THAT interview with Andrea Dossena

The greatest story never told

When Andrea Dossena was a little boy growing up in Lodi, northern Italy, he would spend hours sat cross legged outside the cathedral on the historic Piazza della Vittoria, telling strangers how he would change the world one day, many miles away from where he now sat.

A Jolly Good Football Match

"This header's going to get more coverage than Welbeck's even though it's arguably not as good."

We’ve been documenting the decline and shortcomings of ‘modern football’ and its saturation coverage until we’re bluer in the face than a freezing Smurf, so it was refreshing to take in that rarest of spectacles this week: an enjoyable football match. With European ties scarce between Real Madrid and Manchester United in recent years, and those that have occurred remembered fondly – particularly for exhibitions of skill and goalscoring by Ronaldo, Redondo, Beckham et al – it was pretty difficult for any of the usual trumpeting narratives of revenge, vendettas or rivalries to penetrate what looked like an absolute classic from the moment the balls came out of the bag.

Euro Revision #5: Manchester United v Real Madrid 2003



It's part five, which means handing over to In Bed With Maradona's Dave Hartrick...

Manchester United 4-3 Real Madrid, April 23 2003

The problem with the Champions League is that until the latter stages there are far too many mismatches. Every year the draw comes through for the groups and all we can look forward to until the next round is Barcelona waltzing through six games in which they’ll never be required to shift in to top gear. Yes, we love the Caligula style orgy of football as up to eight games are screened for us to red button to and from, but in reality, for every shock there’s 30 games that equate to a little kid swinging punches but being held at arms length by a teenager.

El Clasi-coach

Amid the almost plaintive geeing up from the stands at White Hart Lane, Real Madrid fans at one end of the ground could be heard bellowing Jose Mourinho’s name. Forget that 5-0 humbling, forget the eight point gap at the top of the league. Forget that Mourinho’s proud unbeaten record at home (nine years incorporating 150 matches) was demolished by a team currently 11th in La Liga. Forget that four clasicos now await us in the space of 18 days. Madrid fans now believe that a team so comprehensively battered by Barcelona can become its superior in Europe.

This is unquestionably Mourinho’s favourite time of the year. This is also his favourite way of operating. While we all get carried away with the prospect of seeing four matches involving Spain’s top pair, the likelihood is that the Portuguese will see only two.

You Are Not A Loan

We’ve all heard the myth. That deep in an underground bunker, somewhere beneath Richard Keys’s house, Sky took a timeless sport, the most popular sport on the planet, covered it in bells and whistles and whooshing logos and created football in 1992. They made Sundays ‘Super’ too.

Obsessed as they are with the concept of ‘breaking news’, it came as no surprise that the Sky behemoth has been all over transfer deadline day since its inception in 2002-03 like a fly around the proverbial. Which leads me to what we think about the transfer window.

Champions League, You're Having A Laugh

'No, I don't know what happened to that unicorn'

Well bugger me, it’s the Champions League this week. AGAIN. Where are we up to at the moment? Oh, it’s the penultimate group games. Well, that could be exciting – maybe Real haven’t qualified ye- oh no, never mind. Maybe United-Rangers will be a mouth-watering contest, as surely United need to go and get a win to be sure of- oh no, no they don’t. What about a real continental fixture? Maybe if Panathanaikos get something off Barcelona at home it’ll make things diffi-, oh no, Barca’s last game is at the Camp Nou against a team with no wins. Well they still want to win their group of cour- NO. NO THEY DON’T. NO ONE CARES.

The Reinvention of Ronaldo?

If you had a checklist of 'allegations levelled at Cristiano Ronaldo' (in a football sense), you'd normally be able to put a tick next to each one over the course of 90 minutes. Preening? Check. Too many stepovers? Check. Free-kicks? Check. Outrageous (and pointless) long-range shooting? Check. Other, more complimentary attributes (pace, aerial prowess, goalscoring record) are also identifiable more often than not.

Not against Ajax though. Even the favourite slight of his most fervent detractors, that of the Portuguese as a flat-track bully, seemed some way off the mark. Ronaldo wasn't necessarily bad against Ajax – he linked well as part of the triumvirate behind Gonzalo Higuain – but he was different somehow. Identity crisis, or the hand of Jose Mourinho?

Jose To Fill In The Blancos?

“Poverty wants much, but avarice, everything.” So said the Roman author Publilius Syrus. Fast-forward more than two millennia and the wise scribe may well have been talking about Real Madrid and their all-encompassing obsession with being the world’s most successful club. And so it has come to pass that for seven of the past 15 years, the Ballon d’Or winner has made his way to the Bernabeu, unable to move for all the bells and whistles. It is as if, season on season, the Real Madrid president, whoever he may be, takes his summer shopping list from France Football, buying into a marketing opportunity first and the concept of a player actually fitting into a system merely an afterthought.

This summer, were he a player, Jose Mourinho would almost certainly be first in line to get his hands on the golden ball. Having just tied up another Serie A title with Inter Milan, a week after winning the Coppa Italia, the Portuguese has his sights set firmly on the Bernabeu this weekend as he seeks to lift his first Champions League trophy since his days at Porto. Mourinho is already revered by Real fans for his bus parking job in the previous round, thus saving them from the frankly unthinkable travesty of having Barcelona trot out in the Champions League final (and worse still, win it) at the Bernabeu. Win or lose come Saturday, the assumption is that Mourinho is more than likely going to make the Bernabeu a home from home from the summer onwards as the Real board line him up as Manuel Pellegrini’s replacement.

