All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and […]

The Spanish official translators working on the ongoing Madrid bomb trial have said that 90% of the transcription of recordings alleged mastermind Mo the Egyptian has little to do with the translations carried by the Italians, which served as grounds for his extradition and on which the prosecution has been basing its case. Specifically, they […]

In another bar in the village-over-the-hill aforementioned:
Lettuce in fearsome red wine vinegar
Little bony bits of baby goat wrapped in stomach in a mushroom sauce
Intestines of baby goat stuffed with rice and lungs, kidneys, liver etc
Roasted baby goat head
Pudding made of milk from the mothers of new-born calves
Red wine, coffee, tea and whisky
I think 15 goats […]

I’m unreliably informed that Real Zaragoza star Ewerthon Henrique de Souza’s dad couldn’t spell Everton rather than Erewhon (buy USA/UK). Not that anyone gives a feck, but by all means keep the tips flowing.

By my almost-neighbour EJH, who, having discovered Daniela’s 120 tits, seems to have stopped posting.

It will surely be taken as a compliment if I say that Youp van ‘t Hek reminds me a bit of Tarragona’s finest:
Gelukkig was ik in Spanje en niet alleen in Barcelona. Zondag zat ik ruim op tijd in de trein naar Tarragona. Op naar de topper Nastic tegen Sevilla, de koploper op dat moment. […]

Almighty personalised Google is having problems with syndication widgets:
No 10 denies ’secret email’ claims 1/26/07
Australia cruise to nine-wicket victory.
says the Guardian feed. Norm suggests voting for Blair, so I did, but only twice.

I just met a gentleman of gypsy ethnicity (as they say here) who claims to know a man who claims he was paid by gamblers to debilitate favourites at the Canódromo, the old dog stadium up on Barcelona’s Avenida Meridiana (good piece by Javier Tomeo), which the regional government under pressure from animal rights nutters […]

Tim Stannard at La Liga Loca suggests that coach Javier Clemente may not be the smartest bet for a Serbian national team in desperate need of an image upgrade. Dutch coaches seem to travel rather better.

Here. (Thanks Fenian Mark)

Without resorting to stereotyping, explain why the Brazilians lip-read “sister” and “prostitute” while the Brits went for “terrorist” and racism.

It’s difficult to believe that this Telegraph headline wasn’t selected with Google in mind.

To the extent that I ever was English, I hereby relinquish all claim. I was talking to an Ecuadorian the other day who, having observed the relative position of his country and Spain in the atlas, said he was a native of the Low Countries, los Países Bajos. Ecuador, Holland, anything but England.

Ephiphany may, of course, be a play on FIFA; alternatively, it may be telling us something about the state of Sean Ingle’s expenses in Stuttgart, where, according to the Guardian’s man on the spot, the streets are strained yellow.

This kind of thing is ridiculous. If someone doesn’t want to play for the national team, fine. Individual liberties shouldn’t just be available to people with whom we happen to agree.

Over at Charlie Connelly, with thanks to the DG.

I was sitting peacefully on a bench yesterday when an Italian architect came and sat beside me. (I knew he was a architect, because all the Italians here are architects. I don’t know why.) He asked me where the nearest supermarket was, but I knew this was just what chessplayers refer to as the Berlin […]

Doosra, the other one, will without doubt join the many other South Asian terms gracing English dictionaries if the sublime Murali hangs in there for a while. The only sub-continental word I can think of in standard Spanish and Catalan dictionaries is the Tamil-derived curry. Tandoori and henna are prime candidates for addition. Hindú comes […]

Check out footie rag Marca.

I’d like to see Guus Hiddink take over England asap, but then I was supporting Mark Oaten (go on, get me one for my birthday!) to run the Lib Dems until he started chasing the England job, leaving Boris Johnson as the LDs’ only potentially electable leader.
(Apparently the Koreans gave Guus a villa on […]

Just in case you wondered and don’t understand Google, Beercelona isn’t my term but the name of a 5-a-side team in Cambridge. Real Madras is still around, but whatever happened to Orange Flavoured Bicycle Sheds?

I just read Beth Marie Kosir’s interesting paper on the British codpiece and thought I’d have a quick look through some Spanish stuff. The Hispanic bragueta (I guess it comes from the French braguette, which is actually not a combination of baguette and bragas, “knickers”) seems to have been used first (in the late 15th […]

Death row / Fila de la muerte by Pedro Patricio Escobal sounds like a good read. I’d also know more about football trainer, Mr Petland, who apparently engineered some kind of “English revolution” in Madrid and in the Basque country.

Every night Africans try to climb over the razor-wire fences into Spain’s North African colonies; some don’t make it, and are robbed, raped, murdered by Moroccan “security” forces.

Real Madrid employs some phenomenally well-paid Brazilians.
El País’ homepage this afternoon.

I bumped into El Gran Picasso in a bar down south and thought stories of his epic exploits in Vegas must have been exaggerated, but no. Star juggler Dick Franco recalls the guys–principally Europe-based–who showed him the way:
One of the first was El Gran Picasso, who I met in November 1974 as he was winding […]

It was only after dumping her that he remembered that the tickets for Trent Bridge were on her credit card. (It’s becoming increasingly difficult to buy beer off Pakistani street vendors without getting into Flintoff vs Wasim discussions. Last night a single can cost me €1 and a 10 minute lecture on reverse swing in […]

When I went back to live in Ingerland a few years ago, it took a month before I felt I knew what was going on in meetings where people used new expressions like “the dog’s bollocks” and “a load of arse”. This time I’m preparing my trip and today I discovered that England spin bowler […]

Boris Johnson this morning has in his slightly misty sights
the new species of pissed ladette, profane, belly-flaunting, swigging shots of cocktail from brightly coloured and cunningly marketed bottles, and sweeping the streets in terrifying gangs.
For all the problems created by 24-hour drinking in Barcelona (the old town is full of well-established illegal bars […]

It’s a funny old world in which the celebration of states’ primary ethnic identity passes without comment while people are falling over themselves to ban poor old Chief Illiniwek.

… explains Ronaldo’s pre-marital crisis.

Political repression and the relative positions in the league of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid

I’ll be visiting Jan van Bakel’s site again shortly to quote from his extraordinary collection of letters written by Flemish soldiers in Napoleon’s armies, but here’s another strange thing I found, which he quotes from Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger - Between Good and Evil (1998):

“The only constant throughout Spain’s storied history is failure”

Here’s who the public thinks Graeme Souness will punch first in his new role as manager of Newcastle FC:

Lesson 1 in football: referees are blind, not deaf.

Notorious scumbag Patrick Kluivert was convicted this week of threatening a Barcelona waitress. I am just trying to imagine what will happen to him if Middlesbrough buy him and he tries the same trick in a Teesside bar.

Invited by Tony Blair, the Iraq national team is apparently playing a British parliamentary XI tomorrow and then heading up the M1 to West Brom to take on that well-known Midlands outfit, Trinidad and Tobago. The Spanish authorities have refused them visas, presumably out of political spite, and Mr Bush has not replied to their […]

No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been […]

Metrosexual. The Americans blame French cissies and Brit hacks, but the honours go to Galician AZ Alkmaar footballer, José Fortes Rodriguez:
Some women just don’t get it. They’re not used to being turned down. They say: Go on, you want me don’t you! I say: Am I talking Chinese? I don’t find you attractive. And then […]

I don’t think that John McWhorter’s “YO!” has really “floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation, and … become what linguists would call a pragmatic marker.” It’s just like football: there are always a few pragmatic markers hanging around on the margins of matches, and then there are Dutch defenders who […]