A Real Mess At Real Mallorca

Oh, Real Mallorca, how you manage to really make yourself a real old laughing stock. This ridiculous club, subjected in the recent past to the indebtedness of the Drac Group and Vicente Grande, to the absurdly grandiose ambitions of the Walter Mitty-like Paul Davidson and to the brief and unhappy interregnum of the Marti Mingarro family and the club’s entry into voluntary administration, was meant to have headed into calmer waters with a new ownership and a new team at its helm, its main face being that of vice-president, major shareholder, sporting director and indeed former coach, Llorenç Serra Ferrer.

That new team, which comprised Ferrer, Miguel Angel Nadal, Rafa’s uncle and former Spanish centre-back, and Pedro Terrasa as director, didn’t stay together long. Terrasa went off to the television station IB3, then he decided to go back to the club, which he did in July. It was then that the latest round of in-fighting started to get under way.

It has culminated in accusations that Terrasa has been conspiring to overthrow Ferrer and take over the club himself. This comes against a further backdrop of the club’s possible sale to an unnamed Swiss group, willing it would appear to pump 30 million euros in, but which now seems to have disappeared, and of the resignation of Danish coach Michael Laudrup, whose right-hand man, Erik Larsen, had branded Ferrer a “bad man”.

Laudrup had been handed something of a bum steer for the new La Liga season, star midfielder Jonathan De Guzmán being sold to Villarreal, a club with which there is bad blood over last season’s Europa League qualification, and no obvious strikers being available once Pierre Webó had left. Terrasa went on record as describing Ferrer as inept in the handling of the transfer of Belgian forward Marvin Ogunjimi who will be a Mallorca player, but not until January, the transfer-window deadline having been bungled.

The club’s board, ahead of a meeting to decide Terrasa’s future, was split and became even more split just before the meeting when it was announced that the board’s representation by the Nadal family, which owns ten per cent of the club, was to be withdrawn. Miguel Angel Nadal was close to Laudrup, who was once a team-mate at Barcelona. The Nadals have not confirmed as yet whether they will sell out.

One member of the board whose attitude towards Terrasa was unknown prior to the meeting was Utz Claassen, a German businessman, the third largest shareholder in Real Mallorca and the former president of German club Hannover 96. Claassen, who joined the board almost a year ago, came in with the sort of publicity that unfortunately reminded one of Davidson; foreign fans would soon be winging their way down to Palma to watch Real on the back of improving the club’s brand name in key European tourism markets.

The extraordinary meeting of the board, in the end, resulted in Terrasa expressing his “sincere loyalty” to the club. Various apologies were offered and accepted, and so all is hunky-dory. For now.

The board does, though, also face an issue with regard to the club’s old ground, the Lluis Sitjar stadium, which it, the board, reckons is going to be redevloped. Palma town hall and its mayor have been seeking guarantees regarding the 200 million euros of foreign money which is said to be going to be available for the redevelopment scheme. The town hall appears to be fast running out of patience and has insisted that the club makes sure that work is carried out on the abandoned stadium to prevent it from becoming a risk to the public.

In addition to not exactly endearing itself to the town hall, the club has managed to also make an ass of itself with talk of Luis Aragonés, the coach of Spain’s World Cup-winning side, taking over from Laudrup. Unfortunately, Aragonés wanted two million a year for himself and his assistants, the sort of money that Mallorca most certainly doesn’t have.

Despite all the shenanigans at the club, the team has – quite remarkably – managed to rise above them. It has performed well, even if it nearly managed to clutch relegation from the jaws of mid-table safety on the last day of last season. A return of seven points from six games, putting Mallorca tenth in La Liga at present, is reasonable, all things considered.

But the club, if not the team, stumble from one crisis to another. It would be astonishing if the team could manage to survive another season in La Liga, and it might all depend on Joaquín Caparrós, formerly at Seville, La Coruña and Bilbao, and now confirmed as the new coach. But don’t put it past the team surviving. It has proved resilient, but no thanks to the club’s board.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Football: It’s not cricket

At five minutes past four local time yesterday afternoon Luis Suarez missed a penalty for Liverpool. It would have signalled the first cries of exasperation and the first curses of the new Premier League season in Bar Brits the length and breadth of Mallorca. The footy was back, the Saint Mick was flowing and the tills were alive with the sound of euros.

