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Sid Lowe's annual sidelong glance at La Liga. Enjoy.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/05/27/its_the_sids_2008.html
It's the Sids 2008!
From Chris Coleman to The Official Cheese Of Real Madrid, it's time for the annual end-of-season awards bonanza
Sid Lowe May 27, 2008 3:11 PM
When Thierry Henry signed for Barcelona, 30,000 fans gathered at Camp Nou to celebrate his arrival and the press went potty, declaring the foundation of the Fantastic Four - the greatest forward line in history, one that would glide their way effortlessly to the title. Trouble is, Barcelona took them on their word and made no effort whatsoever. With Henry proving more cough-choke-grrr-bloody-well-start-you-bastard than va-va-voom, Ronaldinho sleeping off the night before in the gym and Samuel Eto'o getting injured and mad by turns, they barely played together and Barça's forward line was more the Wonderful One than the Fantastic Four. Only Leo Messi was truly impressive - and he suffered yet another muscle injury.
So it was left to Real Madrid to walk the league title, finishing 18 points ahead of their rivals and eight above Villarreal in a frankly flat season that did at least throw up more surprises than a toddler chocking on a job lot of Kinder Eggs. Almería and Racing, two sides that could have been expected to go down, were nowhere near the drop, thanks to excellent coaches. Racing even earned a miraculous place in the Uefa Cup - the competition in which Spain converted to Getafe for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile, Atlético Madrid actually stuck with a coach and returned to the Champions League for the first time in 11 years. Mind you, they were given a helping hand by the collapse of the other challengers. Espanyol shot into the top four only to have the worst segunda vuelta in the division and Sevilla missed out on head-to-head goal difference after a season in which everything went against them. Real Zaragoza managed to play Racing three times in a fortnight, each time with a different coach. Which pretty much says it all. Too good to go down, they went down anyway. Valencia didn't, but not for want of trying. They sacked Quique Sánchez Flores when they were just four points behind Madrid at the top and finished 34 (thirty-four!) points adrift.
Still, at least Valencia won the Copa del Rey, while Iker Casillas won the Zamora award for best goalkeeper and Real Mallorca's Dani Guiza became the first Spaniard to win the Pichichi since Diego Tristán six years ago, with 27 goals. Raúl, meanwhile, won Marca's Inaugural Alfredo Di Stéfano trophy for the best Spanish player at Real Madri ... er, best player of any nationality in La Liga - an award voted on by Marca readers and decided by a panel of former Madrid figures and Marca "experts". But if the rest of the league felt robbed by an award that was about as impartial as the Best Midget With A Double-Barrelled Surname In The England Squad As Voted For By Ian Wright Wright Wright Award (or even Sport's team of the year, that brilliantly includes five Barcelona players), fear not.
Because these are the prizes they really, really wanted ...
Best performance
Forget Sergio Aguero's single-handed destruction of Barcelona, the season's most virtuoso display came from Paolo Calabresi - the Italian actor and Nicolas Cage lookalike who doesn't look much like Nicolas Cage at all but still managed to get the VIP treatment at the Santiago Bernabéu, complete with the poor unsuspecting press officer singing him songs.
Of course, Ramón Calderón "clocked him right from the start". Which will be why he gave him a signed Real Madrid shirt, made him a member and took him down to the dressing room after the game.
Best president
Football's very own Brian Potter with his potbelly, rubbish tache, flabby jowls, shabby suits, and marvellous ability to run a club with disastrous and comic consequences, Juan Soler is special. As in "needs". When he took over at Valencia in 2004, they'd just won the league and the Uefa Cup. Having also been to two Champions League finals and won another league title in the previous three years, they were statistically the continent's best club. Three and a half years later, Soler had clocked up one unsold former stadium, one unbuilt future stadium, €300m worth of debt, €180m worth of players, one star signing in a police cell, another star signing naked on the internet, a club captain in court, three veterans with over 1,000 Valencia games in exile, three medical chiefs, seven directors of football, five coaches ... and no trophies. Within a couple of months of him leaving for medical reasons - he was making Valencia sick - they won the Copa del Rey. The perfect president. For someone else's club.
Dirtiest tackle
Ever Banega.
Biggest villain
Pedro Villarroel. Not content with going through nine coaches in seven years, racking up a huge debt, making secret pay-offs to secure survival last season or creating a "charitable foundation" with which to siphon off cash, the Levante owner chartered a plane so creaky that two players refused to board it, witnessed his star signing get injured and spiral into depression after using a makeshift gym compromising of a couple of weights sluing across a pair of chairs, and hasn't paid his players for over two years. Worse still, he had the cheek to fine Mustafa Riga for missing a training session and still shows no remorse: he called fans "subnormals" and "rats", sent text messages threatening players and asked the club captain if he believed in God, adding "good, then you know you're going to hell" when he said yes.
