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Tag Archives: AFA
Messi is Ours
It is a declaration of love for the wee man from Rosario, touchingly bashful at times (“i’d be uncomfortable overstepping the mark…”) while at others it veritably flushes with ardent reverence. It betrays a burning need for consummation, which comes through in metaphysical statements that suggest don Julio has been digging into his John Donne: “He plays as he is therefore he is as he plays.” Such demands could prove awkward for the object of his affections, we feel. And how surprising – by all accounts Mrs Grondona is a thoroughly respectable woman, a loyal companion and a fervent Catholic to boot, yet we never suspected her husband was a man of such romantic intensity, such burning passion, a man not content to smell the flower but one who must possess it, ravish it: “Messi is Ours.” Continue reading
Santiago Solari & Facundo Sava – Great Budgies
At home, though, there’s a dearth of such folk: Diego Simeone should be one of the luminaries but his glib, blind bumbling at Racing, forever haughtily sniping at the short-sightedness of the pueblo whilst ignoring his own shortcomings, is but a blueprint for despair. Simeone’s the Man Who isn’t Here. The very title of Solari’s blog, El Charco (‘The Pond’), on the other hand, implies a connection to the auld country, that he’s not an eternal ex-pat; it reveals a sense of commitment, of duty. Likewise Sava, who keeps an even lower profile far from the fanfare of Olé. Nationalism is such a dirty concept, but we’ve come to believe that some of its cleaner qualities, namely a sense of solidarity, far from cheap xenophobia or base self-congratulation, ought to be rehabilitated – especially in such an outward-looking, insecure nation such as Argentina (or Ireland, for that matter). Continue reading
Posted in 5 On Argieball, Santiago Solari & Facundo Sava - Great Budgies
Tagged AFA, Apertura 2011, Boca, Facundo Sava, Falcioni, Santiago Solari
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Security! Magellan, Drake & the AFA
Magellan, though, ah Magellan. As a youth we’d draw our grubby finger across the beautiful, though distorted mess of the Mercater world map. Invariably we’d end up at the Strait of Magellan. We still don’t know why; we’ve yet to venture there. It exercised a sense of wonder on us matched only by the awesome phenomenon that is an eleven o’clock dusk in Dublin. Of course we were schooled in the feats of Magellan, his empirical demonstration, by proxy, of the globe’s theoretically palpable rotundity; his obscene death, riddled with arrows, run through with spears knee-deep in the breakers of his very own Saipan. Only later did we look into Magellan. We learned that he personally ordered that some 1,200 bells, mirrors and trinkets be brought along, notwithstanding the clear space restrictions even with five ships, convinced as he was that whomsoever or whatever they would meet on the journey into the unknown, shiny stuff was bound to go down a storm. So it was that whilst waiting out the winter way down south in San Julián, in the yet unbaptised Argentina, that Magellan’s men managed to capture some simple giants with big feet (‘patagones’). Crude but effective, they distracted the friendly giants before slapping some irons on their legs, in cool civilised fashion. Continue reading
Posted in 1 AFA, Security! Magellan, Drake & the AFA
Tagged AFA, Doughty, Drake, Grondona, MAgellan
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