Descanse En Paz: Phillip Hughes

DEP. Descanse en paz, often stated as descansa en paz. It doesn't matter which. It means RIP, rest in peace. There were thousands upon thousands of RIPs on forums and on social media last week. There were also many DEPs. DEP and RIP combined to mourn the death of Phillip Hughes.

It was when I saw that "Ultima Hora" had run the story about Hughes that I realised how deeply and how widely news of his death was being experienced. Contemporary communications being as they are, news agencies being as they are, it was a story which might not have touched the Spanish media in years gone by, but because of the instantaneousness of communications, it did. But this was the death of a cricketer. Un jugador de críquet. They don't play cricket in Spain. What do the Spanish know of this sport?

Well, they do of course play cricket in Spain. The national side may in international terms be in the minor league but national team there is, though to suggest that the overwhelming majority of Spaniards would have a clue about the sport - quite how it is played or quite how silly mid-off might be translated into Spanish - would be well wide of the mark.

Sport has over time followed its own evolutionary pattern of separate development, but there are - as with all evolution - common origins, for example hitting something with something else, which became a bat, while the thing to be hit was moulded into a shape that would allow smooth movement - the ball, the pelota. The Spanish - the Basques originally - have "pelota", which migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, just as much of the British Empire formed a common bond on the cricket pitch. The sports are different but they are not different. They share a common root and they share a commonality in being a sport.

It was this commonality which came across most in the reports of Hughes's death. A sportsman had been killed doing what he did, playing sport. That cricket might be a sport of arcane rules and jargon to the uninitiated doesn't matter. It is still a sport and so part of a global community which comes together in the name of sport;  hence the many DEPs that were contained in the comments to those reports.

The comments were, from the point of view of an English-speaking, cricket-loving observer, more interesting than the reports themselves. "Marca", the leading Spanish sports daily, had several pages of them on its website. The first one I came across said: "apart from being very boring, cricket is also dangerous and should be banned". Another opined that cricket was "a foolish and risky game". Others acknowledged the risks but no one else went so far as to suggest that cricket should be banned, though one added that "frankly, it seems stupid to me to play with balls that can kill". The counterpoint to this was one which said: "People die in cycling, motorcycling, skiing, and I could name others. Sport has a risk. If you don't want to assume it, then don't play it. But using a ball of foam rubber would be like limiting speeds on motorways to 20kph in order to avoid deaths".

It was the ball and its characteristics and the nature of protective gear which dominated the comments. There were those who, not having experienced cricket, were curious as to how the ball was made and others who expressed surprise that there was not greater protection. For those who didn't fully appreciate what had happened, someone went into some detail in explaining how "Hughes had turned on his vertical axis" (in cricketing parlance, he was playing the hook shot) and been struck where it was unusual to be struck. There was also surprise as to the sheer speed with which the ball can be bowled (or, in the absence of a Spanish verb "to bowl", can be thrown or slung). A Pakistani commenter came on to say that Shoaib Akhtar had bowled at 160kph (100 miles per hour).

Unrelated to the incident, someone else, not having any knowledge of cricket, had looked it up on Wikipedia. It was a sport with "a very interesting perspective". It was supposed that England would dominate it, but it turns out that England had never won the World Cup. He noted that India were the current champions and that the tournament had also been won by the West Indies ("a coalition of Caribbean micro-nations that seems to have been a good team").

Well, there's no need to rub it in about England's ongoing failure, but it was a comment which, I guess, highlighted how little would be known of cricket in Spain. Yet despite this, many people wished to comment, and overwhelmingly the feeling was one of sadness. The world of sport had come together. Phillip Hughes, DEP.

The Team Myth

Australia's cricket coach, Mickey Arthur, may be either a genius of human motivation or a total drongo. Not being a fair dinkum Aussie, the South African Arthur may well have a made a rod for his own back in effectively suspending four players for the third test against India.

Cricket is a strange sport. It is a team game yet its component elements are individual. In recent years, it has been possible to discern more obviously defined roles for players within a cricket team, partly the consequence of the development of different formats. These may always have existed, but they were far less apparent, especially in the days of Geoffrey Boycott who would, nevertheless, maintain that what was widely perceived as selfishness was in fact playing for the team.