That said, least appropriate means of transport
Riga turned up at the training ground to plead poverty, waving papers that showed the bank was going to repossess his house after two years without being paid. Not the best day to roll up in a bad-boy Hummer with four new alloy wheels at €9,000 a pop.
Most unfortunate journey
4am on his very first weekend in Spain and Royston Drenthe's SatNav said turn right, so he did - straight into an oncoming police car. Meanwhile, Ramón Calderón had one flight turned back midway across the Atlantic after Mighty Oviedo supporting singer Melendi got pissed up and lairy in the back row and after another flight found himself detained at JFK because US officials confused him with a Mexican bandit called Ramos Calderón. Getting its knickers into a self-righteous twist, Marca cried about how "utterly ridiculous" it was for Calderón to be confused with a "common criminal" and they were quite right - there's nothing common about him. But this award goes to the unnamed valet at Madrid restaurant Soko. When Getafe midfielder Javier Casquero turned up with a Porsche Carrera 911 and handed over the keys, the valet called his mates, went for a spin and ploughed it headfirst into six cars.
Best excuse
Atlético Madrid whinger José Antonio Reyes squirmed his way out of trouble for insulting coach Javier Aguirre by insisting "I didn't $h!t on his prostitute mother, I shat on my prostitute mother" and Bernd Schuster excelled himself week after week, culminating in his claim that defeat against Roma "wasn't a defeat". But the winner has to be Chris Coleman's fabulously far-fetched porky. The former Real Sociedad coach claimed to have missed a press conference after his washing machine broke down, flooding his flat. Only it wasn't just the machine that didn't wash and journalists quickly discovered that the only thing spinning furiously was Coleman's head after a 5am trip down the local student night.
Speaking of journalists, most imaginative headline writing
Bored of splashing on "Raúl Always Returns", perhaps because this time he actually did, and with no "Fuck of the Century" to bang on about, the creative geniuses at AS went all Groundhog Day with their mastery of maths. When Week 38 ended, bringing the curtain down on the season, their front cover declared a: "Record number of points" in great big yellow letters - and for once they weren't lying. After week 23, great big letters on their cover had screamed: "7 goals ... and 8 Points!" After week 26, great big letters on their cover screamed: "5 points". And after week 27, great big letters on their cover screamed "7 points!" After week 28, it was "7 points!"; after week 29, it was "4 Points!"; after 31, "7 Points!" and after 32, "9 Points!". Inspired.
Most convincing argument
AS's mental Madridista Tomás Roncero's insistence that Cesc Fabregas is "definitely" coming to Madrid because he likes eating in De María - a restaurant that's only 800 metres from the Bernabéu!
Most disturbing mental image
Sport's description of Espanyol president Dani Sanchez Llibre arriving at a meeting behind the wheel of his car, "smoking and talking on his mobile." So what was he steering with?
Biggest act of selling out
Forget the deal that made BabyBell "The Official Cheese of Real Madrid", the winner is Marca's vile free-lunch-chasing columnist Roberto Gómez, who wrote an impassioned plea for Real Madrid to play a special friendly against Atlético Madrid. Apparently, Madrid had already played in a game between some people called "Israelis" and "Palestinians" in support of something called "peace", so it was only right and proper that they should also play to mark the opening of a controversial new development of 13,000 homes built by a construction magnate with a string of court cases hanging over him. Not that this column is suggesting Gómez was getting a free flat or anything, of course. Oh no. His price is far lower than that.
Weirdest attempt to motivate your team
Betis's very own little Lionel Blair, Paco Chaparro, spent the week leading up to the Seville derby showing his players slideshows of wolves sneaking through the grass, ready to pounce. It was time, he said, to become the hunters not the hunted. His team went on to the Pizjuán pitch with the determination and ruthlessness of a hungry salivating pack. And lost 3-0.
Weirdest attempt to motivate your team-mates
Valencia winger Joaquín and his tunnel talk, in which he shouted: "Come on lads, let's do them. There's not many of them and they're malnourished." Alas, by the time Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the second half, the battle cry had changed, goalkeeper Santiago Cañizares shouting: "Come on lads, for fuck's sake, let's avoid this becoming an embarrassment."
