There be Moider at Camp Nou

There was a time not so long ago when the sight of Barca dismantling other so-called "football teams" at will was a delight to behold, but The Special One and his swarthy henchmen from Real Madrid have reminded us, and rightly so, that football is still supposedly a contact sport. Barca's demeaning reaction to being kicked up in the air is not to simply play these oafs off the park (Messi aside), which they are well capable of, but to fall over at every given opportunity, usually before they've even been touched. It's got to the stage now where I'd love it, love it (© K Keegan), if Vidic, Pauly Pauly Scholes, Rooney etc would kick a few of them over-tanned jessies up in the air before suffering the inevitable sendings off in the final, miracle comebacks from that bunch of hopeless Germans tonight notwithstanding.

Sorry, but making more passes than Sid James in a Carry On movie, followed by "..ouch he looked at me funny and now I've hurt my hair...I know I'll fall over and roll around like I've been shot and con the ref into sending off some lesser mortal.." just doesn't do it for me. We want some good old fashioned hobnail-booted centre half thuggery, now!

OK, I exaggerate, but being long enough in the tooth to remember the 70s, when the likes of Best, Marsh, Bowles, McKenzie, etc had to use pure skill, often while suffering a hangover, to get past the likes of Hunter, Cooper...erm most of Leeds Utd actually, Smith, McLintock etc, occasionally failing and being felled by literally bone crunching tackles, and never rolling about like fairies with no centre of gravity was far more entertaining in my opinion. Reminds me of the Coliseum...or Filbert Street.... Ah, the putrid smell of partially cooked and mostly synthetic "meat" products, old pubs, stale fag smoke, and warm fizzy drinks, the young lad sniffs the thick air as he shuffles on the terrace to avoid the stream of steaming lager-piss descending from the back, where those nice skinheads stand, while on the pitch likely lad Stan Bowles is upended at the end of a mazy dribble (they went on dribbles then, not "runs") by David Nish and lands with an audible thud as a splurge of wet mud flies into the air from the point of impact.......takes you back does it not?

Sorry, got lost for a moment in a reverie (or was that a Revie?)....Utd to lose the final 3-0 and end up with 9 men, Fergie explodes. What odds could I get on that? Barca hoist the cup aloft at Wemberleee to a resounding chorus of boos, me included, and I'm not even a Utd fan.

Ah, feel better now....



"I speet on your Armani...Take this, mofo"