/football fans worldwide should and/or would have gone home or turned off their TVs disappointed because of the scoreless draw and because the "inferior" team didn't fought to its death to score.

I can assure Mr. Hughes though that reality is a lot different from the representation he tried to give. While it can be comprehensible that the Belgian fans may have been in delight 5 minutes into the game, I can confirm to him (after hearing an acquaintance of mine who was at the stadium in Liege on Wednesday) that all of the S. Liege supporters would have given an arm to sneak home with a 1-0 nothing boring win than witnessing their team go down that way.

The same is true for the Inter - Barcelona game (that I witnessed as a neautral spectator being a fan of Udinese and Osasuna). On Thursday I spoke with a dozen people who were in San Siro and every one of them was thrilled for the game they saw; every one of them had no problems in admitting that the Barcelona side was superior to theirs as far as attacking was concerned, but they were on Cloud 9 for the adrenaline and the emotions that the match gave them on Wednesday night.

They could clearly recall their feelings at seeing Ibrahimovic wearing a different shirt, a friend of mine recalled cutting abruptly a call to his girlfriend because of a Messi drive towards Inter's goal, my friend sitting next to me at his house was cursing both assistant referees for another offside wrongly signalled.

The game may have been scoreless but I challenge Mr. Hughes to find a man who saw both games (in Liege and Milan) and that would choose Arsenal's win over Inter-Barcelona's hard fought draw, a battle on the pitch where in the end there were no winners and losers. Not a game for the ages but definitively one more worth remembering than a 2-3 game played in Belgium.

The Express before the Rise

The first week of this year's Vuelta ended the way it began, with Cancellara in the golden jersey. The Bern Express regain the leader's symbol today in a rainy Valencia winning by a large margin the second ITT of the race. He did so riding an almost carbon-copy race of the ITT he won at the Tour: he started slowly, did an impressive middle part distancing beyond reach every other competitor and finished strongly but not as strongly as in the earlier part of the race.

The most impressive rider in this first week has been without a doubt André Greipel, the German rider of Columbia-HTC won two stages (one after an amazing crash less than 3 kms from the finish line) in a row and weared the golden jersey into today's stage. Another rider who has been strong in this first week has been Vacansoleil's Slovenian sprinter Borut Bozic who was consistent in the Top 10 in the bunch sprints and who took Stage 6 as his first ever Grand Tour stage. Slightly disappointing has been Daniele Bennati instead (at least for me), with the Liquigas rider never finding his groove in the bunch sprints so far.

As far as the GC riders are concerned, the situation is pretty interesting. Cadel Evans leads the way, 1 minute and 12 seconds behind Cancellara, with a two seconds advantage on Piti Valverde and eight on Samuel Sanchez. Fulgsang, who is in 21st position so far, is only 51 secs behind Evans, and ahead of him we find riders such as Basso, Gerdemann, Vinokourov and Zubeldia. So I do believe that we're in for an interesting stage tomorrow, the first mountain stage of the Vuelta.

Tomorrow the race will arrive on the Categoria Especial Alto de Aitana, after the riders already went up and down seven times (four category 2 climbs and three category 3). It's a stage well suited for a long early breakaway while the leaders won't try anything before the last climb is well under way. The stage will not be decisive as far as the GC is concerned, and I won't be surprised to see a small group of 6-8 riders arrive together atop the Alto de Aitana.

I do certainly hope to be wrong and that already from the foot of the climb we'll see fireworks from the favorites, but I doubt this will happen.

The Rumbling of the Mountain

For many years Dinara Safina has been only "Marat's little sister", living in the shade of her slam-winning older brother. Now the situation has been reversed with 29-year-old Marat on the verge of retiring from the game and 23-year-old Dinara clinging on WTA N.1's ranking spot for most of the year.

The two siblings couldn't be more similar in physical apparency and different as far as mental strength is concerned. Marat has always been subjected to highs and lows, a fact that made him so unpredictable that you sat in the stands or in front of the TV and asked yourself which Marat was going to play that day, the slam-winning one or the one capable of losing to a man who had never before defeated a top-50 guy. Dinara, on the other, hand is almost certainly less talented than her brother (and probably of some of her opponents on the WTA circuit), but she has two characteristics that allow her to make amends for her slightly lower talent: consistency and resiliency.

As far as the first is concerned, she has shown of being capable of reaching at least the Semifinals in all four slam tournaments: this year she has reached 8 finals, winning three (2 o clay and 1 on hard surface), and lost twice more in the semis (both on grass). She may have yet to win a slam but f.e. this year she has twice been the runner up and reached the semifinal in the other.

Talking about her resiliency, I had the chance to witness it last night during her first round match at the US Open against teenage aussie Olivia Rogowska that she eventually won 6-7 6-2 6-4. After gifting her opponent the first set - and Dinara did exactly that failing to exploit the chances she had in the 12th game and in the tie break and eventually committing a couple of crucial errors - she came back strongly in the second set despite an almost non-existent serve. Once Rogowska started to play in the third set like she did in the first, Dinara found herself twice in the hole, at 0-2 and 2-4: in the former the aussie even had the chance to climb up to 3-0, a risk that Dinara avoided thanks to a couple of wonderful plays. The key game was the 9th, on Rogowska's serve, when the two girls battled for almost 15 mins exchanging some good plays and some not unforced but really horrible errors due to fatigue, tiredness and the heat.

The decisive turning point of the game came when Rogowska came down to the net and tried three times, unsuccesfully, to claim the advantage only to see Dinara unlash a perfect backhand that curled away from the aussie and landed a couple of inches inside the left-side line of Rogowska's court. From there Dinara went on to claim the last 6 points of the game breaking for 5-4 and then taking advantage of 3 unforced errors by her opponent in the 10th game of this 3-set marathon.

It was a game that if it had featured her brother I could have easily predicted as a Marat's loss (despite admitting that he's my favorite player in the ATP circuit because of his unpredictability and capacity to entertain), but with Dinara on the court I was certain she'd be able to find a way to cope with it because of her resiliency (despite her two first round losses this year in minor tournaments).

Now she will meet Kristina Barrois of Germany in the second round - the German is ranked 67th in the singles ranking - with a chance to meet Barrois's doubles partner Tathiana Garbin in the third round, if the Italian will defeat Czech Petra Kvitova.