Kudos to Sean Birnie. What a fantastic post.

It is a great game to play, especially when you are young. It is by nature a participation sport.

Don’t throw it all away by making it into a version of the thing that passes for a spectator sport in the rest of the world. Don’t watch it. Play it!

I’m very interested to see what the next few years will bring for Major League Soccer and for pro-soccer in this country.

You know, I’m going to miss old Goldenballs, but I always new this sleepy little European backwater Madrid (that’s Madrid Spain, not Texas or Alabama or whatever)was too small to contain his splendour for long. Anyway every shopkeeper in the upmarket Serrano bario has been driven to nervous exhaustion by his wife Pija Especia’s insatiable taste for shopping, she just doesn’t seem to understand that Madrilenos need a 7 hour lunch break (siesta) so they can recover from staying out and drinking all night (fiesta), and frankly people are complaining about the severe shortages of needles and ink. In schools across the country children are being forced to write with used matchsticks. But missed he will be and not just by the hordes of adoring sultry senoritas who bless this land (at least now the rest of us might get a chance. Hey, you guys in LA, Do you have any idea…oh, never mind, you’ll soon find out). Apparently the directors of Madrid T-Shirt Co (also known as Real Madrid Football Club} have formed a suicide pact, although rumours that El Presidente Zapatero was to join them seem, sadly, to be false. Me pesonally, I’ll miss the only Englishman in Madrid whose Castellano (Spanish} is even more appalling than mine.

Beck’s short sojourn here in the capital of Spain (It’s a small devoloping country just north of Africa, look on Googlearth), the home of such culinary achievements as the potato omelet (tortilla, never criticise it, that’s cause for a lynching here), the chick pea (honestly, they’re obsessed wth them) and the unbuttered ungarnished sandwich (brilliant don’t ya think? Just a bit of cheese or ham between two hunks of dry bread, Europeans are just sooo sophisticated}….where was I, oh yes….No, David’s time here has not alwways run smooth. His inability to learn to communicate in their language turned the fiercely linguistically chauvinistic Spanish against him. I did try to explain to them that Becks had similar difficulties communicating in English but then there came the Obregon affair.

I sense a little background may be necessary here for those not familiar with the essentials of modern Iberian culture (Yes, I do mean you Americans). All nations have their idiosyncratic obsessions, for Yanks it’s guns and oil, for us Brits; alcohol and spanking, in Spain the obsession is the glamorous granny (Not the ony obsession mind, they do some very weird things with both bulls and pigs, I can tell you!). The aging tarnished Madonna archetype, there are legions of them. They rule the airwaves. When they advertise for TV presenters in Spain they specify three things. 1, Must be dermoesthetically altered. 2, Must be over 60. 3, Must have had an affair with a bullfihter. David’s first instincts were good, he realised that keys to the Kingdom of Castille lay with women like these. Unfortunately he moved too soon, or rather was outmanouevered by a cunning upstart; La Donna Ana Obregon. Ana, a stunning replica of a bottle-blonde geriatric Barbie (eat your heart out Peamela Anderson), managed to get our boy in a somewhat compromising position in the trendy gym they both frequented. What Davey didn’t realise was he’d been set up for a fall. Ana got wall to wall airtime, in and out of her bikini…and in and out and in and out and did they or didn’t they?…ad infinitum. The poblem for our hero, Twinkletoes, was he’d just lost the respect of every hotblooded latino machista schoolboy in the country, and probably half of Latin America too. You see, Ana was a second divsion supergran, she was “hortera” (tacky) and “coutre” (common) not a worthy concubine for a prince. Now if only he’d gone for Isabel La Pantoja, the raven haired siren of Andalucia, a flamenco singer whose voice you could grate manchego cheese with and whose husband the ex-mayor of Marbella is now, conveniently, doing hard time for corruption. Or, even better, Rocio Jurado, another of Spain’s iconic flamenco artistes. A stalwart of Generalissssssimo Franco’s Fascistas Flamencas movement and whose recent death threw the whole nation into mourning. I’m reliably informed that it absolutely ruined the Maricas Orgullas (Gay Pride) parade, they were understandably inconsolable. So there it is, the real story of boy wonder’s undoing. Remember you heard it here first.

Hasta luego ******** [ed.] . Padrisimo!