Greatest entertainers
Atlético - at the Calderón, at least. As if three successive 4-3s weren't enough, there was a 6-3 and a game of comic genius against Getafe, in which Perea punched Belenguer, Maniche tried to maim Cata Díaz, Granero got in a fight with a ball-boy, Pato started on the subs, Aguirre started on Pato, the goalie coach refused to give the ball back, Maxi got taken out, and so in fact did just about everyone else. It was slapstick violence at its best, every tackle leaving fans wincing and laughing in equal measures, and in the middle of it all Clos Gómez lost the plot and started dishing out cards like a croupier on crack. Twelve in less than half an hour, plus six reds, including one for Sevillian simpleton Reyes, who'd only been on the pitch quarter of an hour, and Aguirre's No2 for "making observations". It finished nine against nine, eight minutes into additional time. When Manu de Moral was handed the record-breaking eighteenth card in the 94th minute, the Calderón roared its approval, chanting: "We want more! We want more!"
Best goal
Getafe's he's-behind-you moment at Madrid was the season's funniest, and Javier Arizmendi's strike in the same stadium, when he sent Fabio Cannavaro sliding dementedly by like a McDonald's worker on his way to the chip pan, was the most unexpected. But there have been better - like Marcos Senna against Betis, a Fernando Varela hit that was plain indecent, and Cazorla's perfect one-two against Barça. Ronaldinho briefly reappeared to score a phenomenal overhead kick only to be overshadowed by what Kun Aguero did at the other end - probably the best of the Argentinian's catalogue of great goals. And then there was Álvaro Negredo's flick-up-and-finish. But this column's favourite was this beauty from Valladolid - the fastest goal in La Liga history.
Best coach
Unai Emery: does exactly what he says on the screen. The Almería coach went on telly with a tactics board and explained how he was going to defeat Real Madrid 24 hours before going into the arena and doing precisely that - the high point of an exceptional season. Manuel Pellegrini not only led Villarreal to their best-ever finish but did so having had to rebuild his team after Riquelme's departure. But the winner has to be Racing Santander manager Marcelino García, who took his side to a first ever, thoroughly improbable, European place in 94 years of history.
Player of the year
Runner up: Iker Casillas. Normally the Zamora award goes to the keeper with the best defence. Not this time: Iker faced more shots than anyone else in Spain but performed weekly miracles like he was having a nice cup of tea.
First: Sergio Aguero. The milk. The consecrated bread. Born of a whore mother. The dog's dinglie-danglies. With his low-slung balance, skill, quick feet, acceleration, vision, strength and goals (19 of them, if you believe Marca; 20 according to the Federation), 19-year-old Aguero was unbelievable this season, finally taking an otherwise fairly average Atlético back to the Champions League. The "New Messi" could turn out to be the new Maradona. And not just because he's marrying El Diego's daughter.
Team of the season
GK: Iker Casillas, Madrid.
RB: Dani Alves, Sevilla.
CB: Gonzalo Rodríguez, Villarreal.
CB: Fabricio Coloccini, Deportivo.
LB: Joan Capdevila, Villarreal.
RM: Wesley Sneijder, Madrid.
CM: Marcos Senna, Villarreal.
CM: Seydou Keita, Sevilla.
LM: Santi Cazorla, Villarreal.
S: Sergio Aguero, Atlético.
S: Dani Guiza, Mallorca.
Subs: Edu (Betis), Ibagaza (Mallorca), Raúl, Heinze, Pepe and Guti (Madrid), Milito and Messi (Barça), Garay (Racing), Fabiano (Sevilla), Casquero (Getafe), Pires and Nihat (Villarreal), Forlán (Atlético), Llorente (Valladolid).
And, finally, some of 2007-08's choicest quotes
"[Espanyol president] Daniel Sanchez Llibre's behaviour was infantile and absurd" - So said Joan Laporta, the man who stripped to his undies at airport security.
"We might as well give up on football, grab a coffee and start playing cards if this is what's going to happen" - Zaragoza keeper César Sánchez bitches about the refs, while Zaragoza fans wonder why he and his team-mates didn't come up with that idea 38 weeks earlier.
"I miss tea" - Thierry Henry sums up every ex-pat's Spanish hell.
"I've got at least four or five of the squad behind me" - Valencia coach Ronald Koeman neglects to add the words, "brandishing knives".
"When I went to Valencia, Joaquín was worth €30m; now he's worth 30" - Koeman doesn't so much cut off his nose to spite his face as hack at it with a scythe.
"Ronaldinho is training in the gym today" - Aye, right.
"What is black one day is white the next" - Xavi Hernández reports back from the Neverland ranch.