In a multi-screen Bar Brit would have been a corner of a bar in a foreign land that was forever, or at least on Saturday afternoon, England. An England that once was. Cheers there would have been, but they would have been a momentary distraction for the bellydom bemoaning Suarez’s miss. At five minutes past four local time Kevin Pietersen caught Sree Sreesanth. England had thrashed India, had claimed the number one spot in the world test cricket rankings and had restored the order of Empire.

During the lunchtime interval before the confirmation of England’s newly acquired status, there was an interview on “Test Match Special”. It was with Dan Stevens who plays Matthew Crawley in “Downton Abbey”, a period drama set at a time when Empire was starting its decline but when civility was encapsulated by the village green and a gentlemanly ethos of cricketing fair play and values.

Stevens went to Tonbridge School. Its annual fee of over 31,000 pounds is greater than the national average wage and, so, far greater than that earned by inhabitants of inner cities, assuming they earn at all.

Cricket is still a sport of the public school. As it always has been. Yet it was, until around the fifties and sixties, a game of the people as much as football was. It is popular now, but not to the extent it once was. The downturn in its popularity and the supremacy that football assumed coincided with the irreversible changes to English society from the sixties onwards.

Football reigned through the wasteland years of the seventies, the brutality of the eighties and into the newly aspirational nineties, the Premier League being born out of clubs’ demands for ever more television money. So started the golden era of English football, golden in terms of the sheer amount of cash the game could generate. It became unquestionably the people’s game.

Yet this people’s game, at least in its Premier League manifestation, is far removed from the people. They have been taken in, exploited and made complete fools of. But they still lap it up. They still flock to the Bar Brits, donning their replica shirts.

The richness of the sport, the attitudes that surround the game and the exposure of the wealth and misbehaviour of players are the stuff of constant media fascination, fed to a fanaticised public incapable of discerning the degree to which it is being manipulated and driven by the game’s marketing. Despite the cost of football, be it that of a Sky subscription or the cost of attendance and travel, the public refuses to turn its back on a sport which has lost any sense of moral compass. The most sickening word in the football vocabulary is a four-letter word – “scum”. Teams are scum, other fans are scum. It is a filthy word that sums up the attitudinal wrongs of a sport that in its playing is the preserve of the filthy rich.

Cricket has acquired its own wealth, its own disposability, its own attitudinal failures. It is still played on the playing fields of the public schools, attended by the sons of bankers who can afford thirty thousand a year fees. Yet despite its wealth and a history redolent of Empire and the public school, it is more of a people’s game in that it has not lost sight of its core values. It comes close to doing so, but somehow manages to pull back from the brink. Fair play just about prevails.

It fails, though, to capture the following of those who inhabit a Bar Brit and who have been sold and continue to be sold a game that is as socially divisive as bankers earning huge bonuses. Football constantly searches for role models, as though this quest were an admission that the game has no core values. And who does it throw up? Terry, Cole, Rooney. Millionaires all.

The Bar Brit football fan who bleats about the criminal avarice of rioters fails to appreciate that what’s on a plasma screen on a Saturday afternoon is avarice gone mad. Football is a game lacking a sense of fair play. It is one dominated by its “scum” attitudes and its glamorisation of those of questionable intelligence and personal values. This, not cricket, is what you mainly get on a plasma screen. So why should anyone be surprised when someone smashes a shop window and helps himself to his own screen?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Flick When You’re Winning

Spain have failed to add a further World Cup title to the nation’s list of footballing honours. They were knocked out in the semi-finals, going down three-one (on aggregate) to Belgium who then succumbed to Italy in the final, the home nation being crowned the 2011 Subbuteo World Cup champions.

The World Cup was played over the last weekend in Palermo. It has fallen in the midst of Mallorca’s fiesta season during which all manner of table games are played. Pollensa’s Patrona, for instance, has more or less a whole day of such games.

Table football games, eclipsed by PlayStation and what have you, still hold a place in nations’ affections, and the Spanish are one of these nations. The most obvious of the games is table football itself, a crash-bang-wallop of wrist action and toe-ended attempts on goal. Though some finesse is required, as in the manoeuvring of the ball under close control in order to set up the shot, it is a deeply unsatisfactory game. It is inflexible, a rod of players that can only ever move in formation, square across the pitch, as though they were Ray Wilkinses on a steel pole.

