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.