It can’t even be a foul, as the Frankfurt player wasn’t man-hugging the Real player from behind in the box with both arms fully locked around his body.
Oh wait a minute, Arsenal have done that all season?
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Good example of why those early European Cup wins by Madrid should be disregarded.
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Headline of the year!
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Balague:
Mikel Arteta winning the Premier League. Unai Emery about to play a final with Aston Villa. Andoni Iraola stopping Pep Guardiola, the best manager in history, in their tracks, and maybe taking Bournemouth to the Champions League. Six out of eight managers playing European finals are Spanish (the greats Iñigo Pérez, Jonatan Girládez, Pere Romeu, Luis Enrique of course). Xabi Alonso going to Chelsea. Spanish football culture is reaching a very tall peak that shows the quality, thinking, experiences, bravery of a group of explorers of the mind. It has been such a pleasure to chronicle that.
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It’s when you read things like that, you realise that things have moved on for the better - at least inside football grounds. It wasn’t really until the late 1980s that the clubs themselves started to face people down. Essentially, the sort of people who would throw that kind of abuse around were bad news for anyone that just wanted to watch the match.
I think the turning point for us was when John Barnes was signed. The club knew that they would have to face down the racists and there were incidents at the time that I think they should have publicised more at the time. Apparently, one of the directors (I’m not sure which one) wanted rid of them and said something along the lines that the racist element could, “fuck off and support Everton” if that was their attitude.
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I remember being on the Kop in the early 00s and the crowd chanting “You black bastard” at Uriah Rennie so I don’t think we should be too quick to pat ourselves on the back.
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In fairness they chanted that at every referee. But you’d think someone could realist that it would be taken the wrong way…
I think people feel they can report this stuff a lot more nowadays, however I sadly feel in the last few years we are sliding back as a society.
I feel that as a gay man certainly and people seem to hide their prejudice behind reasons.
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We are sliding back as a society.
Social media is a cesspool of bile and hatred, and as you say, excuses or reasons for it
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Funny thing about that is that it quite clearly is the wrong Romeu
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They are lucky it doesn’t show their hands
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So that’s what Jim Robinson did after leaving Ramsay Street?
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The Netflix documentary on Netflix about France’s catastrophic 2010 World Cup is incredible stuff. I bet even the Dutch were watching thinking it was an absurd way to blow up during a tournament.
The one thing didn’t make sense to me was they were all seemingly in agreement that the reporting about what went on in the dressing room at half time was false. But then they immediately flipped to paranoia about there being a mole in the camp…if the stuff wasn’t true why do you assume it had to have been given to the press by someone inside the camp?
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