Table football, though, is a survivor. It is still with us in bars in Mallorca and elsewhere. And here, as with with the full English breakfast tradition, is an opportunity for Bar Brits. International table football tournaments. Put them on over a few days in a resort like Alcúdia and they would be a recipe for fierce national pride and considerable drinking among any number of nationalities.

But more sophisticated, more refined, more skilful would be the Subbuteo tournament. Though there is greater potential for harm to be caused to Subbuteo players than to those on a rod of iron, there is a code of conduct that is applied by the Federation of International Sports Table Football, of which the Spanish Association Española de Jugadores de Futbol de Mesa is a member. Anyone guilty of snapping an arm or the legs of a Subbuteo player is subject to disciplinary procedures (I’m not kidding, you can have a look for yourselves on the federation’s website).

Subbuteo was always the Barcelona of table football to the hard-working, long-ball, huff-and-puff of table football itself. The spin around an opposing player to effect a deft touch on the ball, a push to the right with a gentle flick by the index finger and, in seemingly one movement, the unleashing of a shot past a despairing goalkeeper, skewered like a kebab on the end of a thin metal rod of his own (or in more modern versions, a plastic controller).

My own Subbuteo career spanned some fourteen years. I was only 25 when I decided to hang up my plastic men on plastic domes. It was not an injury that caused my retirement, it was not that I had been unable to cope with the stardom and had gone off the rails in a George Best style (and Subbuteo never produced a drunken George as such). I called it a day because I knew I had reached my peak.

In 1980 I played the perfect Subbuteo game, one of high tempo, fabulous flicking, slick spinning and passing. It was the enactment of the Everton-West Ham FA Cup semi-final. My hapless Hammers opponent was brushed aside; he was given a Subbuteo footballing lesson. It was his Hidegkuti and Puskas moment. Brian Kidd bagged five, and the result was 11-0.

In the World Cup just played, Spain had a player called Flores. He was the one to register the one in the 3-1 aggregate loss to Belgium. In an otherwise dull encounter (2-0, 1-0, 2-1 to the Belgians in the three other match-ups), Flores trounced Dehur 10-2. Subbuteo has flowered thanks to the Spaniard Flores, just as it had 31 years ago. And despite going out in the semis, it proved that Subbuteo is alive and flicking in Spain.

With this in mind, I propose a grand Subbuteo bar tournament, one to bring the nations of Mallorca together. But I would only be a spectator. I’ve had my day. It’s a young man’s sport now, demanding highly trained index fingers as opposed to those whose training was mainly confined to curling around a pint glass. But I would hope that an English champion could emerge, one who could be encouraged by our singing “flick when you’re winning, you only flick when you’re winning”. Because in Subbuteo, if you are not flicking then you cannot be winning.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Football: A Family Game

Some football’s happening tomorrow. I had quite forgotten that the season was still with us, and had all but forgotten that Capello and England any longer existed. But they do, and they’re playing Switzerland. Has the FA’s favourite gnome of Zurich, Sepp Blatter, been invited along for the prawn sandwiches, do you suppose?

Actual games of football no longer seem to matter. It’s all the other stuff that is so entertaining, and some of it is in Spain. Take Real Mallorca. A team that can contrive to almost be relegated on the last day of the season, having spent the entire season in mid-table obscurity, takes some beating.

Dottiness is never far away from Real Mallorca, and now the club is seeking to become the Brentford of La Liga; major shareholder and vice-president Llorenç Serra Ferrer possibly taking over the coaching reins. Serra, the Ron Noades, chairman/team manager, of Spanish football. To be fair to Serra, he is actually a coach; Ron just lived his own odd dream.

Real Brentford, once described by Sid Lowe of “The Guardian” as “rubbish” and having no fans, charges which revealed that there were indeed some fans, as they leapt to the club’s defence, has, despite nearly clutching relegation defeat from the victory of staying in La Liga, been honoured in Sid’s annual Sids. Just. Two players, Nunes and De Guzmán, are on the subs bench for Lowe’s team of the season. And De Guzmán’s an interesting character. Is he Dutch, is he Jamaican, is he Canadian? What is he exactly? Owen Hargreaves with his knees still intact.