What is also more evident nowadays is the very notion of the "team", one by which all players pull in the same direction in the pursuit of a common cause. This, you would have thought, would always have been a given in an apparently team sport, but not so. One of the more glaring examples occurred during the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932-33. Gubby Allen refused to bowl leg theory, so going against his captain Douglas Jardine's strategy. Allen, like Jardine, an amateur and a product of the public school system and Oxbridge, had the background and the bearing to enable him to take a stand. Under England's cricketing apartheid, Allen was a "gentleman". The paid ranks, the professional "players" like Harold Larwood, did what they were told. So much for a team ethic.

Arthur's suspension of the four players was the result of his wish and that also, so one supposes, of captain Michael Clarke to establish a particular team ethic. One of the criticisms of Arthur is that he indulges in psycho-babble, but all he has attempted to do, albeit in a cack-handed manner, is what other sports sides now typically strive to do, which is to create genuine "teams".

The psycho-babble, so the critics insist, has been lifted from management and business, yet much of this jargonising about teams came originally from sport. In organisations, "teams" as a concept didn't really exist until the 1980s. It took studies of outstanding sports teams to bring the concept about. In so doing, a framework was established for understanding the nature of teams and therefore teamwork and for distinguishing them from what were merely groups of workers.

Teams were to be created according to certain rules. One of these was their purpose for existing. It was in accordance with shared objectives. Team players had to buy into these shared objectives and provide roles that met them, even if this meant a certain humility and subordination of the ego to the common cause. By acquiring these objectives and by adopting the required roles, what were once groups now became teams.

This apparently sensible development was, however, to become undermined by the subsequent sheer ubiquity of the term "team" and its transfer into marketing-speak. The "team" became a means of promotion. Just as "quality" was a panacea of which a company could boast (even if it didn't conform to notions of quality), so the "team" was a de rigueur marketing tool designed to establish, in the minds of the customer, a perception of a company working in the best interests of that customer - the common cause. Unfortunately, most of it was rubbish and it still is.

Come to Mallorca on holiday now, and you will find that there are all sorts of "teams": the hotel "team", the entertainment "team", even the bar or restaurant "team". The word has become a meaningless shorthand but one, nevertheless, that is intended to convey the impression that "teams" are there for only one reason, and that is to serve the customer. Some may do precisely this, but they may well do so more through luck rather than judgement or through a specific strategy that has set out what it means to be a "team". Others won't do anything of the sort, because these "teams" are merely a collection of individuals rarely that committed to any objective other than getting paid or, with some parts of the summer tourism industry, getting laid.

So, when you click on a website on which there is a signing-off by "your team" (and it is usually is your and not our) or you see a display in say a hotel lobby with smiling faces as part of "your team", don't be taken in. They may be teams, they may be very good teams, but they may just be groups of people hiding behind the convenience of marketing guff.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Power To Corrupt

If the Duke of Palma's appearances in court were to have a British parallel, it would be like Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence being up before the beak for allegedly fiddling a few invoices, though to be more sportingly accurate, it would be preferable were Captain Mark Phillips in the dock. An Olympic gold medallist, he does share a sporting background with the Duke who, as simple Iñaki Urdangarin, was an Olympic handball medallist.

What do former Olympic medallists with royal connections do once they are no longer participants in their sports? They stay with sport. Captain Mark has gone on to be a successful horsey person. Iñaki has gone on to be a sort of Mr. Fixer for sport of all sorts. Perhaps he should have stuck with handball, the sport he knew.

How has the Duke come to be in a Palma court? Partly, it is because, like many sportspeople, his life remained sport after he had ceased to be a player. The impulse is strong. It is one that makes managers, coaches, pundits and administrators of former players. It, the sport, is all they know. But normally, they stick with the one sport they knew. The Duke became positively Olympian in terms of his sporting interests.

It may have been the Duke's misfortune, or fortune if you prefer, to have sought to carve out a sports marketing career at the same time as Jaume Matas was president of the Balearics. Matas has been exposed as a vain man, one who coveted the company of celebrity (and royalty) and who puffed himself up with grandiose projects or ideas for projects of a sporting nature. The "caso Palma Arena" takes its name from the velodrome. It was just one of Matas' pet schemes. Another was the preposterous idea of staging a grand prix on the streets of Palma.

