Spain

Real Madrid—serial winners—Ancelloti-time.

Celtic (my team) played Real Madrid in the Champion League, November 2022. They beat us 2—1 at Parkhead. We should have been well ahead at half-time. Missed chances. Punished and comprehensively beaten. Carlo Ancelloti said all the usual things about the fans and the stadium. Real Madrid are not the best team in the competition. They haven’t been for a few years. That would be last year’s winners Manchester City. Madrid edged them out on penalties. That late, late goal again, doing it for City. Two years ago City looked to get past Madrid. In a team filled with superstars, they just had to see it out in the Santiago Bernabeu. Two late goals, City out.

I’d watched bits of the PSG v Borussia Dortmund (the sixth best team in Germany). PSG hit the post and bar five times. They couldn’t score. They couldn’t get that equaliser. We’d all the usual talk of a defensive masterclass. I see it every week at Parkhead. Opposition teams sit in. Celtic simply have better players. When the diddy teams comes away with a result, my team are castigated and the opposition are lauded. Defensive masterclass as a cliché is always used. Mats Hummels made a joke about it. Ally McCoist, the commentator, was trying too hard to make something special out of it by calling him ‘The Magnet’.  

Another way of putting it is they got lucky. Teams, and managers in particular, need to be lucky.

26th May, 1999. Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona. Bayern Munich are beating Manchester United 1—0. Game over.

United had run out of ideas. Bayern were seeing it out. Substitutes, Teddy Sheringham scored in the 91st minute. Ole Gunnar Soljskaer on the 93rd minute. Dead and buried. They scored in Fergie-time, which has come to feel like Ancelloti-time.  

 Goalkeepers? Manuel Neuer sold the shirts. Simple. Bayern get the lead and they look to see the game out. Real Madrid look out—again. Neuer makes the kind of goalkeeping error that has an under-ten coach turning away in disgust. Vincius Junior’s shot was of the past-back variety.

The back-up striker, Joselu Mato, didn’t even have time to thank Neuer for dropping the ball at his feet to knock into the net, before he’d scored the winner. Bayern were gone in just over sixty seconds. Harry Kane, who went there to pick up silverware, picked up nought in his debut season.

It’s difficult to imagine the former Stoke and Newcastle striker heading to Wembley to play in the Champions League final.  Carlo Ancelotti looked to have run out of ideas as Everton manager. Going back to Real Madrid…well, that’s hardly a step down. Pep Guardiola is no longer in Spain. Barcelona are no longer the best team in the world. It’s a one-horse race. But when it comes to the Champions League, Ancelotti and Madrid have had the luck of the devil. This looks like being their year, yet again. Can Dortmund beat Madrid? No.  But they can score and they do have ‘The Magnet’. Dog’s chance? Hey Jude, Poor old Harry, it’s a dog’s life.

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Real Madrid 3—3 Manchester City.

I’ve never been to Spain or the Santiago Bernabéu, the state-of-the art domed stadium, where the pitch is rolled out before the multimillionaire players warm up. I saw Real Madrid under the bright lights of Paradise in their white strips. Johnny Doyle (RIP) scored a double and we we went to the home of Real Madrid and got gubbed 3—0. Laurie Cunningham was the star of the show then. More recently, ‘Don’ Carlo Ancelotti came up against Ange ball and did that slightly patronising thing that all managers do of praising the unique atmosphere of Parkhead while grabbing the points. In the return leg the referee gave the Ancelloti’s  multimillion pound team two early penalties for nothing and they ran away with a 5—1 victory, without breaking sweat. Jota celebrated his late free kick as if he’d won the Champions League. Fat chance. These teams are in a different league entirely.

Brendan Rodgers in his first incarnation of saviour (before it all went wrong in a familiar way) did run Josep “Pep” Guardiola Sala close. 3—3 draw at Parkhead. Our previous with these teams is accepting our place in the football world. After the 3—3 draw with Ranger, Real Madrid go it with Champion League holders and favourites and draw 3—3.

I used to watch every and all football matches on the telly. Arsenal v Manchester City, for example, promised much but was a dreadfully boring game in which nothing much happens over 95 minutes.

With three goals in the first 15 minutes, this was much better and more entertaining. I’m not entirely sure what Jack Grealish is for. He seems to get rave reviews for not doing very much more than back-pedalling and falling over. I don’t think he went past the full-back all night. But in two minutes he bought a free kick. Bernardo Silva looked to cross it into the box. Instead, his 25-yard free-kick rounded what little wall there was and past goalkeeper Andriy Lunin, who was late to react, flapped as the ball passed him. Terrible defending and goalkeeping of the lowest order.