Far, far more interesting, however, are the shenanigans at the Banana Republic of FIFA, and its own Spanish connection. Blatter has proved, like Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Belarus’s Lukashenko, that a touch of pretend democracy can go a long way in keeping a dictator in power. The delegates walked up, two by two, entering the ark above the flood that never really threatened to wash Sepp away, and dropped their voting slips into the box, watched on by Sepp muttering, “there, now, you know you’re doing the right thing”.

Among the members of the FIFA “family” who turned on the bleating black sheep Bernstein of the English FA was another interesting character. Spain’s very own Sepp: Ángel María Villar Llona, the president of the Spanish football federation. Villar Llona’s been in power even longer than Blatter has. He’s carved out his own fiefdom. And like Blatter, a certain amount of mud has attached itself to his hands and knees.

Back in November, a judge formally archived charges that had been open against Villar Llona for several years. Despite, I quote, “abominable management in accounting for trips, expenses and purchase of foreign currency” as well as various other criticisms, the judge found that the president and other directors of the federation should be absolved of charges of impropriety.

On being re-elected, yet again, as president in 2008, the head of La Liga said of Villar Llona’s re-election that this would mean “the union between all the families of football”. Football certainly is a family game, and “allegations”, that “beautiful English word”, as Villar Llona taunted the FA with, should not be made about families.

In the 2008 election, when he was unopposed, Villar Llona polled 87% of the votes, a bit short of the 92% Blatter secured in Zurich, but pretty good going after 20 years. There was clearly no problem for him in that, two years before, he had managed to stun delegates at a UEFA conference by arguing that too much attention was being paid to racism in football.

It should have come as no great surprise that Villar Llona joined the queue to give the FA a good kick in the shins in Zurich. During the gathering to divvy up the spoils of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Villar Llona, rounding on those accusing FIFA of corruption (i.e. the British media), said: “FIFA is clean and does things with honesty. All of you (members of FIFA) are honest and hard-working and are concerned only for football”.

Ah, the beautiful game, the beautiful family game, adorned by Messi, Xavi, Iniesta and Guardiola’s wonderful Barcelona. But even Barça can’t avoid being dragged in. Villar Llona has spawned a word. “Villaroto”. José Mourinho has used it, the Madrid football papers have used it. It refers to the alleged bias of the Barça-supporting president against Real Madrid.

Barça, more than a club. Football, more than a game. I nearly forgot, there’s one on tomorrow.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Zoo Time: El Clásico

It was El Clásico on Wednesday night. Again. You couldn’t avoid it or the boards that were chalked up outside bars. If there is one Spanish football match that tourists would know about and might want to watch, it is Real Madrid and Barcelona.

The regularity with which the two sides are meeting at present does not diminish the status of the match. Rangers and Celtic may play each other every other week and may also be able to command the attention of far more than just regular football-goers, but they do so because of absurdities far removed from a football pitch.

Barça and Real Madrid are also both an awful lot better than their Glasgow counterparts. They are, along with certain other clubs, such as Manchester United, a fashion item, and not just because of the wearing of a Messi or a Ronaldo shirt. They are football accessory, one to be worn on the chest like a famous brand name, a sporting superficiality for the marketing-manipulated, the johnnies-come-lately of soccer sophistication that brandish boastful awareness of major teams, or worse still, allegiance, as they would brandish a Gucci mark.

When did El Clásico become El Clásico? For the British, at any rate. It never used to be, but now it is, to the extent that Barça and Real merge into one. They are not separate teams, but a combined entity, and it is classic. They are distinguishable only by red and blue and white. Which isn’t of course true, but they may as well be.

The marketing of El Clásico has now informed the previously uninformed as to the historical significance of the match and of the two clubs. Barça has long claimed to be more than just a club, but so also is Real Madrid. They are more than just clubs, because the marketing says so.

The classicism of the contest, that which it has now unavoidably assumed, is in the tradition of football puffery, one that Real itself did much to elevate to the heights of hyperbole with its galácticos. Like El Clásico, the term seeped into and then burst out into the consciousness of the distant football fan or nouveau fan, thanks to the compliance of a media that, with the fashionista pretension of a foreign word here or there, granted the match and the two teams an exoticism for the brigades of Roy Keane’s prawn-sandwich eaters.