Making sense of the trail that has led to what has not been a trial but a declaration in front of the judge reveals a whole world of sport that the Duke inhabited. The case against him first surfaced when the judge investigating the "caso Palma Arena" was inclined to consider arrangements between the Fundación Illesport (and IBATUR, the now defunct-because-of-corruption tourism agency) and the Duke's Instituto Nóos that related to international sports forums in Mallorca at the time of Matas' second presidency.

This was not the first time the Duke's institute had dabbled in grand sports gatherings. There had been the Valencia Summit in 2004, an annual sporting debate. There had been the European Games that weren't, also in Valencia, for which initially Nóos was to receive three million euros from the Valencia administration (it came to less than half this). Then there was the Palma Arena itself and an alleged 2.3 million euros from the Matas government to Nóos. And there was advice in respect of Villarreal football club; a ten-page report cost nearly 700,000 euros.

To itemise all the bits of evidence, if only in outline, would take much more than a ten-page report. How much paperwork the prosecutors and the judge have to consider is anyone's guess, as it requires untangling the network of companies with which the Duke was said to have had an association and the movement of funds to the UK, the USA and Belize. The Duke, in his declaration, has intimated that he knew little or nothing of these companies. They were under the management of his former business partner Diego Torres.

Through this network, so it is claimed, contracts from local authorities - the Balearics, Valencia, Alcalá de Henares, Mataró - were turned into subcontracts to companies operated by the Duke and for which unrealistic charges were made and payments sent offshore into tax havens.

The Duke has, however, further intimated that he only got involved with sports matters. Sport is all he knows, one might conclude. Olympic medallist he was, but he also acquired a diploma in business science from the University of Barcelona, is licensed in business management and had gained an MBA from ESADE, one of Spain's leading business schools.

The Duke will discover whether or not he is to face charges. This is why he has been in court; to establish whether there are grounds for formal charges.

Whether charges are laid or not, the Duke's story shows that sport, meant to have the power for good, can just as easily have the power to corrupt. His sporting background was the Olympics, his sporting interests were Olympian in scope, and the Olympics movement itself was once the embodiment of how sport can corrupt.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

People Of The Year: Spain and Mallorca

Mark Zuckerberg is "Time Man (Person) Of The Year". Good for him. He joins a distinguished list of those who "for better or worse" have most influenced events during the year. His name is now etched alongside previous winners such as Roosevelt, Churchill and The Computer. There was no person of the year in 1982, just a machine; neither Thatcher nor Galtieri could persuade the judges.

There has never been a Time Person Of The Year from Spain. There is arguably only one who might have been: Franco in 1936. Wallis Simpson won that year for some reason. He then faced some pretty tough opposition over the years of the Civil War; Chiang Kai-shek and his missus winning in 1937 and Hitler and Stalin in the next two.

If Spain has proved to be light when it comes to candidates for Person Of The Year, then Mallorca has been all but weightless. The island doesn't really do "greats". In seeking a person of the year, therefore, there is no alternative other than to forget global influence and to instead be inward-looking in considering Spain and Mallorca's persons (sic) of the year.

For Spain you probably have to look no further than Vicente del Bosque or Andres Iniesta for lifting the World Cup, but that puts them in Sports Personality of the Year territory. Influencing for better or worse? Well, does A.P. McCoy do this, other than influencing the betting habits of a nation? Discuss.

Does Zapatero qualify as person of the year? He has influenced relatively little other than his likely political downfall, but his real problem has been that he is influenced by other things. He has no real control of events, just as Mallorca's politicians have no control, except in one area. A whole dock-full of them have influenced events for the worse - Munar, Matas, (Miguel) Nadal and their shenanigans with public money. Allegedly. People of the year might well be the more anonymous faces of the anti-corruption police and judges.

But Zapatero does qualify in one respect. He responded to the Pope's accusations of secularism in Spain by saying that laws are not made "that the Pope wants". His great achievement, not just this year, has been his challenges to the Church. He may go down in history as having presided over the collapse of the boom times, but he also deserves a place in history for his social policies. He can't be made person of the year because of his economic failings, but he would still make the shortlist.

As in Spain, so Mallorca has its sporting aspirants. Rafael Nadal and Jorge Lorenzo. Great achievements by both, but what have they really influenced? The greater achievement was probably that of a non-Mallorcan, Real Mallorca's former coach Gregorio Manzano for influencing outstanding performances from a team that refused to be dragged down by a hopeless club. Even Manzano didn't influence events that much though, not to the extent of ridding the team of Sid Lowe's "no-fans" jibe.