"Stick a collar on him" - Bernd Schuster explains the best way to stop Leo Messi. And later blames it on his son - the Schuster really writing Bernd's blog.
"Barça are more than a club and you, Sir Norman, are more than an architect" - Joan Laporta reaches for the architect's hand while everyone else reaches for the sick bucket.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/05/27/its_the_sids_2008.html
It's the Sids 2008!
From Chris Coleman to The Official Cheese Of Real Madrid, it's time for the annual end-of-season awards bonanza
Sid Lowe May 27, 2008 3:11 PM
When Thierry Henry signed for Barcelona, 30,000 fans gathered at Camp Nou to celebrate his arrival and the press went potty, declaring the foundation of the Fantastic Four - the greatest forward line in history, one that would glide their way effortlessly to the title. Trouble is, Barcelona took them on their word and made no effort whatsoever. With Henry proving more cough-choke-grrr-bloody-well-start-you-bastard than va-va-voom, Ronaldinho sleeping off the night before in the gym and Samuel Eto'o getting injured and mad by turns, they barely played together and Barça's forward line was more the Wonderful One than the Fantastic Four. Only Leo Messi was truly impressive - and he suffered yet another muscle injury.
So it was left to Real Madrid to walk the league title, finishing 18 points ahead of their rivals and eight above Villarreal in a frankly flat season that did at least throw up more surprises than a toddler chocking on a job lot of Kinder Eggs. Almería and Racing, two sides that could have been expected to go down, were nowhere near the drop, thanks to excellent coaches. Racing even earned a miraculous place in the Uefa Cup - the competition in which Spain converted to Getafe for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile, Atlético Madrid actually stuck with a coach and returned to the Champions League for the first time in 11 years. Mind you, they were given a helping hand by the collapse of the other challengers. Espanyol shot into the top four only to have the worst segunda vuelta in the division and Sevilla missed out on head-to-head goal difference after a season in which everything went against them. Real Zaragoza managed to play Racing three times in a fortnight, each time with a different coach. Which pretty much says it all. Too good to go down, they went down anyway. Valencia didn't, but not for want of trying. They sacked Quique Sánchez Flores when they were just four points behind Madrid at the top and finished 34 (thirty-four!) points adrift.
Still, at least Valencia won the Copa del Rey, while Iker Casillas won the Zamora award for best goalkeeper and Real Mallorca's Dani Guiza became the first Spaniard to win the Pichichi since Diego Tristán six years ago, with 27 goals. Raúl, meanwhile, won Marca's Inaugural Alfredo Di Stéfano trophy for the best Spanish player at Real Madri ... er, best player of any nationality in La Liga - an award voted on by Marca readers and decided by a panel of former Madrid figures and Marca "experts". But if the rest of the league felt robbed by an award that was about as impartial as the Best Midget With A Double-Barrelled Surname In The England Squad As Voted For By Ian Wright Wright Wright Award (or even Sport's team of the year, that brilliantly includes five Barcelona players), fear not.
Because these are the prizes they really, really wanted ...Best performance
Forget Sergio Aguero's single-handed destruction of Barcelona, the season's most virtuoso display came from Paolo Calabresi - the Italian actor and Nicolas Cage lookalike who doesn't look much like Nicolas Cage at all but still managed to get the VIP treatment at the Santiago Bernabéu, complete with the poor unsuspecting press officer singing him songs.
Of course, Ramón Calderón "clocked him right from the start". Which will be why he gave him a signed Real Madrid shirt, made him a member and took him down to the dressing room after the game.
Best president
Football's very own Brian Potter with his potbelly, rubbish tache, flabby jowls, shabby suits, and marvellous ability to run a club with disastrous and comic consequences, Juan Soler is special. As in "needs". When he took over at Valencia in 2004, they'd just won the league and the Uefa Cup. Having also been to two Champions League finals and won another league title in the previous three years, they were statistically the continent's best club. Three and a half years later, Soler had clocked up one unsold former stadium, one unbuilt future stadium, €300m worth of debt, €180m worth of players, one star signing in a police cell, another star signing naked on the internet, a club captain in court, three veterans with over 1,000 Valencia games in exile, three medical chiefs, seven directors of football, five coaches ... and no trophies. Within a couple of months of him leaving for medical reasons - he was making Valencia sick - they won the Copa del Rey. The perfect president. For someone else's club.
Dirtiest tackle
Ever Banega.
