Got this from a newspaper, cant say where or the general will hunt me down.
The Champions League begins and with it the resumption of the battle between Italy and Spain for global supremacy. It might not quite be England-Argentina, or England-Turkey, but they are starting really to dislike each other, these two. The Italians because for five years Spain's La Liga had been usurping what Serie A considered to be its God-given ascendancy in international club football. The Spaniards because their dislike of Italian football is so intense it has acquired a quality of moral outrage. The cynicism of the Italian game offends those Don Quixote values - nobility, generosity, courage - that the Spanish like to conceive of as their distinguishing national virtues. The offence was felt all the more keenly last season after the Italians had roundly beaten their best teams.
Right now it looks as if in the 2003-04 round of the most serious competition in world football the Italians are going to beat them again. In the absence of Valencia, who forgot last season that it is important to have someone in your team to score goals, only Real Madrid of the Spanish pack look capable of overcoming the two Old Trafford finalists, Juventus and Milan. Inter and Lazio, meanwhile, seem a better bet to progress than Celta Vigo, Real Sociedad or the more experienced Deportivo La Coruña who never quite cut it at the sharp end of the Champions League and seem less likely to do so this time around, having sold Roy Makaay to Bayern Munich. The Italians and Spanish having provided between them 13 of the past 20 Champions League finalists (Italy 7, Spain 6), it seems a sound bet that the four Italian clubs will progress farther than the four Spanish and that one of the eight will win. You never know, though. Maybe it will be Chelsea and Manchester United in the final on 26 May at the not exactly world-renowned Arena AufSchalke, the 60,000-seat home of Germany's Schalke 04.
One thing we can be certain of, though, is that whether your tastes lean towards flamboyant, devil-may-care attack or ruthlessly regimented defence, the two big footballing nations of the Mediterranean, spearheaded by the last two European Cup winners, Real Madrid and Milan, will be delivering the best of both extremes. Going forward, Real will continue to provide a terrific show. The problem is that someone at the Bernabéu appears to have forgotten that to win at football you also need to defend. It was noted after last year's semi-final defeat by Juventus that Claude Makelele, whose absence that night was decisive, was vital to Real because he provided the hardness around the team's soft defensive centre. Now, Makelele having gone, there is no hardness and no defensive centre, not even a soft one.
That is only a slight exaggeration. Real have no defensive midfielders left - not one - and have bought no one to replace the pensioned-off Fernando Hierro. The team's predicament is so seem ingly severe that hitherto serious football commentators in Spain are honestly suggesting that David Beckham should be appointed to the Vieira-Keane holding midfield role. Tell that one to Sir Alex Ferguson and he will die laughing. Mind you, suggest to the Real president Florentino Pérez that there is a crisis and it is he who will laugh - disdainfully - in your face. As far as he is concerned it is a truth scientifically acknowledged that an attack comprising Ronaldo, Raúl, Luís Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Beckham and - for all practical purposes - Roberto Carlos must be an unstoppable force. End of discussion. It is the 'you score two, we'll score three; you score three, we'll score four' philosophy only ever tried to successful effect by the defensively hapless World Cup winning Brazil side of 1970. And who knows? Pérez might be right. We could be on the verge of a revolution. Florentino Flower Power. It would represent a sensational break with contemporary football orthodoxy, were it to succeed.
The Italians do not for a moment believe that it will. Make war, not love, is their footballing motto. On a football pitch you do not muck about, you do not tamper with the tried and trusted rules. Or if you do, as Milan did at the start of the last Champions League - playing spectacular attacking, passing football - you pause, you make amends, as if excusing yourself for a moment of drunken madness, and resume the sober demeanour that has always served you well. When it was put last week to Andrei Shevchenko, Milan's Ukraine striker, that Milan won the Champions League last season despite playing progressively less appealing football, he did not disagree. 'At a difficult moment for us in the competition we understood that it was not enough merely to play well. We sacrificed attractive football in order to win.'
Carlo Ancelotti, the Milan coach, summed up the difference between the philosophy of Real Madrid and the way the Italians see the game when he accused the Spanish last season of 'an excessive appetite for the aesthetic'.
The funny thing about Italian sides, though, is that they can be as aesthetic as the next team when they put their minds to it. Wales, torn to shreds by a typhoon of attacking football at the San Siro last weekend, will attest to that. And maybe Milan, inspired by the spectacle the Azzurri turned on at their stadium, will have another crack this season at examining an alternative to the constipated habits of play that made the Champions League final against Juventus last season such a balefully dull affair. Milan certainly have the players to do it. In fact, such is the critical mass of Brazilians in the squad now that they may end up playing the beautiful game beautifully despite themselves.
In addition to the four Brazilians already in their squad (Rivaldo, Dida and Serginho), they have signed the veteran Cafu from Roma and the youngster Kaká from São Paulo. Cafu, only a marginally less talented attacking full-back than Roberto Carlos, is an acquisition that combines defensive seriousness with a sense of fun. Kaká, who few outside Brazil had ever heard of until a few weeks ago, might turn out to be the next megastar to come out of the world's favourite football factory.
