The Sync Magazine

On the silver screen you have good guys and bad guys. When the Empire is destroyed in Return of the Jedi, I’m jubilant. I’m pretty sure most people are, even if the Ewoks had to live for it to happen. Sport is different. There are definitely bad guys, those nasty monolithic super-powers like Manchester Utd in football, the Yankees in baseball and Australia in everything else. The ones who win, and seem to do it through the sheer force of their evil will (and loads of money). However there aren’t that many good guys, and deciding which ones are is based on a significantly more subjective metric. I’m not talking about fan loyalty here, though everyone agrees Fulham are good, I mean the ones who seem to do things right, the underdogs, the nice guys. 

In sport, unlike in the movies, bad guys often win. When they get their comeuppance – see every time Tiger Woods shoots his ‘why is the world against me’ face at the camera after a missed put – it is delightful, but it happens all too infrequently. We are coming to the end of this mini El Classico season within a season, the result of which reads Barcelona 2 – Real Madrid 1 (3 – 1 if you factor in the five nil win earlier in the season), and despite every fibre of my being understanding the fundamental incongruity of it, I am willing Real Madrid to win these games. I am starting to hate Barcelona. Everytime Gerry Armstrong praises a piece of fluid passing (and denies a clear penalty) or someone like Patrick Barclay writes an overwhelmingly adulatory column, my venom rises.

Superficially, Madrid are the bad guys. They’re the Empire. Yes they might be draped in white, but their blood surely runs as black as Christiano Ronaldo’s greasy pompadour. They incessantly spend money to procure talent from around the world in order to dominate. Talent including truly loathsome figures like the aforementioned number 7, Marcelo, Adebayor and Pepe, and a coach who entertains, but is as self-important and media-savvy as Simon Cowell. They are aggressive, they are dirty and they aim to overpower the opposition. Worst of all they are eerily reminiscent of Stoke despite the quality of player at their disposal (Xabi Alonso, as good a passer and midfield focal-point you will find in world football, is effectively bypassed). Long, directionless hoofs down-field, quick wingers pinging their ears back and an over-reliance on set-pieces. However, they are the perennial losers, the archetypal underdogs and I’ve been conditioned to root for the underdog. If this was a Hollywood script, the last five years would be the second act misery before the third act jubilation. Though producer notes would see a few of the ‘characters’ made more sympathetic and artistic license would be taken in having Ronaldo play for the opposition, his downfall in the dying minutes of the ‘Soccer Superbowl’ would be wonderful to watch.

Barcelona on the other hand, are led by the cute and playful Messi, alongside local boys Pep, Xavi, Iniesta and Puyol (the comic relief). Obviously they are not Stoke, they are not wholly awful. They play football the ‘right’ way, or so I’m told, they wonderfully represent their people in Catalonia and they even have a firm relationship with Unicef, a bloody children’s charity. I understand all that and I’m very envious, I’d love to have been brought up in Barcelona and had a season ticket to the Nou Camp, yet I am coming to despise them. I certainly appreciate their excellence, through a combination of skill, tactical acumen, athleticism and work ethic, they are the most dominant club side I have ever seen, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Busquets is despicable, he is either the biggest play-actor in the world or has lowest pain threshold in human history, Alves is worse, all Iniesta wants to do is try to force contact and draw a foul, Guardiola is so preening and smug he makes Mourinho look as sincere, modest and disheveled as Uncle Woy, and the sycophancy that follows them is unbearable. Worst of all is the unrelenting sense of invincibility. I don’t necessarily dislike winners, but I do find myself disliking people who win so often with total efficiency, even when it is more artistic than mechanical.

I watch sport, in part, because of the virtuous unpredictability. Happy endings are not a pre-requisite and a fan really does run the full gamut of emotions over the course of a season, let alone a lifetime. Barcelona winning 95% of their games, most of them comfortably, works against that. Mourinho’s gameplan to ‘beat’ Barca has been to cede possession, play athletes in the middle and hope with all his might they fail to take their chances. Frankly, when the best result attainable is a one-nil extra-time victory earned by Catalonian profligacy, I am bored. When that is matched by a volume of hammed up ‘acting’ and bluster on show that would make Sean Penn blush, I am also depressed. I can re-watch the original trilogy over and over, safe in the knowledge things will not go well for the Emperor, but watching this Barcelona team, crushing everything put in front of them through an aggregation of their tremendous ability allied with their irredeemable cynicism, just isn’t very fun. In this quadrilogy, the Empire is fighting the Borg to an anti-climatic standstill and everybody loses.