Alex Massie Alex Massie

Visca Barca!

Jim Henley had a great post a while back naming names and shaming those people who blog too much. As Jim rightly put it, these days you need to be a professional blog reader just to keep up. On the other hand, there are those people who don’t blog nearly enough. My friend Kerry Howley is one. Blimpish is another. And so is James Hamilton, whose More than Mind Games has been in a kind of extended winter break for some time. Happily, however, there are signs of the green shoots of bloggy recovery. Happily James is back to remind us how grateful we should be that Barcelona did the entire continent a favour by knocking Chelsea out of the Champions League last night:

And Chelsea were robbed. There’s no doubt that the tie was theirs on balance. But consider what it would have meant had the football gods (and let’s hope it was just the football gods and not bribery or UEFA as well) not intervened in the dying moments of the game. We’d have had last year’s final all over again. With all that entailed. Just imagine: Three weeks of self-serving, self-pitying mockney bullshit from England’s captain John Terry. Tedious speculation about penalties. Replays from Moscow on Sky Sports every day. The hideous ramping-up of the pressure on Guus Hiddinck to stay. Poor Frank Lampard’s mother getting wheeled out for inspiration. Mourinho hassled about his legacy. And all that Triumph of the Will stuff about the manifest destiny of the blues.

Quite so. Now we just need Barca to spank three or four past United in the final for all to be well with the world. Temporarily, anyway.

UPDATE: Via a friend’s Facebook status: Cashenfreude – to derive enjoyment and joy from the distress and troubles of Chelsea Football Club.

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