Of Mallorca's politicians, the ones who have kept their hands clean, that is, can anything be said? Not a lot. President Antich was and is a victim of circumstances, but he did one thing for the good - booting the Unió Mallorquina party out of the coalition when the corruption charges became a daily occurrence. The weakness of his position and that of his government was, however, exposed when he had to concede the environment ministry to the Mallorcan socialists (PSM) who promptly bared their political teeth in bunkering the Son Bosc golf course. The new minister, Gabriel Vicens, has form in influencing events for better or worse, depending on your point of view; he had previously managed to hack Alcúdia town hall off so much that the planned rail extension from Sa Pobla was scrapped.

Antich said in January that he was going to make tourism his priority in 2010. Heading off to Moscow to press some flesh may have been evidence of this, but did he influence tourism events? Not so as you would have noticed. As with most things, he showed how impotent Mallorca's politicians are. They find it hard to influence anything that really matters, such as tourism. The real people of the year, as ever, are the bosses of Thomas Cook and TUI. It is they who influence events for better or worse, and so we can anticipate ever more all-inclusive in 2011.

No, there is no one person who merits the Of The Year accolade. Not a Mallorcan or a Spaniard anyway. The one who does is American. Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook influenced us, well many of us, for better or worse, and gave rise to subversiveness of the sort that saw Pollensa and its poorly maintained and littered streets being highlighted with shame and pro-duck campaigners in Can Picafort aiming to flout the law.

"Time" may have got it wrong with Wallis Simpson when it overlooked Franco, but it has got it right with Zuckerberg. Do you like or do you want to be a friend?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Rubber Ball I Come Bouncing Back To You

The BBC came to Puerto Alcúdia yesterday. Well, a Breakfast show reporter and a camera and sound crew did. Wonder where they stayed. Nice work if you can get it I suppose. I didn't see it, but I know someone who did, so this is all second-hand, but I could hardly let such a huge news item pass without mention. Apparently they didn't drag a sofa out onto the beach and interview some local celebs, of which there are very few; in fact none that spring immediately to mind. They did interview some Brit tourists - family of four, couple of old dears and someone engaged in projectile vomiting following an all-night bender; normal sort of thing.

From these chats it would seem that, despite credit crunches, recessions, global warming, plagues of locusts or whatever else might be on the horizon, the tourists will still come because of the British weather - and it was only up around the 30 mark yesterday in parts of the old country. There was also an interview with Bellevue, well not the whole of it but a director. Don't know which one; my mole didn't actually stretch to noting down names. Whoever it was said that people were spending less this year - yes, I think we knew that - but that they were spending what money they had on less frivolous things. What, would that be cartons of cigarettes and bottles of spirits? He also said that bookings were up. Really? Not what I'd heard. Unless last year's were particularly low. A little bird, actually a pretty big one, told me that there was a fair old amount of knock-down being flogged to Spaniards, so perhaps the numbers are indeed up.

But it seems that the BBC showed a number of nice shots of Alcúdia, the beach, the mountains, the promenade etc. Pretty good publicity, reckoned my contact. Yea, it would be, like the publicity when the Holiday programme, a few years back, voted Alcúdia the best beach in the Med. Damn good publicity. Publicity to do something with. Wonder if the town hall knows. Wonder if they ever knew about that Holiday programme vote.


Perhaps it was the BBC crawling all over the beach that put a stop to it, but there was meant to have been a beach handball competition going on at the "sports beach" yesterday. I went along. I quite like handball. There were the stands that sit on the beach at the top of The Mile; there were a couple of games going on; and there was not sight nor sound of a handball player. Maybe they thought it was too hot.

Handball is a mystery game to the Brit, be it on sand or on court. It's all that cricket I suppose, but the British never took to court sports that involved putting balls into nets or over them, except with the aid of a racket or if they were girls at grammar schools. I once partook in a battle of the sexes netball game. It had all looked so easy until it started. Basketball only ever caught on because it was well and truly Niked and given street cred, and afforded the opportunity for lengthy spells of on-court posing and speaking in Americanisms: dee-fence. Other nations can't get enough of these sports. Stick a bunch of Germans on a beach and within five minutes they'll have rigged up a volleyball net.

