'They play football the right way'

Not my words, but those of Alex Ferguson, after seeing Barcelona give his Manchester United team 'a hiding' in the UEFA Champions League final last night.

I don't watch football much, but this was a match not to be missed, and the fluid and deft play the Barcelona team displayed was both extraordinary and memorable.This is football a million miles away from the shirt-pulling, 'if you can't tackle them, push them over' tactics that we observe weekly on our screens. Seeing Lionel Messi run with the ball will remind some of how it was years ago with George Best, when he really was at his best. But this was never a one-man show. To watch the intuitive interplay between those gifted mid-field players as they worked their way up the pitch to produce the inevitable strike, nineteen times in all, should be a lesson in humility for all the Premier League overpaid and overrated teams for whom their car collections, court injunctions and overtanned WAGs appear to be the main focus of their lives.

This was far, too, from the bad-tempered semi-final exchanges with Real Madrid where the spirit of Mourinho ruled rather than that of Guardiola. Mourinho's lip-curling comment after that defeat that the Barcelona team couldn't be beaten because they were 'too nice' was telling in that it said more about him than anyone else. It has to be said that in comparison with Barca on that occasion, the Real Madrid team seemed like a crowd of delinquents.

To their credit, Manchester United played a clean game, not Mourinho style, and it was an event where for once, being the exception rather than the rule, football could truly lay claim to be 'the beautiful game'.

Though not as beautiful as tennis, of course ...

The evidence of blood

¡Que no quiero verla!

“I don’t want to see it!”

This was the anguished and repeated cry of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, in his famous lament on the death in the bullring of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in 1935.

Dile a la luna que venga,
que no quiero ver la sangre
de Ignacio sobre la arena.

Tell the moon to come,

I don’t want to see

Ignacio’s blood on the sand.

This last week, whether we wanted to or not, we’ve been forced to witness blood in two major events, two contexts, very different yet perhaps redolent of each other in forcing the question: Has anything much changed in human nature in the last thousand years?

The first event I’m thinking of was the parading of John Paul II’s blood through St Peter’s basilica in Rome on the occasion of his beatification. The other was the parading (as one might see it) of pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s blood (and maybe that of his wife) staining the floor where he was killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Some may find it inappropriate to bring these two images together, but  I’m struck by their synchronicity. I’m equally gobsmacked, in the famous Chris Patten phrase,  by the awesome incongruity of both.

What on earth does the Catholic Church think it is doing, in this century, in taking a glass phial of a man’s blood extracted during his final illness, treating it so that it will not coagulate, mounting it in an elaborate silver monstrance, then processing around with it held high in the air like some precious relic. Ah, I see, it is a precious relic. So precious, indeed, that there are three more just like it preserved in safe places just in case this one should go astray.

I do realise that this kind of thing didn’t disappear with the Enlightenment, but I'm amazed that the Church authorities think it still appropriate for the modern world to engage in such shows. Didn’t it occur to them that the blood of the intended saint, tucked away quietly, might have been left to coagulate and liquefy miraculously through its own inner power? Then there could indeed have been something unusual and worth parading around with, like the blood of San Gennaro in Naples.

Blood is emblematic, yes, and powerful, the spilling of blood even more so. The poet Lorca could not bear even the sight of his friend’s blood on the sand. So one wonders at the reasoning in the US administration which allowed video of Bin Laden’s bloodstained bedroom to be circulated, while not releasing pictures of his dead body -- too gruesome to show, says President Obama.

We will see whether this sleight of hand persuades anyone who thinks otherwise that Bin Laden was just a gangster to be shot down, Dirty Harry style. The sheer ugliness, bloodiness, destruction and confusion of the death scene, captured on camera, will seem to sympathisers to speak more of a crime than of legitimate, official justice. To them, the blood shed here will indeed be seen as the blood of a martyr.

The reality in both events, of course, is that over the centuries we have not progressed much in how we do things. Stage-managed piety rules in Rome, dressed up to the nines. Elsewhere ugly violence is still the answer to ugly violence.  Superior weaponry and terrifying machines of obliteration, as in the future world of Terminator, are what the West contributes to the art of conflict. But with all their space age technology, the ultra-élite SEALs apparently still have found no bloodless way to victory.

So will the official US images of Bin Laden’s blood on the carpet achieve the desired effect of “proving” his death? I think not, any more than the elevated phial of the dead Pope’s blood will convince any sceptic of his sanctity.

And, with Lorca, I can frankly say, in both instances, “¡Que no quiero verla!”

CJM