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.

City Domination, for 18 more games

Despite vowing to myself that I'd refrain to talk about big time football but since the only sports event I was able to catch up in the last couple of days was the Milan derby (and since I'm working in Milan at the moment) I'm going to write a couple of paragraphs on how it went and why.

Wel, first of all I guess everyone knows what the final score was, and I might say that only over-enthusiastic Milan fans or people who do not follow Italian football could have expected Inter to lose this game. Last week's results could have led some people to believe that Inter was not the team to beat and that Milan had finally found some groove after its disastrous pre-season. The problem is that Mourinho got what he wanted (Snejider) and was finally able to bench the useless armchair called Vieira this week. The Inter side was also able to exploit and show to everyone who still hadn't got it (like its President, who never gets anything) Milan's weaknesses: the wings. Especially on the right side Maicon and Eto'o did whatever they wanted and all the first three goals came from attacks down that side.

I won't be in the office tomorrow, but I do believe that the minority of Inter fans will send plenty of emails to the majority Milan fans (with us neutrals as cc) with jokes and trash talk. The Milan Derby is something that is strongly felt throughout the city, something enhanced by the fact that football is the official religion of Italy.

On a different note, mixed results for the teams I support during this weekend. To quote just a few:
- wins for Man City, NAC and Istra Pula
- draws for Osasuna, Bodo/Glimt and Keflavik
- losses for my beloved TPS (on ET in the Cup), Udinese and Belenenses (both 3-1s away); plus for Hannover 96