There was a time when the beach was a relatively sedate place. Not now it isn't. Football started it, and before we knew it every beach was staging a mini-Olympics. The one sport with a strong beach tradition which isn't much played here is cricket. Try getting the ball to lift off a good length on Alcúdia or Muro beach. Sand's too fine. You need some good tidal flats for a game of beach cricket. Preferably, therefore, the ideal beach sport doesn't actually involve the beach. Football is only any good if you can give the ball a firm old welly; otherwise it's that sand again. There are any number of potential beach sports that could avoid the inconvenience of sand - beach javelin, beach hammer throw, beach target shooting. Something tells me though that they might not quite catch on.

There is one "sport", one sport alone that needs to be shown the door of the beach stadium and cast into the wilderness of the utterly irritating - bloody paddle tennis with those wooden rackets. Try getting some beach shut-eye and along come a couple of wannabe Nadalists and ... dock-dock, dock-dock. Stop it.

Anyway, coming back to handball. There is an Alcúdia handball team. Not that you would expect to find its numbers filled with Brits; it is very much the preserve of continental Europeans, such as Frederick at Bistro Bell and Erik from the El Limón estate agency who play for the team. Like the Alcúdia rugby team of which I spoke some months ago, it is not widely known that these teams exist. Perhaps the BBC should come and broadcast their matches.


Finally - there was a comment sent for Sunday's piece from someone who seemed to want some advice on real estate. There was an email address which was bounced back, so who knows, but if the sender reads this, please use the email address below and not the comments facility. Thank you.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Tommy Steele, "Little White Bull". There is a karaoke youtube but it lacks the brilliance of Dimple Diamond who himself should do a version of this Uncle Mac classic. Today's title - who did that bouncing?

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This Is England

When they talk about commitment to a country, as in commitment to that in which one lives, there is one thing that cannot be re-committed or from which the old commitment can be taken. Sport. The Spanish national football team may have my support for the coming Euro championships but only because of the absence of any British Isles representation. It's sort of like the Tebbit test, and I fail, as do pretty well all other localised Brits. Get behind a football team here? Real Mallorca? Couldn't give a damn except if maybe they were good enough to make a European championship and Spurs got to play them.

It's a strange thing this sporting affiliation through distance. It's as though you are a spectator watching the spectator watching the game. There is a sense of third-hand engagement. Much of the involvement becomes imaginary unless glued to Sky for hours on end. Even the Internet doesn't always give an element of the first-hand as streaming of many sports commentaries are blocked outside of the UK. Perhaps it's just as well. Having endured Matt Dawson frothing at the mouth at England deciding that a bit of wind and rain was sufficient to not bother playing against Scotland in Edinburgh, it would have been too much to then hear Geoff Boycott having paroxysms as England succumbed to the might of a bowling attack that would struggle to make the County Championship a few hours later.

You can still feel the pain of dire English sporting performance but it doesn't somehow hurt as much from a distance. The occasional shafts of light - Tottenham's Carling Cup win, Aldershot being ten points clear in the Conference and likely to rejoin the league from which the team was dumped for non-footballing reasons - seem, nevertheless, to glow with less intensity than they might. It's support without involvement, commitment without the responsibility of suffering; as though one can pick and choose the degrees of fan-based intensity safe in the remoteness from ever having to actually subject oneself to high and lows at The Lane, The Recreation Ground, Lord's or Wembley.

There are those who do of course very much wear their shirts with pride, and not only the tourists. On a match day a bar can be filled with expat-clad kit replicas. Even the walls wear their shirts with pride. But the tribalism of individual team support does not create the sense of unity that is to be found in a bar when one of the national teams is playing - and usually being humbled. For all this though, one still feels disengaged. It's the distance thing again. So the shrug of the shoulders when Wilkinson makes another hash of a kick or Harmison launches the ball into the slips is ... just that, and you go on about living your life at a distance because perhaps it doesn't matter quite as much.


QUIZ
Yesterday - "What Have You Done For Me Lately", Janet Jackson. Today's title - single by; they had a mention here quite recently?

