Bring on the Champions

 

Dragons, drinking and a wee match against Spain.

 September has been a crazy month in the land of Paella and Bovril, 2 very big parties that lasted a few days and I had to outrun that dragon!! 

I thought I would be fitting to publish an oldy from "Letters from Barcelona" that feature that wee team, Spain!! 

Here in Barcelona the Spain national team is not as big as the mighty Barcelona, but I am sure that a few locals will be chatting to me on Tuesday about the great Scots! 

Letters from Barcelona first appeared in the Raith Rovers match day programme.

PLEASE SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL CLUB AND IT'S MATCH DAY PROGRAMME.

TAKE A BUDDY WITH YA! 

Barcelona 20th june 2010, world cup in full flow, games today, honduras-somebody , blah blah, and spain-chile. First thing in the morning I see, on the ten minute walk to the metro, five women wearing the honduras top, two chile tops and a blah top. By the time I get home from work, after four metro trips and a bit of wandering about, I have seen a multitude of different shirts, but as i put on my Espana top ($5 from the  barcelona primark) I can't remember seeing a Spain shirt. On the way to the house of an amigo who has a 54inch HD TV and ids paying for the Canal plusHD coverage, I keep an eye out for any sign of support for the Spanish national side, but see none. Why would this be? And why should I feel almost like a traitor wearing my t-shirt? The city of Barcelona is, after all, football mad.

To explain, I need to give you a little history lesson.

Catalonia, which is the area of Spain to the north east, is a semi-autonomous region, which has aspirations of being "independent in Europe". Sound familiar? Whenever I answer the inevitable "Are you English?" by telling people I meet that I'm Scots, locals are full of questions about the political landscape as regards independence, why do we have a different football league and so on. Catalonia has its own language but is very much a part of the Spanish state. When you ask the locals how they think of themselves, the answer is almost always "Catalan", then Spanish, (sometimes) Sound even more familiar? So the Catalans find it difficult to support Spain, As spain means Madrid, which means Real Madrid, a team associated with Franco's regime and arch enemy of the pride of Catalonia, FC Barcelona "El Barca"

To complicate matters, there are a load of Catalan and Barcelona players in the national side, which leaves the folk here even more ambivalent. Hence the lack of obvious support. I went to my mates house and watched the game with a few guys who are ardent Barcelona fans and Catalan to the core, and they told me, in between shouting at the TV that they will support the team but wearing the jersey is just too much.

This got me thinking about the old debate about a Britain team. There is supposedly going to be a britain squad for Olympics 2012, through some fudge or other, and [previous to England's awful world cup I thought that an all English UK side was probably how it would be, which was one of my main objections to the idea(well the main RATIONAL objection). But now I'm thinking, maybe the English need our help, We know they tend to think of England and Britain as being synonyms, so with a couple of scots, Welsh or N. Irish players bin the squad they may be finally able to get the glory they so desperately seek. They could clearly have done with a Ryan Giggs for the left wing the five live commentary team inset is weak so weak