What Not To Wear . . . on your face or when collecting awards

It's probably a  cheeky mash-up/juxtaposition of images but I love it anyway. The image below is Ronaldo's supposed reaction to Lionel Messi winning the Ballon d'Or for the fourth year in a row. 

If I was one of the head honchos at Barca, I'd hire a PI to investigate Ronaldo, to ensure he doesn't have a Netflix account and, if he does, that he never rents Amadeus.

Sadly, Pepe Carvalho is not available for the gig. It would have been a blast. 

Barca: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World by Graham Hunter (BackPage Press 2012)

I distinctly remember the first time I saw Leo Messi play football. One of us was patently off-form that day. I came away thinking that Joan Verdú, who was playing in what we would now consider Messi’s best position, completely out-shone him and that the genius acknowledged as the greatest footballer of modern times had a bit of a stinker.

It was autumn 2003 at Barça’s Mini Estadi, the 17,000-capacity arena a few hundred metres from the Camp Nou. My friend, Rob Moore, had asked me along to watch the Barça B captain, Arnau Riera, because he was considering representing him. Messi’s name, of course, already had a buzz surrounding it, but that day he played on the left wing in a 4–2–3–1 formation and, although there were one or two of those delightful dribbles, he looked sluggish and disinterested.

The next time I saw him was the night he scored his first goal for Barcelona – against Albacete at the Camp Nou in spring 2005. No one who was there doubted we were witnessing the arrival of a special footballer.

The Two Souls of Glasgow

A quote from Lionel Messi from earlier this season:

“It’s incredible,” Messi told the Spanish newspaper, Sport. “Rangers didn’t want to play football. They practised antifootball from the first minute and it’s a shame we couldn’t take victory because we created a good number of chances. We just didn’t put them away. I think that when they come to the Nou Camp everything is going to be very different.

“We need to find a solution for breaking down a team who close down so much, but I don’t believe we will come across many teams who play this way.”

[From the London Times.]

Celtic go down fighting against Barcelona. Yep, they were dominated and the better team won and all that jazz but at least they gave it a go and they'll do the same at the Nou Camp in the return leg. And I did love Red Robbo's stop-start looping header.

And hit tip to the Scottish Patient for correctly predicting the scoreline . . . sort of.