Barça v. Real Madrid has assumed a position of football tourism. Even for the tourist with only passing interest in the game, to be present at El Clásico, in a bar, and especially a Spanish bar, has become an attraction in its own right. It has become de rigueur. The match itself can be unimportant, a largely irrelevant blur of action on a large plasma screen with a commentary that is unintelligible. What is important is the being there. And the being able to say that you had been there.

It may happen that Spanish tourists to England have desires to seek out a pub and sample the atmosphere of a Premier League equivalent, but I somewhat doubt it. Certainly not to the extent that El Clásico would be sought out by a British visitor. But were that Spanish tourist to do so, one would also doubt that there might be quite the same propensity for patronisation, voyeurism, the visit to the zoo; watching the locals wrapped up in the match and smiling inanely and uncomprehendingly at a new best friend who has just exploded as the ball hits a post. “Oh, it was amazing, so passionate, so atmospheric.” El Clásico is the new quaint.

But of course, it is passionate. Despite the marketing, despite the pretensions, it does mean a great deal. And there is no Premier League equivalent. Not really. In Scotland, Rangers and Celtic might be, but what it and any major English match does not possess is a quality that makes it culturally correct to be a bar witness not just to the match but also to the natives as they shout, scream and hug each other. And this is the real point about El Clásico. The marketing has reinforced and emphasised its cultural importance. It is more than just a football match, and the clubs are both more than just clubs. The football match as culture.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

WikiWorld: Spain, Wikileaks and World Cup

Wikileaks and World Cups. They tell you much about a nation’s diminished role in the scheme of things. A political leader considered to be pretty much useless by the Americans and humiliation by the quasi-nation that is FIFA.

But so much for Gordon Brown and England. Another nation has to cope with its own minor role in the scheme of things. So minor it had to combine with a minor-minor nation to try and prise the World Cup out of the clutches of the Russian mafia that has made the country one of its favourite offshore bases.

Spain is not a world power. Centuries ago it was. It has had to adjust to being an also-ran, which doesn’t stop it trying to reclaim some one-time glory and importance. But when it does, it ends up looking a tad silly. As with the presidential predecessor José María Aznar. “My friend Tony” were the words put into the mouth of Aznar when he was being savaged by the satirists. The little man of world politics like a mini David Steel sitting on the shoulders of the really powerful and his lackey.

This was Iraq. Aznar stood shoulder to shoulder – well, slightly lower than shoulder to shoulder in fact – with Bush and Blair, desperate for some international kudos that had long since deserted Spain. Aznar’s back in the news, thanks to the splendidly cringeworthy revelations from Wikileaks.

In 2007 Aznar confided in the American ambassador to Spain who, praise be, then broke the confidence. He was thinking of a return to frontline politics and all because he doubted that his successor as national leader of the Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy, was up to the job. There are many who would have agreed with Aznar then and would still do so.

Poor old Rajoy. If, and it really isn’t much of a choice, he were to succeed Zapatero as national president, it would be a case of trading in Mr. Bean for Mr. Grey, the uninspiring, uncharismatic bearded blunder of the PP. For one who aspires to great office, to a place on the world stage (sort of), he has an unerring capacity to come over all Bush-like, as was the case when he pooh-poohed climate change because his cousin had said so. It was only slightly better than taking the word of the bloke in the pub. Admittedly his cousin was a physics academic, but going on the say-so of one person, a relative, is a rather worrying trait for a potential national leader.

While we have been bombarded with information of seemingly rather greater importance, Spain, appropriately enough, has been relegated to the footnote category of Wikileaking. In the world scheme of things, matters Spanish are not exactly earth-shattering, but “El Pais”, a sort of “Guardian” of the Spanish media left, has nevertheless been informing the Spanish public about not only Rajoy but also US pressure to stop Spanish High Court investigations into matters such as alleged war crimes in Iraq and about the use of Palma airport for rendition flights.

Wikileaks, Spanish style, doesn’t make for easy reading if you are a Spanish politician, as US officials don’t seem to be overly impressed. The King, on the other hand, is approved of by the Americans. And then there’s Zapatero himself. He has not enjoyed great relations with the US, who doubtless see him conveying a rather bemused, bumbling, if genial, persona. Just as he was when to everyone’s surprise, including his own, he snatched the presidency from Aznar. But this doesn’t stop him turning up at events like the World Cup vote. Not that it did much good. Nor did the vain attempt by the president of the Spanish football federation, Ángel María Villar, to butter up the FIFA voters with his grovelling declaration that: “FIFA is clean and does things with honesty. You are all honest and hardworking and worry about football”.