The Brazilians themselves certainly think so. Listen to this from Carlos Parreira, the vastly experienced Brazil national coach: 'Don't look for more players like Kaká. One like him appears once every 30 years.' Tostão, star of that Brazil 1970 team, last season declared Kaká to be, quite simply, the best player in the Brazilian league.
Only 21, he is an attacking midfielder who plays down the middle. He is 6ft tall and strong, but he is elegant, has a feathery first touch, a tremendous change of pace and great balance. A Juan Sebastián Verón with bite, he sets up goals and scores them: a screamer from the edge of the penalty area that gave victory to Brazil last weekend away against Colombia, 2-1 in a World Cup qualifier, provided a dramatic case in point.
Ancelotti may soon come to share Parreira's enthusiasm for the young man. When the Italian league began two weeks ago he put Kaká in Milan's starting XI, keeping Rivaldo and the experienced Portuguese Rui Costa - hitherto the owner of Kaká's position - on the bench. Which makes you realise what a formidable team Milan are going to have this season: names not quite as big as Real Madrid's perhaps, but in terms of talent very close indeed. Shevchenko is an electric striker, Filippo Inzaghi at least as efficient a goalscoring machine as Raúl. With players of the calibre of Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta and now Cafu in defence, assisted by the demonic Gennaro Gatusso in midfield, Milan have a team as talented as it is compact.
Add to all that the Ancelotti rigour, the feet-on-the-ground organisation he brings, and logic tells you that Milan are a better bet to lift the European Cup this time around than Beckham's otherworldly galácticos . Juventus, eternally solid and blessed with Pavel Nedved and Alessandro Del Piero up front, are also a tighter, more plausible-looking unit than Real Madrid, described recently by the Juve coach Marcello Lippi as 'a circus'.
Circuses are fun. Fun is way down the list of priorities in Italian football. But maybe, by accident more than design, Milan may provide lots of it this season. There again, since nobody can predict anything in football with any seriousness (for example, who would have thought England would fail to score for 45 minutes against Liechtenstein on Wednesday?) maybe defenceless Madrid will confound the conventional football theorists whom Pérez so disdains - by wiping the floor with all comers in a competition that they are in the habit of winning when the final is played in a year that is an even number.
Numerology being, in the end, as plausible an indicator of football outcomes as any, the evidence indisputably shows that Real have won the European Cup in 1998, 2000 and 2002. Pérez, whose personal numbers as head of the second-biggest construction company in Europe are pretty impressive, may well know something the rest of us don't.
The Champions League begins and with it the resumption of the battle between Italy and Spain for global supremacy. It might not quite be England-Argentina, or England-Turkey, but they are starting really to dislike each other, these two. The Italians because for five years Spain's La Liga had been usurping what Serie A considered to be its God-given ascendancy in international club football. The Spaniards because their dislike of Italian football is so intense it has acquired a quality of moral outrage. The cynicism of the Italian game offends those Don Quixote values - nobility, generosity, courage - that the Spanish like to conceive of as their distinguishing national virtues. The offence was felt all the more keenly last season after the Italians had roundly beaten their best teams.
Right now it looks as if in the 2003-04 round of the most serious competition in world football the Italians are going to beat them again. In the absence of Valencia, who forgot last season that it is important to have someone in your team to score goals, only Real Madrid of the Spanish pack look capable of overcoming the two Old Trafford finalists, Juventus and Milan. Inter and Lazio, meanwhile, seem a better bet to progress than Celta Vigo, Real Sociedad or the more experienced Deportivo La Coruña who never quite cut it at the sharp end of the Champions League and seem less likely to do so this time around, having sold Roy Makaay to Bayern Munich. The Italians and Spanish having provided between them 13 of the past 20 Champions League finalists (Italy 7, Spain 6), it seems a sound bet that the four Italian clubs will progress farther than the four Spanish and that one of the eight will win. You never know, though. Maybe it will be Chelsea and Manchester United in the final on 26 May at the not exactly world-renowned Arena AufSchalke, the 60,000-seat home of Germany's Schalke 04.
One thing we can be certain of, though, is that whether your tastes lean towards flamboyant, devil-may-care attack or ruthlessly regimented defence, the two big footballing nations of the Mediterranean, spearheaded by the last two European Cup winners, Real Madrid and Milan, will be delivering the best of both extremes. Going forward, Real will continue to provide a terrific show. The problem is that someone at the Bernabéu appears to have forgotten that to win at football you also need to defend. It was noted after last year's semi-final defeat by Juventus that Claude Makelele, whose absence that night was decisive, was vital to Real because he provided the hardness around the team's soft defensive centre. Now, Makelele having gone, there is no hardness and no defensive centre, not even a soft one.