At first glance, given the Madrid public’s voracious appetite for attractive football, Mourinho seems an unlikely choice to take the helm. But then again, the one trophy desperately sought by the fans is also the one you sense is also first on the list of Mourinho’s priorities each season. Compromise, therefore, seems to be the order of the day. The expansive football demanded by Real fans will certainly be evidenced next season, should Mourinho be in charge or not. With creativity the likes of that possessed by Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Karim Benzema, Real Madrid are never going to do a Blackburn. Also, people are too quick to forget the early days of Mourinho’s tenure at Stamford Bridge, when Damien Duff and Arjen Robben ran defences rugged and were, by all accounts, pretty easy on the eye.

The insatiability of the handkerchief wavers at Real is two-fold; success, but by playing Barcelonaesque football. Under Mourinho, this rapacious mindset will need to be tempered as success at all costs becomes the new mantra. There will be glimpses of the sort of computer game ‘ole’ football so lauded at the Nou Camp but there will also be a greater discipline under Mourinho, of that there is no doubt. Given the choice between watching a Ronaldo flick or a Walter Samuel reducer, one gets the impression Mourinho would probably favour the latter. That isn’t to say he is a killjoy, however. Far from it. He just appreciates that to win, more is needed than sticking a team full of Galacticos onto the pitch and saying “get on with it”.

The size of the task at hand should not be sniffed at. In many ways, it is the most thankless task in world football. Mourinho will ostensibly be given no more than two seasons to bring the Champions League to the Bernabeu for the first time since the class of 2001/2. In the interim, an astonishing nine managers have come and gone (presuming Pellegrini goes as seems a dead cert). Indeed, Real have not got past the quarter final stage for four seasons. Quite why they have this preordained sense of entitlement to Europe’s biggest prize is strange to comprehend for most fans. But it is simply a fact of life Mourinho will have to embrace if he is to succeed. As if this wasn’t enough to contend with, it has traditionally been the president who cherry picks the new transfers. Cast your minds back and it wasn’t so long ago that Mourinho was locked in another power struggle with a hands-on owner.

Bearing all this in mind, should the Special One take over next season, the grit that has been noticeably absent from Real in recent seasons may well be thrown into the mix. Bells and whistles coated in grit; now that might just be the golden formula. Adam Bushby

Canales Scores, Prepares For Season On Bench

Enjoy it Sergio. You won't see one for a while.

When he signed his contract with Real Madrid, Sergio Canales probably expected to be arriving at the club this summer to a dressing room of galacticos fresh from a glorious Champions League final victory in their own stadium. In light of that, he probably then expected to be loaned straight back to Racing. However, the reality has proved somewhat different and in actual fact, two players who went the other way through the Bernabau’s ever-revolving doors – Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder – will be the ones gracing Madrid's turf on May 22nd. Moreover, Marca has reported that Real won’t be sending Canales out on loan in 2010/11.

The thing about Canales is that his most recent wonder goal, against Villareal last Saturday, was his first since the middle of January – the first time most of us had heard of him. That’s 21 matches without a peep. The timing of Real’s latest outburst therefore is no doubt designed to remind everyone exactly who Canales is and where he’s going in July. It almost seemed that they’d forgotten about him in the interim, because he wasn’t in the news.

I get the impression that Real are like the mate in the pub who doesn’t really like football, but tries to join in with all the chat anyway. The kind of person that thought Nayim would be a good buy because he once scored from the halfway line. The kind of English person that buys a Brazil shirt every four years. The kind of person that spends £4m on a 19-year old because he scored a couple of goals and Sid Lowe consequently talked about him on Football Weekly.

Real are very keen on you if you’ve got a reputation, whether as a wonderkid or a 42-goal winger. They don’t tend to put in the hard yards, in general, when developing players. In fact, they basically go against the over-riding rule of football that EVERYONE knows: 11 amazing players do not an amazing team become. Doesn’t everyone know that? Throwing money at World Players of the Year season after season might enable you to open up a 25-point gap on the team below you, as it has this season, but it counts for very little when that team (Valencia) are third in the league rather than second. Barcelona, for obvious reasons, are the exception.

It’s all a bit sad, really. In the same way that your mate in the pub stuck to his guns in 2002 and maintained that signing El-Hadji Diouf was a great idea, so Madrid are equally unequivocal. Their desire for success will lead them to up their pursuit of Franck Ribery, Wayne Rooney and David Villa in the summer – players that everyone knows about already and will just join a long list of attacking options including – and then limiting – young Canales. This policy might be enough to suppress the domestic league, but it won’t deliver the trophy they crave. So far, all the galacticos have delivered Madrid in this iteration is an embarrassing exit from Spain’s domestic cup and a humbling at the hands of Lyon in the Champions’ League. Whether they win La Liga this season or not, they will still have to suffer the ignominy of watching their final – including their former players – while stuck in their seats. Rob MacDonald