The week of panic and sleeplessness is done now. I've been waking up weary every day, not remembering my dreams, with only vaguely troubling recollections of nights poisoned by sisyphian tasks and trying to find my way through convoluted'd like to see them eating their left-brain, pragmatical, evil-wins-because-it-has-more-money words on a hefty Catalan platter today.
It's hard to say what did the trick, exactly. Man U hit the pitch all gangbusters and superpowered, controlling the game for the first ten minutes. Granted, Barca have a sort of tradition of starting slow, probing and exploring, finding their passing rhythm before making their first move, but in those first ten minutes I think Ronaldo created at least three chances for himself... all saved by my boys, of course. (The backline played tremendously yesterday. Sylvinho and Pique were downright heroes, and Carles Puyol is a damn superman, reining Ronaldo in over and over and getting continually battered for his troubles. I hope he's sitting today in a hot-tub full of supermodels. Certainly he's earned it.) And then somehow Cameroonian marvel Samuel Eto'o slipped up the touchline with the ball at his feet and tapped it past keeper Van der Sar into the net, ten minutes into the match, and I've never seen anything so quickly and finally turn an entire tide. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Like all the life drained right out of Ferguson's men, and they were transformed in that one instant from a smoothly-oiled fighting machine into a pile of disengaged parts, still fighting, but without effect.
If you've never seen Barca play, you're missing a great pleasure. The footwork, the pace, the aesthetics of the passing... Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez are like two halves of a single person when they move the ball between them up the pitch. Much of the greatness of Barca lies in its youth training, a school known as La Masia. Boys are trained early in the ways of Beautiful Football, and a great many of them stay with the team for many years, a rarity in these days of nomadic players following the siren call of their bank accounts. Both Iniesta and Xavi rose up out of this youth program, as did manager Pep Guardiola (seen flying, below), first goalkeeper Victor Valdes and superstar Argentine forward Lionel Messi, as well as more recent additions Sergi Busquets and Gerard Pique. Intrepid Captain Puyol has been a staunch Catalan for nearly his entire career.
But these are the giggly mutterings of the near-exhausted. I've got that same empty feeling I had after the marathon that was the World Cup, this time with a patina of happiness washed across it, but there's that melancholy, too. The season's over. I'll have nothing but World Cup qualifiers, never my favorite dish on the menu, for a good three months. Add to that the prospect of three more months of nothing but summer fare at the cinema (GI Joe?! Trans-frickin'-formers?!) and I'm at a loose end. I've been watching the first season of Alan Ball's True Blood, which I'm enjoying (cajun country, vampires, and all those stellar character actors that get work on HBO. What's not to like?), but I'm jonesing for an obsession. My immediate impulse is to go out and watch Star Trek again, see if I like it as well as I thought I did the first time, put off Terminator Salvation for a few more days, and hope that if I leave myself open and vulnerable, some god or other might show up in the form of a flash of brilliant inspiration. Here's hoping.
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