That is only a slight exaggeration. Real have no defensive midfielders left - not one - and have bought no one to replace the pensioned-off Fernando Hierro. The team's predicament is so seem ingly severe that hitherto serious football commentators in Spain are honestly suggesting that David Beckham should be appointed to the Vieira-Keane holding midfield role. Tell that one to Sir Alex Ferguson and he will die laughing. Mind you, suggest to the Real president Florentino Pérez that there is a crisis and it is he who will laugh - disdainfully - in your face. As far as he is concerned it is a truth scientifically acknowledged that an attack comprising Ronaldo, Raúl, Luís Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Beckham and - for all practical purposes - Roberto Carlos must be an unstoppable force. End of discussion. It is the 'you score two, we'll score three; you score three, we'll score four' philosophy only ever tried to successful effect by the defensively hapless World Cup winning Brazil side of 1970. And who knows? Pérez might be right. We could be on the verge of a revolution. Florentino Flower Power. It would represent a sensational break with contemporary football orthodoxy, were it to succeed.
The Italians do not for a moment believe that it will. Make war, not love, is their footballing motto. On a football pitch you do not muck about, you do not tamper with the tried and trusted rules. Or if you do, as Milan did at the start of the last Champions League - playing spectacular attacking, passing football - you pause, you make amends, as if excusing yourself for a moment of drunken madness, and resume the sober demeanour that has always served you well. When it was put last week to Andrei Shevchenko, Milan's Ukraine striker, that Milan won the Champions League last season despite playing progressively less appealing football, he did not disagree. 'At a difficult moment for us in the competition we understood that it was not enough merely to play well. We sacrificed attractive football in order to win.'
Carlo Ancelotti, the Milan coach, summed up the difference between the philosophy of Real Madrid and the way the Italians see the game when he accused the Spanish last season of 'an excessive appetite for the aesthetic'.
The funny thing about Italian sides, though, is that they can be as aesthetic as the next team when they put their minds to it. Wales, torn to shreds by a typhoon of attacking football at the San Siro last weekend, will attest to that. And maybe Milan, inspired by the spectacle the Azzurri turned on at their stadium, will have another crack this season at examining an alternative to the constipated habits of play that made the Champions League final against Juventus last season such a balefully dull affair. Milan certainly have the players to do it. In fact, such is the critical mass of Brazilians in the squad now that they may end up playing the beautiful game beautifully despite themselves.
In addition to the four Brazilians already in their squad (Rivaldo, Dida and Serginho), they have signed the veteran Cafu from Roma and the youngster Kaká from São Paulo. Cafu, only a marginally less talented attacking full-back than Roberto Carlos, is an acquisition that combines defensive seriousness with a sense of fun. Kaká, who few outside Brazil had ever heard of until a few weeks ago, might turn out to be the next megastar to come out of the world's favourite football factory.
The Brazilians themselves certainly think so. Listen to this from Carlos Parreira, the vastly experienced Brazil national coach: 'Don't look for more players like Kaká. One like him appears once every 30 years.' Tostão, star of that Brazil 1970 team, last season declared Kaká to be, quite simply, the best player in the Brazilian league.
Only 21, he is an attacking midfielder who plays down the middle. He is 6ft tall and strong, but he is elegant, has a feathery first touch, a tremendous change of pace and great balance. A Juan Sebastián Verón with bite, he sets up goals and scores them: a screamer from the edge of the penalty area that gave victory to Brazil last weekend away against Colombia, 2-1 in a World Cup qualifier, provided a dramatic case in point.
Ancelotti may soon come to share Parreira's enthusiasm for the young man. When the Italian league began two weeks ago he put Kaká in Milan's starting XI, keeping Rivaldo and the experienced Portuguese Rui Costa - hitherto the owner of Kaká's position - on the bench. Which makes you realise what a formidable team Milan are going to have this season: names not quite as big as Real Madrid's perhaps, but in terms of talent very close indeed. Shevchenko is an electric striker, Filippo Inzaghi at least as efficient a goalscoring machine as Raúl. With players of the calibre of Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta and now Cafu in defence, assisted by the demonic Gennaro Gatusso in midfield, Milan have a team as talented as it is compact.
Add to all that the Ancelotti rigour, the feet-on-the-ground organisation he brings, and logic tells you that Milan are a better bet to lift the European Cup this time around than Beckham's otherworldly galácticos . Juventus, eternally solid and blessed with Pavel Nedved and Alessandro Del Piero up front, are also a tighter, more plausible-looking unit than Real Madrid, described recently by the Juve coach Marcello Lippi as 'a circus'.
Circuses are fun. Fun is way down the list of priorities in Italian football. But maybe, by accident more than design, Milan may provide lots of it this season. There again, since nobody can predict anything in football with any seriousness (for example, who would have thought England would fail to score for 45 minutes against Liechtenstein on Wednesday?) maybe defenceless Madrid will confound the conventional football theorists whom Pérez so disdains - by wiping the floor with all comers in a competition that they are in the habit of winning when the final is played in a year that is an even number.
Numerology being, in the end, as plausible an indicator of football outcomes as any, the evidence indisputably shows that Real have won the European Cup in 1998, 2000 and 2002. Pérez, whose personal numbers as head of the second-biggest construction company in Europe are pretty impressive, may well know something the rest of us don't.
