Here we go again. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images
BLEECK HOUSE
Good news, readers: The Fiver's STOP FOOTBALL campaign, and equally prominent TORTURE METAPHORS - NOT ANIMALS campaign, will get more heavyweight backing tonight when Barcelona and Real Madrid meet in the latest instalment of El Fiasco and no doubt proceed to present further compelling evidence that football has jumped the shark, killed the golden goose and flogged the dead horse, while continuing to give far too comfy a living to a contemptible bunch of chicken-chokers.
These diving divas have done much in recent weeks to definitively replace football's Wow! Factor with the now-dominant Waaaaaaaaaaah! Factor, but tonight, like US Navy Seals storming an Abbottabad compound, they're going to take another shot at their target anyway just for the hell of it. It is the negligence of the governing bodies, of course, that has done most to slay the sport; their refusal to take effective action against endemic in-game cheating and time-wasting allowing cads, cynics and cretins to hijack and snuff out the game. Perhaps as some kind of belated, typically feeble gesture. Uefa has named the referee of tonight's fiasco as Franck de Bleeckere, who is also a public relations manager, but if it thinks the Belgian can use any of his PR knowhow to restore football's image while the so-called best players on the planet jump and roll and jab and wail and scam all around him, figuratively and sometimes literally sticking two-fingers up at the swindled folk who'd paid to see them showcase their supposed skills, then Uefa's fat cats are as stupid as they look.
"I don't know what Madrid to expect," said Pep Guardiola to a journalist, presumably before hurling himself to the ground and tearfully claiming to have been maimed by the microphone. "They have such a strong team and so many players that they can play in several ways," insisted Guardiola, as - in the background - a Portuguese driver started backing up a large bus outside Camp Nou.
