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Barney Ronay

Barcelona Burger King

Pax Barcelona reigns — but it’s a reign, perhaps, more akin to the Roman Empire than Alexander the Great, crushing us into compliance “within a prison of engineered perfection,” lacking a human element to fall in love with. “For this consumer there is a certain processed, robotic quality in the application of Barcelona’s peerless skills…There is a textureless quality to this elite fondue. Every bite of Barcelona tastes of something similar: blended and gristle-free Barcelona.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

(Image: Burger King Steakhouse Angus burger. Image credit: AR Pratama/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Blame When Saturday Comes

WSC ploughed the field we all play in now — first with a literary, “unashamedly cerebral” take on the sport; first with football humor set-pieces; first with “the new vocabulary of puckish humour, critical scrutiny of football’s hierarchies and the promiscuous eliding of football with other parts of the popular culture. Cranky, and populist, it might seem a little outdated now, “like a slightly mildewed Victorian keystone buried within the sparkling bowels of a craning new-build mega-city, it has remained essentially unchanged as football has mushroomed around it.” And thank God for that. (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Andy Carroll and the Drinking Game

Andy Carroll’s alleged weakness for lager (eight or nine pints in one evening!) flows nicely into English football’s sudsy history, but Carroll’s status as Albion’s bright young hope means his servers will probably be calling the Daily Mail with his nightly quaff tallies. Blame lager itself, which “begets only lager, and a full raft of degenerative lager trimmings: the palette-sharpening lager-fag, the lager-hunger solace of the sodden kebab. Lager turns the world a single colour: lager colour.” (Barney Roney/The Guardian)

Take David Beckham. Please.

People used to go away; now they don’t. Take David Beckham, back giving interviews last week, before England’s latest World Cup memory could even begin decomposing. In his vampirish semi-retirement, still England’s most famous footballer, this Vegas Beckham symbolizes the failure of English football, the machinery of craven celebrity that constructed him, and “above all, a sense of congealment, of a handsomely branded stasis…and these things, you feel, aren’t about to go away just yet either.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

An #Englandfail Compendium

When it comes to stylish self-laceration, the French have nothing on the English. England crashed out of World Cup 2010 because its players are soccer-stupid (Martin Samuel/Daily Mail), because it’s an island nation with insular thinking (The Ball is Round), because of the creaky old 4-4-2 (Glenn Moore/Telegraph), because they play with too much passion (Musa Okwonga/New York Times-Goal), because they’re basically Everton (World Cup College), because Capello got 10 things wrong (Richard Williams/Guardian), because of so many things (Left Back in the Changing Room). It needs to take a step backwards and play youth for a cycle or two (twofootedtackle). It even needs to get off the plane better (Barney Ronay/The Guardian).

His Ideal Reader

Fabio Capello is packing Barney Ronay’s book The Manager with him to South Africa — which sets Barney Ronay’s writerly and football fan fantasies aswirl. “At a time when I’m all set to spend the next six weeks staring fixedly in Capello’s direction, a little piece of me could be nestling, double-agent-style, on his bedside table or penetrating behind that fiercely muscled frown during another hiatus in the departure lounge, whispering in his ear, perhaps, in those rare and vital moments of doubt.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: The Balls of John Terry

If Chelsea win the Premier League, would that deny us our need for sporting triumphs that indicate superior character? By one light, Chelsea have simply endured, are the “equivalent of zombie movie survivors…who laid in slightly more tins of rhubarb and shotgun cartridges than everyone else.” But their resilience really flows from their often-half-naked captain, the one man for whom a title will “represent a compelling personal tale of defiance.” With an unpalatable yet “strangely apposite twist,” history “will force us to admire his balls.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Reads of the Weekend: Full Time for Football?

The reasons to love football are legion; but the reasons to fall out of love beat against some of us, too, the waves of aging, injuries, wife-grumbles, playing pals who suddenly look pathetic and grinding disappointments of a game that seems to be slipping away from the ordinary person. Barney Ronay at FourFourTwo makes a literarily desperate case that we can’t stop playing…because we can’t; Alex Netherton of Who Ate All the Pies says English football is so ugly and hopeless that he can’t bear to watch anymore.

Read of the Day: England’s Keepers: The Iconography of Failure

Goalkeeping is “an illogical business, a pseudo science that — despite some waffle about angles and big-making and wrist-firmness — is still bound up in an invisible world of aura and personality and luck-creation.” And in this parallel, Entacto universe, England’s goalkeepers have “a flustered, unrehearsed quality. They seem unlucky.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Read of the Weekend: Head Game

There are no tactics in amateur football, right? Trying telling that to the weekend warriors in their deep-theory team talks, the “coaches” remonstrating their mates from the touchline. Why do they bother? Because amateur football occurs mostly inside our heads…of us imagining how we might one day play. (Barney Ronay/FourFourTwo)

Reads of the Day: Somebody Got Hurt Sunday

Somebody Got Hurt Sunday: The best on Achilles’ rupture: Paul Hayward/Guardian; Ian Chadban/Telegraph; James Hamilton/More Than Mind Games; Matthew Syed/The Times…plus a golden oldie by Barney Ronay/When Saturday Comes.

Mourhino Plays It Cool

Mourhino Plays It Cool: The Special One’s depressive presser at Stamford Bridge yesterday was almost anti-Mourhino…until he explained his restraint was out of respect for Chelsea. “At which point Mourinho looked so theatrically pious, as though Chelsea — rather than a football club — was his estranged virgin bride, and this very room his dear old dead mum’s mausoleum, that you started to get a sense of what he was up to.” (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: You Make Me Wanna Shout

You Make Me Wanna Shout: Amateur football is guaranteed to be noisy — in fact, not shouting while playing “can seem a little creepy, a little bit exhibitionist.” Yeah, it’s mostly “F***” from the bus to the pub — but when you shout “John’s on! Send it! John’s on! Send it! John’s on! Send it!” it’s more than just tactics — it’s like manly birdsong. (Barney Ronay/FourFourTwo)

England = Fail

Wayne Bridge, Emotional Suicide Bomber? With the Bridge/Terry soapdish, the British press has its 2010 narrative of English failure: John Terry starring as The Man Who Shagged Away the World Cup. Oh, but stop blaming the press…

Read of the Day: ‘You’re Not Very Good’

What does playing amateur football teach you? That you’re not very good, one hopes — and maybe just as bad as the British youth side that lost 90 matches in a row. Because the only thing worse than losing all the time…is winning just once.