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Everybody Wants To Run The World

Sport again. And sports tourism. One thing you have to hand to Alcúdia town hall is that they do make an effort, more so than others. They have now got a brochure for various sporting events to take place over the spring and into the summer. The first, over the Easter weekend, is an international beach volleyball tournament that, not unsurprisingly, will take place on the beach. In April, there will be a Nordic walking what they call "meeting point". Not a competitive thing as such, more a gathering of all those with those damn sticks; Nordic skiing without the snow and also indeed without the skis. This is apparently going to take place in Alcúdia, which may mean in the streets. What a fine racket this is likely to create, all that tapping and clicking of the poles on the pavements. According to the brochure, Alcúdia is the "perfect place" for this singularly daft past-time as it "meets the required conditions for practicing (sic) this activity in terms of weather, location and environment". Hard though they try, they still manage - somehow - to torture the English language. But be that as it may. There will be a half marathon in May, something called "Island Fit" in June "in the incomparable setting of Alcúdia beach, creating a unique atmosphere of co-existence and a frenetic pace for participants" (whatever that means), rapid ball also in June, the night race around the city walls in August, the extreme swim to Formentor, the Balearman triathlon and "Copa Presidente" golf tournament in September, and then in October the first wheelchair tennis open and the frisbee contest on the beach.

The BBC once used to boast of "great summers of sport". Not now they can't, since Sky nicked all the best bits. This all sounds like the Beeb stripped of test matches and the rest. But hush my sarcasm. Hats off to the town hall for trying, especially in the quieter months of the year, and to that end, let us not forget the boat and cuttlefish extravaganzas at the end of March and let us pray that the weather this year is not as damn cold and miserable as it was last year - Nordic skiing, anyone?


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Rolling Stones. Today's title - they changed one word for a Geldof-influenced run? Who?

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You’re An Embarrassment

The racist abuse of Lewis Hamilton at testing for the Formula One season in Barcelona was regrettable. The hysteria surrounding it has used stronger adjectives, justifiably perhaps but in danger of over-revving the engine, in particular an anti-Spanish one with the throttle down on all Spaniards being racists.

There is racism here. Unquestionably there is. So there is everywhere. On occasions such as the Hamilton affair, the British scurry into their sanctimonious smugness of having “solved” the racism-in-sport issue. But things are never black and white, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Whereas Britain has been largely cleansed by political correctness, the same cannot be said for Spain, and for which – in certain ways – we should be grateful. Spanish racism in sport is not the vicious neo-Nazism of eastern Europe; it is more a jokey racism. It is the sort of “joke” that used to pervade British society, one that used to allow even someone as apparently right-on as John Cleese to associate himself with a radio-comedy show that featured a regular “how-de-do-dere-honey” whenever the word black or dark was in the script; one that used to allow something as monstrous as “The Black and White Minstrel Show” to pass as Saturday evening entertainment.

But the “joke” is itself unkind and unacceptable. In Spanish football, it has led to Barcelona’s Samuel Eto’o threatening to leave the pitch, to the embarrassing abuse of England’s coloured players, and to the lack of censure of Luis Aragones, the national team coach, after his remarks about Thierry Henry. What has happened to Aragones? He is still the coach. Glenn Hoddle’s crackpot ideas about the disabled proved to be the final nail in his England managerial coffin. Offensive they may have been, but Hoddle was dismissed as being potty and went on to manage in the Premiership. Had he said what Aragones said, he would have been booted out of FA headquarters faster than you could say “Ron Atkinson” and would never have gone near the game again. Big Ron, shown the red card from the commentary box on the back of his Desailly remarks, had his own joke about the three black players at West Brom – “The Three Degrees”. The last I heard of him, he was involved in a celebrity dinner. Where? Yep, in Mallorca.

The incident involving Hamilton may have been inspired by his spat with local hero Fernando Alonso, but the blacking-up by a few spectators was not a joke, even if they might have believed it to be. It was not a joke, it was puerile. And that’s the thing with such racism, it is childish, stupid, embarrassing and demeaning; demeaning both to those who have their fingers in the face paint and to their “targets”– just like the minstrels used to be. The relevant Spanish authorities and elements of the Spanish media are complicit in giving succour to such childishness. Football clubs are treated with a woeful lack of sanction, the commentators on the England match managed to ignore mentioning the chants, a reporter from the “AS” sports newspaper was on radio saying that it was just a handful of people at the testing in Barcelona. The absence of righteous political correctness may be a positive in Spain, but it does not, or should not extend to the puerility of darkening the face and monkey chants. It does the country no favours and needs to be addressed more seriously, as it should have been with Aragones who should have been shown the door. It is time that some in Spain learnt to grow up.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Could only have been the wonderful Dusty Springfield. Today’s title – nutty boys?

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