The Spanish, and indeed President Zapatero, do have rather more pressing issues to worry about than the failed World Cup bid, but there has been some anger regarding the decision to hand the 2018 tournament to Russia. One commentator has suggested that “we (the Spanish presumably) should emigrate to another planet”.

Ah yes, to another planet, another world, where there would be no Wikileaks, Spain and England would still rule the waves and have their empires and there would be no “clean” FIFA to prevent Spain and England from forever more sharing the hosting of the World Cup between them.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Wear Your Shirt With Pride: Football returns

England play Hungary this evening. On Saturday, the Premier League kicks off again. Rarely have two football occasions been greeted by such a lack of enthusiasm. By me, at any rate. Not so by the local Brit bars. There is at least one that counts the number of England matches through the tourist season; days when it can expect a full house and empty barrels come the end of the evening. It won’t be the only one.

The dependence upon football, England or Premiership, seems a bizarre way of running a business. But it’s not so bizarre when one witnesses the hordes that take to the bars when Saturday (or Sunday or Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday) comes. Has anyone ever attempted to measure the level of “ancillary” business that football creates – the takings in the bars of Mallorca and elsewhere?

One wonders, though, at the enduring capacity of footy to entice tourists into parting with good money to demonstrate affiliations with teams unworthy of the price of a pint of Saint Mick. During the England game against Slovenia, I started to contemplate the peaks of beer buying during a match and the average pint consumption per punter. I never arrived at a scientific figure, but the peaks were rarely troughs and the consumption seemed massive. There are a lot of cold drinks imbibed in the name of … in the name of what?

Come the day of a match, the football shirt is ritually removed from the hotel or apartment drawer. Wear your replica shirt with pride. In England’s case, it’s the last thing anyone should be admitting to, let alone donning. Affiliation? Ah yes, a team run by an Italian, increasingly being exposed as an idiot, and populated by numbskulls such as Potato Head. Premier League and affiliation? Ah yes, to whole African tribes and a European dribbling diaspora handed fat cheques by representatives of superpowers, past and present. Rod Liddle in “The Sunday Times” at the weekend raised the possibility of Premier matches provoking nuclear attacks. To the USA and Russia, we must now, in all likelihood, add China, to say nothing of the threat of Islam.

Why does anyone care any longer? My own team, Spurs (who it might be said were to blame for a movement towards football fan alienation when they grabbed footballing aliens – Villa and Ardiles), do at least have an English manager and a smattering of English/British players, but it’s not the club of Greaves, Mullery, Gilzean and the rest. Yet, curiously, alienation has never quite caught on, despite the hopelessness of success for any club unprepared to spend the equivalent of an African nation’s GDP on … on an African player, and despite the not infrequent references to the size of those cheques and the disproportionately lamentable performances they pay for.

It’s all due to marketing, one presumes, a process that can result in a red-cheeked English child walking the streets of Alcúdia in a Messi shirt. Why? The only good reason I can think of is because it’s not a Rooney shirt. Marketing, constant and exhaustive media coverage, the 24/7 outpouring of inanities and also, just as important, the weird tribalism of football, one that is not just reserved for the English. Wear your replica shirt with pride. It’s a statement, one of lurking confrontation and of territorial bravado, like a dog urinating against a lamp-post. When England played and I hacked along to the bar, I felt under-dressed not wearing an England shirt, akin to turning up in jeans at a wedding and finding everyone else in morning suits. The replica shirt sends out a message not just to supporters of other clubs, it does so also to Johnny Foreigner. Once upon a time, a foreigner in a foreign land was advised to keep his head down, unless there was a pith helmet on top of the head and he was running the foreign land. Not now.

One can understand the Blackpool supporter turning up at a bar with an orange torso and a bright pink face. An affiliation to the totally lost cause. He’s likely to be bought drinks out of sympathy. He also knows that this season will be his only opportunity. But for most of the others, it’s an exercise in compliant manipulation, in the pressure to affirm a marketing concept rather than a football team, in tribalism disguised as support, symbolised by the replica shirt and shouted over the constant chasing of yet another pint. Not, though, that the bars will be complaining.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Spain Win The World Cup: The view from Alcúdia

In the end, Iniesta. In the end it didn’t matter that it was no great final. In the end it didn’t matter to the millions who will have spilled out onto the streets across Spain, just as they did in Puerto Alcúdia.