Manchester City played a big part in their downfall. Vinícius Júnior caused all kinds of chaos with simple balls played behind the City defence. Eduardo Camavinga’s deflected shot made it 1-1, Rúben Dias gifting an OG in 12 minutes and most improbable of all, Rodrygo giving Madrid the lead two minutes later. The stadium was bouncing as the Madrid turned it around.

Júnior had a big chance to make it 3—1 but hit the side netting after half time.

Phil Foden’s equaliser was a thing of beauty. With Kevin de Bruyne’s injury Foden had stepped into the number ten role behind the striker. I’ve seen lots of Erling Haaland recently. None of it has been good. Foden is a giant of the game, but here he too was dwarfed by the occasion. Mostly non-existent. But when Silva, City’s best player, created a space for Stones to make a pass to Foden on the edge of the box, he instinctively banged it in the top corner. Sixty-six minutes gone and there looked like City’s retention of the ball and overall superiority was going to pay off.

Five minutes later, City went ahead.  Gvardiol took a heavy touch from Grealish’s pass. The ball seemed to get away from him, but he hit in the top corner. It was a game of great goals.

Júnior’s cross looked like one of those floppy crazy things player hang up when they have ran out of ideas. Federico Valverde, who never scores goals, caught is sweet and smashed it into the bottom corner from the edge of the box as if he’d been practicing that move all night and this was the time to show it off.

3—3 with almost ten minutes to go.

Toni Kroos had been substituted for Luka Modrić. The German is touted as one of the best in the world. He did nothing of note.

Let’s talk about Luka Modrić. Phil Foden went off with an injury, but if he wants to play as the highest level he needs to do a Luka. We gave him a standing ovation when Madrid beat us at Parkhead. The little man created a goal and scored another. In this game he helped turn the tide. Shouting and gesturing. Give me the ball. You could see him pointing. There’s talk of him retired or being retired at the end of this season. Celtic should offer him a ten- year contract. We’ve had nothing like him since losing Ľubomír Moravčík. Martin O’Neil once famously said when we were being outnumbered and outgunned in a European tie, ‘give the ball to Lubo’.

Give the ball to Luka and good things will happen. Phil Foden, Jude Bellingham, Vinícius Júnior, Erling Haaland, were pedestrian. Luka caught the eye. This man cannot retire at the end of the season. Nothing much has been decided in the tie. They go head to head next week. City should win. But you never know with Luka in the ranks. This is what a great in the game looks like.

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Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song

Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song.

Writers are told, never start with the weather. Paul Lynch starts with the weather in his debut novel, Red Sky in the Morning. Prophet Song, Lynch’s latest award-winning novel, starts with the night weather and a knocking on the door.

‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window, looking out at the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whispers.’

Long convoluted sentences that don’t make sense yet they do. A writer’s job is make things worse for his or her characters.

Mother Courage, Ellish Stack has a Phd and a good job. Her dad, Simon, was a scientist too, but her mother is dead, and he’s paranoid, and in the early stages of dementia. Larry, her husband works for the teacher’s union. They’re respectfully upper-middle class and their eldest son is in line to become that icon of respectability—he has a university place to study medicine. His future is set. She has three other children, including baby, Ben. 

The knocking on the window is their Kristallnacht. They are not Jews. But Larry Stack as a trade-unionist is an enemy of the people. Two officers from the Irish Government’s newly formed GNSB have come to question him. Have come to warn his family. This will be your fate if you oppose us. In the name of freedom, they’re asking them to give up their freedom of thought and assembly, freedom of the press and mass media. It’s a Trumpian scenario we’re all familiar with.

‘The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another, and the end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country, visits your town, knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.’

Prophecy comes from the prayer-book of it couldn’t happen to us. Inevitably it does. Germany, Chile, Spain and Ireland itself had their ‘Disappeared’. Ellish refuses to believe that Larry is gone. Disappeared.

The Irish Government dictatorship will somehow see sense. Suspend the Emergency Powers and the curfews and the rounding up of enemies of the people. Her son, Mark, the doctor-to-be will not be drafted into the militia and fascist army of the governing forces. The logic of inevitably and disbelief creates a toxic fatalism.

‘We were offered visas to Australia, but we turned them down. How could we have known what was going to happen? Leaving everything behind was impossible.’

The impossible is always impossible until it becomes possible. Prophet Song seems prescient. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ An epigram attributed to the philosopher and essayist George Santayana. It is often paraphrased as ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’

Santayana first used this expression in his work ‘The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress,’ which was published in 1905. Mother Courage, the heroine in the novel 2023 by Ellish Stack, illustrates that not much progress has been made. We wait to bear witness to see if the moron’s moron Trump will be re-elected President. Prophet Song may well follow this playbook in American society. Hyperbole? I hope so.

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