There is another clásico this weekend, another head-to-head between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. But it is now possible to wonder how many more of these we’re going to getTowards the end of his life Mozart wrote a piece of music called Ein musikalischer Spaß, or “a musical joke”, intended as a satire on bad composers. As you might expect it contained a hilarious discord in the horns section, some off-key sonata and – LOL – a polytonal finale.No doubt back in the 1780s this was all very weeping-laughing-emoji-face. Listening to it now, A Musical Joke just sounds predictably ace, brill, fun, yeah, really good. It turns up on the kind of CDs you buy at petrol stations called The...
Tuesday’s farcical goings-on at Real Madrid came a matter of weeks after Barcelona’s tainted comeback against PSG and are damaging the Champions LeagueIt would be a great service indeed if Uefa ditched the Champions League anthem for the remainder of this season’s competition and replaced it with Dance of the Cuckoos, the theme tune from Laurel and Hardy. The players could still line up and listen to it with awed reverence, of course, because that would provide an amusing and instantly shareable meme for folks wishing to illustrate the contrast between what the competition purports to be and the farce that it often is.The quarter-final between Real Madrid and Bayern Munich was trailed as a high-brow duel that would offer...
Cristiano Ronaldo has scored more goals than any other Real Madrid player and yet he was whistled by supporters against Bayern Munich. How is that possible?There are supposed to be about 1,300 words in this article. It is tempting to just spend 1,287 of them listing the things that Cristiano Ronaldo has done at Real Madrid – and there are more than enough of them to take up all that space, that is for sure, from the two Champions League titles to the 395 goals – and then leave just enough room at the bottom to add: “On Tuesday night at the Santiago Bernabéu some Real Madrid fans whistled him. Dicks.” On one level at least that would probably sum...
Barça’s fate was in their own hands, which as it turned out was the worst place it could be against Málaga, despite the draw by La Liga title rivalsBarcelona’s fate was in their own hands, which as it turned out was the worst place it could possibly be. Saturday’s story was the story of the season in Spain: everything changed to stay the same, the table remaining unmoved. Another dead ball, another defender leaping to score, another victory coming for Real Madrid, this time in the city derby – the game the front pages had declared “half the league” only that was not the half of it. Pepe’s header would have been an appropriate way to win their first title...
It was the round of games that could have changed everything, but didn’t really change anything, except that the finish line drew closerMálaga’s manager Míchel González called it liberation, safety virtually secured against Sporting Gijón. Real Betis’s fans called for coach Víctor Sánchez del Amo to go, just like Gus Poyet, except that time they actually wrote a letter demanding his sacking and this time they just sang it. Diego Simeone appealed for Atlético’s fans to put down their sandwiches and shout. Thirteen kilometres down the A42 at Butarque, where the sandwiches are better than anywhere else, sizzling away on a portable hotplate, Leganés’s supporters did, beaten but singing about their top flight status on the night Real Madrid visited...