The car horns had been going off well before the match started. Is it possible that car horns can lose their horn? If they can, they will have by now. In the end and at the end it was not just the street sides that were full of flag-waving, so were the roads, right down the middle, right around the roundabouts. I came close to ending up in hospital, or worse, as I crossed the road by the Magic roundabout and a motorbike came haring around at high speed, seemingly the only road user unaware that something remarkable had happened.

And it was remarkable. Even for anyone with no interest in football, he or she could surely not have been overtaken by the outpouring of joy and euphoria. It was the greatest fiesta of all, and one not programmed by an organising committee. Fireworks went off, wherever; the people’s party.

The Mile was packed. A cavalcade of flag-waving, horn-blowing cars jammed the road, as did the onlookers, cheering and crying with ecstasy. Near to Magic, the customised chainsaw with its loudhailing amplifier was roaring, being played like a guitar to passing cars and behind a police bike rider. The lorry that doubled as a float was getting more and more loaded. Kids, with no obvious sign of parents, were throwing themselves onto the dewy grass of the roundabout in an abandon of happiness. Everyone was going mental.

Yet amidst all this, bizarrely other life was going on. A group of tourists outside the Delfin Azul with their suitcases, waiting for their transfer coach; a late-night supermarket, moving the lilos inside. It is at times like a World Cup final, a World Cup final in a Spanish town, that it is hard to believe that anything else could actually matter.

In the end it didn’t matter that De Jong should have been sent off, it didn’t matter that Spain never really played that well throughout the whole tournament. What did matter was that Spain won. And to have been amongst it was astonishing. There was a sense of gatecrashing someone else’s party, but it didn’t matter; far from it, as Germans, Brits, Swedes and others joined in and revelled in one of the greatest nights most will ever experience.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Waving Flags

So there I was, thinking that maybe I’d do something about it being the fourth of July, as in making the observation that there aren’t so many Americans hereabouts, save the incoherent, Riki Lash, the scuba-Mallorca-ing, Mick and Jessie, and the Hollywooding, Michael Douglas. I was thinking about something for independence day, something about flags being waved perhaps, something about national pride, and then … along came the Germans.

Suddenly, German flags have started to appear where German flags had previously not been. Outside Spanish bars, for example. How bizarre, except as a flag of economic convenience. Flags were waving and flying from cars along the main road through Alcúdia and Playa de Muro yesterday. Horns were blowing. Deutschland was über alles; Germans were over all, especially the Argentinians. Then Nobby (Linekers) phones. All kicking off down in the port. Shame, I’ve gone in the opposite direction. Shame, might have been nice to have seen the plod cordoning off the road around the Alcúdia Garden while Argentinians and Germans piled into each other. 200, 300 mass brawling, suggests Nobby. What great sport in the name of sport. Flags waving and punches flying. But take note. Argentinians and Germans. Nary a hint of trouble when Germany beat England. Just a load of very drunk people, too embarrassed to do anything about it, other than to want to attack a plasma screen and get at the ref.

In the port the other day, I happened to look up at flats. All the flags were hanging. From the balconies. Brazil, Spain and Germany and Argentina. Two have probably been taken down now. You wonder, though, what might happen when the flags fly when Germany meet Spain or if Germany meet the Dutch. If there is one nation that has more reason to dislike the Germans than the British, then it is the Dutch. All historical, and all nonsense, but there you go.

As for the Americans. Well, no American flags have flown during the World Cup and you are unlikely to see one. But how Mallorca would love it were you to. When they talk about seeking out new markets, there’s a pretty old one that has never been tapped. Palma airport needs to have transatlantic flights, then a greater state of Mallorcan independence might follow.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Somewhere That Is Forever England: And rather better than the football

The St George flags have been taken down. Like a period of official mourning, the flags have not just been lowered, they have been interred, along with the dead body of English football.

Everyone and his dog and mistress has had his or her say. So why shouldn’t I be any different? England’s misfortune may not directly have anything to do with the little part of Mallorca that is forever Albion, but it is still England, our England – transplanted in the Mediterranean, where the arrests mounted and the odd pisshead went on the prowl for some retribution. How little one has to be proud of.

