Herd about the buffalo racer’s Olympic snub?
UEFA BAN CAN DRIVE CITY TO EURO GLORY
PICTURE the scene in the Manchester City dressing room. A circle of players dancing around a crumpled Champions League flag on the floor as Kevin De Bruyne leads a voluble anti-UEFA chant – when in walks Pep Guardiola with a box of matches.
To the cheers of his team, the City manager strikes one and sets fire to the flag. Up it goes in flames as the players punch the air in a collective mix of rage and elation.
It is the Iranian street protest brought to the Etihad as the oppressed rise up against the Great Satan miles away in Zurich.
Manchester City’s version of football is such an artful creation that anger – passion even – seems to play no part in it.
On Wednesday night, when they played their first game since the two-year ban imposed upon them for accounting chicanery, it was business as usual with a forensic dissection of West Ham.
Afterwards, Guardiola, in committing his future to the club regardless of the success or failure of their appeal, appeared entirely unflustered.
Do not be fooled. If Guardiola is smart – and no-one ever accused him of being otherwise – he will be using last week’s dramatic judgment for all it is worth.
The All Or Nothing documentary on the club revealed what he can be
City’s hierarchy and fans might well like to burn a Champions League flag after being banned, but it will serve as extra motivation like when the doors close and he is alone with his players. He can do passion all right when it suits him.
He may not have the matches with him – health and safety and all that – but it is not hard to imagine the messages: They don’t want us. They’ll do anything to stop us. They think they’ve beaten us.
It is not hard either to imagine the reaction of his squad to his words. They may be pampered and superrich, but millionaires have
hackles too. UEFA think that, do they? We’ll show them, then. F*** UEFA.
No team, however talented, can rely purely on technique and ability. They require an emotional trigger. The colossal blow of a twoyear ban may just be City’s in Europe – the landscape where they have fallen short under Guardiola.
If the appeal against the ban fails, even with Guardiola staying, the City squad is unlikely to stay intact.The lure of Champions
EYE-CATCHING news out of India, where the next Usain Bolt is too busy racing buffalo to go to the Olympics.
Srinivas Gowda, who has apparently clocked 13.42sec over 142m through a sodden paddy field, is unavailable to compete in the national sprint trials, despite the sports minister buying him a rail ticket, because
League football elsewhere will be too great. So, in a season of domestic drift, they suddenly find themselves with startling clarity of purpose.
This is now their one shot together.
And they have all the motivation they ever need.
Whatever the outcome of the Financial Fair Play breach appeal – and frankly City look bang to rights – in their own narrative for the time being they are the victims in all this, the outsider persecuted for having the temerity to try to break into the cosy cartel.
They face Real Madrid next week in the last 16. Formidable opponents but in a time of wagon circling, the perfect foe.An establishment club to its core.
If City want to land a right hook on the chiselled jaw of the old-money elite, there they are in pristine white.
At just the right moment too they have Aymeric Laporte – their second most important player after De Bruyne – up and running again.
One thought should drive them as they wait to walk out of the tunnel next week – how much would UEFA hate it if the club they had kicked out of Europe ended up lifting the Champions League trophy this season?
City have the squad to do it but, then, they’ve always had the squad. This time the difference is that they also have the fire. of Kambala commitments. Kambala is a traditional sport in the Karnataka region which involves charging across rice fields alongside two tethered buffalo.
Perhaps all hope is not lost for the loyal 28-year-old construction worker.
If skateboarding has made it to Tokyo 2020, maybe we will see kambala at Paris 2024.
WORLD No1 Rory McIlroy has said no to the breakaway World Golf League and in one blow killed it dead. No Rory, no story.
But maybe golf needs to take a closer look.
The various tours and their overlapping calendars are a clear
RORY STORY: McIlroy has turned down new league weakness in the sport. They water down the quality of fields globally on any given week.
If it was possible to gather the best players in one place for 18 events a year as the World Golf League proposed, that would represent progress.
Time for the European Tour and PGA Tour to break bread on the subject.