A persistent and enduring commentator on my blogs-a childhood friend who is a Real Madrid and Chelsea fan-has emailed me complaining about my silence on the outcome of this year’s Champions’s League final.
Rather than be accused –as he has accused me-of self-censorship and Barca bias (others who might know me less but who read my blogs less selectively will notice I am actually quite objective about whoever I write about, be it MI6 or Pep Guardiola), I am jotting this blog down for his benefit and those of any other Chelsea fan who may take occasional interest in my website.
By way of explanation –I had a car crash last week. Not a serious one-well, thank God, it involved no fatalities , nor serious injuries to others although I got a pretty severe knock on my head, hitting the steering wheel, and still don’t know quite what happened other than that I woke up from a temporary loss of consciousness to find my car wrecked by the collision with a vehicle of sterner frame .
While it remains an unsettling mystery to me what exactly happened, I am under medical advice to take it easy for a few days- and I guess that means not thinking about Chelsea, while taking a few days of sun and sea and wine in Spain.
As it is, my first thought on waking up at the crash site was that this was a mental hang-over from watching FC Barcelona beaten by a lesser team in this season’s Champion’s League semi-finals second leg at the Camp Nou , combined with a premonition that I might be proved wrong in my prediction that Bayern Munich would follow up their justified victory over Real Madrid in the other semi-finals (which I watched in a Catalan bar near Barcelona with my best local Brit friend who days earlier had been allowed to put up a poster of the Chelsea team that won the 1970 FA Cup) ) by crushing their opponents in the final.
I am not sure what proved worse for my recovery-watching the final of the Champions League between Chelsea and Bayern Munich or the build-up around it. When I am in London I live surrounded by Chelsea fans –although thankfully not all of them engage me verbally so regularly as my expatriate commentator in Spain. I tend to move around in my South London neighbourhood like a subversive ‘sleeper’ , revealing my true identity only when I go to mass or when attending my favourite cafe where the excellence of the blend and the warm company of similarly minded latinos help fuel my exhilaration every time Chelsea loses.
I was told that many Chelsea fans who got to Munich were so drunk that they could hardly keep themselves standing as they approached the stadium for the match. I also know of a journalist female colleague from Spanish TV who had beer poured all over her when trying to film one group of Chelsea fans along the King’s Road.I know it because she told me how angry she was.
But, for the record, let me congratulate Chelsea for reminding me how good they are at winning with a minimum flair or creativity and how much they enjoy dancing on the grave of beautiful football with the likes of Terry being allowed to take a central role in the celebrations. I want to be generous here and recognise that world football must be big enough to accommodate more than one way of playing football , and Chelsea score goals while a team that Barca can still get lost in their own choreography, and narcissism and lose crucial games.
And yet one of the reasons I didn’t want to devote my debilitated faculties on a Chelsea blog is that my tweets were of such an increasingly negative tone as last Saturday’s final came to its conclusion , that they served as a catharsis by two a.m on the Sunday by which time I went to bed, on my own, and read a book about Hemingway and his boat.
Over the last fourty-eight hours or so I have put the final behind me, and started looking forward to seeing Friday’s King’s Cup final between FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao (two teams forged by true theologians of the modern game-Guardiola and Bielsa). I also live in hope that Del Bosque’s La Roja maybe shows Torres the respect in the Euro2012 championship successive Chelsea managers denied him for most the season .
There, you see, I have mentioned Chelsea again – and simply doing so brings back the other reason why I found it hard to write this blog in response to my disappointed interlocutor. As I told him in an email, trying to fend him off-“tell you the truth I am fed up to the gills with the chortling, boasting and rat-assed drunkenness of Chelsea fans” claiming they are deserving champions. But I didn’t want the existence or absence of my blog to take away from the enjoyment experienced in Munich by one of my best-loved and loyal friends. I am sure it won’t.
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