Everyone and his dog and mistress has his or her theory as to the reasons for England going belly-up – on a grand scale, the size of many a belly wobbling with many a Saint Mick in the sun of Mallorca. Perhaps we should toss in the alignment of the planets, as Ted Dexter once madly referred to when a different England team was succumbing horribly.

After England were dumped out of the last World Cup, Graham Taylor, not someone necessarily associated with Pele’s “beautiful game”, said that England would never win a tournament while the players lacked the technique and nous to compete with others – Portugal then, Germany now. He was merely echoing what has been said for some 50 or more years. If you go back to the 1950s, England were soundly thrashed not once but twice by the Hungarians. Players who participated in those drubbings included famous names of English football – Matthews, Mortensen, Finney, Wright. The team was still wedded to the WM system, one invented by Arsenal in the 1920s. The navel-gazing that followed the conceding of 13 goals in two matches focused on the system and on technique. Both were badly lacking. There is nothing new under a Mallorcan or a South African sun, and as we have come to appreciate over the years, 1966 was an aberration, an apparent injustice, for which the Germans now have goal-line redemption.

During that last World Cup, I happened to stumble across a soccer game on Spanish television that wasn’t from the World Cup. It was a tournament being played in Mallorca. The play was vibrant, with movement, pace and passing. Everything was pretty much to feet; it was a joy to watch. The players were 12 years old. It was a tournament featuring junior German and Spanish teams, playing on a scaled-down pitch, not a full-size one.

Germany, for years a dominant force in world football, had slumped so much that at the 2000 European championship they were even worse than Keegan’s England. They had a re-think, a proper re-think. The structure of the game in Germany is such that most Bundesliga sides play in a similar fashion, and the reason lies in the co-ordinated efforts of the Bundesliga and the German football association, together with a programme that has provided thousands more coaches than exist in England. It has also provided Joachim Löw who was the coaching brains behind Jürgen Klinsmann before he got the top job himself.

That class of 2006 and its Spanish counterpart was representative of a coaching style that is only now starting to be realised in England. The FA reckons its under-17s are outstanding. Perhaps so, but unlike with the Bundesliga, how many will get the opportunity to shine in the Premier League? Again, it all has to do with the structure of the sport.

To hear Chris Waddle on Five Live after the match was to listen to someone who was angry beyond anything one has ever heard from a “pundit”. Waddle may not have been much of a manager, but he was a hell of a player. He was widely attributed as having been the driving force behind getting Bobby Robson to change England’s style in 1990, one that perhaps should have won the tournament with a side blessed with greater talent (Lineker, Beardsley, Gascoigne, Shilton) than the so-called golden generation. Waddle was apoplectic, laying into the FA, into technique, into coaching and systems.

Waddle also played abroad, thus broadening his mind. And broad minds are not what one thinks of with the likes of Potato Head. Waddle’s fellow mullet wearer and partner in Diamond Lights crime, Glenn Hoddle, was another expat in France. Hoddle, had he not been as batty as Ted Dexter (battier in fact), might just have proven to be the England manager who changed things for the better. He was an advocate of the joined-up system that the Germans now have and which is a contemporary version of what propelled the Dutch national side (and Ajax) from international obscurity in the 1970s.

Instead of Hoddle, we got Keegan. Passion, which we are now said to lack. But also clueless, as he pretty much confessed to. And then Eriksson and Capello, mercenaries with short-horizon missions. Neither should be blamed for trying to turn apparently golden dross into real gold. If the FA (or the Premier League if, God forbid, it took over the national side) wants another foreign coach, it should open its coffers to Wenger, one who might have the gumption and organisational ability to create a “project”, alongside visionaries such as Trevor Brooking, that goes beyond just the next qualifying rounds. But then Howard Wilkinson, despite his reputation one of the very few other visionaries, tried something along these lines in the late ’90s, partly to counteract what he saw as the potential drawbacks of the Premier League. It came to nothing.

The what-ifs, the Terry incidents, Capello and his various failings, player tiredness, Rio Ferdinand’s injury; the list of reasons is endless. Some of them may well have played a part, but the fault lies at a much more basic level, and it is a fault that has been known about for years. Yet little has been done to address it. From Italy, also humiliated in this World Cup, there is talk of a need to examine the structure of the game there. You wouldn’t bet against the Italians doing something about the failure in 2010. Whether England do, who knows.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.