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Sid Lowe

Surviving Joe Pesci in the Desert

The bargain Real Madrid has made with the devil to beat Barcelona is now in full flower — they’ve lost the league, the players are embarrassed, Mourinho’s tactics infuriate the ancients. And yet the Madridistas celebrate a draw, their smiles a war between desperate hope and simple desperation, survivors of a meet with Joe Pesci in the desert. “Two former coaches agreed: if we had done this, we’d have been sacked; a former Madrid player was privately spitting blood — this, he said, was not worthy of Madrid. And even mad Madridista Tomás Roncero, while talking up the ‘euphoria,’ admitted: ‘It can be hard to take the medicine when it tastes like castor oil.’” (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

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Read of the Day: Man-Sticker Love

Picture a grown man, an accomplished professional who also happens to be a hopeless World Cup sticker completist – railing against Panini and their artificial shortage of certain bizarrely random players, skulking around swap meets for a glimpse of the elusive Danny Shittu of Nigeria. “The truth is I am sad. And I am addicted. I can’t go a day without my fix of got-got-got-got-NEED! I’m not complete until North Korea is.”  (Sid Lowe/Sports Illustrated)

Reads of the Day: Upon Further Review, England Lose

As clear as Frankie’s goal was yesterday, so too is England’s breakdown: Luke Dempsey at The Goal Post says the squad is 45 years behind other countries in terms of technical ability; The Run of Play’s Alan Jacobs argues England is plagued by “backshadowing,” the belief that one’s cause is always being betrayed by imperfect decision-making; Sid Lowe writes at the CBC’s World Cup blog that England’s tournament play has been “eye-bleedingly awful”; The Guardian editorializes that it might be time for the country to try a new national sport. (Oh, right: And Zonal Marking says Germany was pretty good, too.)

The Bluff That Saved Valencia

How did Valencia cheat certain death and live to make the Champions League — all while hanging onto Villa, Silva and Mata? By ignoring the debt piled up from building the still unfinished new Mestalla — “the second greatest white elephant in Spanish football after Dmytro Chygrynskiy” — and bluffing other investors with a worthless share sale to fans worthy of the Green Bay Packers. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: The Pointless Passion of Atlético Madrid

While Real Madrid’s fans are “prisoners of results,” those of perennial losers Atlético Madrid’s are working-class “prisoners of a feeling, of their colours” says Atleti homeboy Fernando Torres. Except that the feeling is doom, the passion curdled into a masochistic cult of collapse and martyrdom, Humphrey Bogart instead of Cary Grant. (One supporters’ club is called “The Suffering.”) “Atlético fans would follow Atlético to the ends of the earth. All too often that’s exactly where they are heading.” (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Shock Therapy for the Drop Zone

Real Valladolid’s Javier Clemente is the managerial equivalent of shock paddles: Club presidents, bathed in the midnight sweat of imminent relegation, summon him to scream and bully and electrify their teams out of the danger zone. Never mind that he hasn’t won anything in 26 years and hasn’t completed a full season in almost 20 — he gets results. And tells off everyone in the process. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

The Two Faces of Zlatan Ibrahimović

The first Barca-Arsenal game perfectly summed all the contradictions of Zlatan Ibrahimović — not just his “awesome and appalling” season with Barca, but his career. He missed cringe-worthy sitters, then scored two massive goals and watched his team fall apart after he was removed. “At half time, he was rubbish; at full time, he was a genius. Maybe he is actually both.” (Sid Lowe/FIFA World Cup Blog)

A Son of the System

They tried to hide Cesc Fábregas, did his hometown youth side, so Barca’s scouts wouldn’t see him — because they knew. For all Thierry Henry’s pain at playing Arsenal, Fábregas tonight goes to war (pending injury) against més que un club — it’s the team that sent a taxi 55km each way every day to pick him up for training at age 10, and the kids named Piqué and Messi that beat him at table tennis and Playstation and mocked his bad taste in music. And that he defended with his fists mid-pitch. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

La Liga = Scotland – €3.5bn

Spain’s total football debt is €3.5bn, and the fiscal decay goes well beyond Real Madrid and Barcelona — only 8% of what clubs spend on average can be covered by liquid assets, there’s no penalty for administration, and clubs blackmail their towns while hopeless of catching the Big Two. “Spain,” says Sevilla’s sporting director, “reminds me of Scotland.” (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Short People

Lionel Messi’s biggest accomplishment last week: Not the brace of trebles, or even zooming right past the Wayne Rooney debate and straight for immortality. For all the talk of his performance against Real Zaragosa transcending language itself, his best work is to confound one of our basic prejudicial categories — i.e., the conventional modern view that physical strength is the best measure of a player. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)

Read of the Day: The Casey Stengel of La Liga

You’re Real Valladolid, you suck, you’ve no hope of avoiding relegation — so when you sack your manager, to whom do you turn? Onésimo Sánchez — a pot-bellied, poor man’s Maradona in his day, now a mile-a-minute wisecracker who yells “I shit on God!” from the touchline…when he’s not insulting his players. La Liga, meet your Casey Stengel. (Sid Lowe/The Guardian)