Biggest villain
Pedro Villarroel. Not content with going through nine coaches in seven years, racking up a huge debt, making secret pay-offs to secure survival last season or creating a "charitable foundation" with which to siphon off cash, the Levante owner chartered a plane so creaky that two players refused to board it, witnessed his star signing get injured and spiral into depression after using a makeshift gym compromising of a couple of weights sluing across a pair of chairs, and hasn't paid his players for over two years. Worse still, he had the cheek to fine Mustafa Riga for missing a training session and still shows no remorse: he called fans "subnormals" and "rats", sent text messages threatening players and asked the club captain if he believed in God, adding "good, then you know you're going to hell" when he said yes.
That said, least appropriate means of transport
Riga turned up at the training ground to plead poverty, waving papers that showed the bank was going to repossess his house after two years without being paid. Not the best day to roll up in a bad-boy Hummer with four new alloy wheels at €9,000 a pop.
Most unfortunate journey
4am on his very first weekend in Spain and Royston Drenthe's SatNav said turn right, so he did - straight into an oncoming police car. Meanwhile, Ramón Calderón had one flight turned back midway across the Atlantic after Mighty Oviedo supporting singer Melendi got pissed up and lairy in the back row and after another flight found himself detained at JFK because US officials confused him with a Mexican bandit called Ramos Calderón. Getting its knickers into a self-righteous twist, Marca cried about how "utterly ridiculous" it was for Calderón to be confused with a "common criminal" and they were quite right - there's nothing common about him. But this award goes to the unnamed valet at Madrid restaurant Soko. When Getafe midfielder Javier Casquero turned up with a Porsche Carrera 911 and handed over the keys, the valet called his mates, went for a spin and ploughed it headfirst into six cars.
Best excuse
Atlético Madrid whinger José Antonio Reyes squirmed his way out of trouble for insulting coach Javier Aguirre by insisting "I didn't $h!t on his prostitute mother, I shat on my prostitute mother" and Bernd Schuster excelled himself week after week, culminating in his claim that defeat against Roma "wasn't a defeat". But the winner has to be Chris Coleman's fabulously far-fetched porky. The former Real Sociedad coach claimed to have missed a press conference after his washing machine broke down, flooding his flat. Only it wasn't just the machine that didn't wash and journalists quickly discovered that the only thing spinning furiously was Coleman's head after a 5am trip down the local student night.
Speaking of journalists, most imaginative headline writing
Bored of splashing on "Raúl Always Returns", perhaps because this time he actually did, and with no "Fuck of the Century" to bang on about, the creative geniuses at AS went all Groundhog Day with their mastery of maths. When Week 38 ended, bringing the curtain down on the season, their front cover declared a: "Record number of points" in great big yellow letters - and for once they weren't lying. After week 23, great big letters on their cover had screamed: "7 goals ... and 8 Points!" After week 26, great big letters on their cover screamed: "5 points". And after week 27, great big letters on their cover screamed "7 points!" After week 28, it was "7 points!"; after week 29, it was "4 Points!"; after 31, "7 Points!" and after 32, "9 Points!". Inspired.
Most convincing argument
AS's mental Madridista Tomás Roncero's insistence that Cesc Fabregas is "definitely" coming to Madrid because he likes eating in De María - a restaurant that's only 800 metres from the Bernabéu!
Most disturbing mental image
Sport's description of Espanyol president Dani Sanchez Llibre arriving at a meeting behind the wheel of his car, "smoking and talking on his mobile." So what was he steering with?
Biggest act of selling out
Forget the deal that made BabyBell "The Official Cheese of Real Madrid", the winner is Marca's vile free-lunch-chasing columnist Roberto Gómez, who wrote an impassioned plea for Real Madrid to play a special friendly against Atlético Madrid. Apparently, Madrid had already played in a game between some people called "Israelis" and "Palestinians" in support of something called "peace", so it was only right and proper that they should also play to mark the opening of a controversial new development of 13,000 homes built by a construction magnate with a string of court cases hanging over him. Not that this column is suggesting Gómez was getting a free flat or anything, of course. Oh no. His price is far lower than that.
Weirdest attempt to motivate your team
Betis's very own little Lionel Blair, Paco Chaparro, spent the week leading up to the Seville derby showing his players slideshows of wolves sneaking through the grass, ready to pounce. It was time, he said, to become the hunters not the hunted. His team went on to the Pizjuán pitch with the determination and ruthlessness of a hungry salivating pack. And lost 3-0.
Weirdest attempt to motivate your team-mates
Valencia winger Joaquín and his tunnel talk, in which he shouted: "Come on lads, let's do them. There's not many of them and they're malnourished." Alas, by the time Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the second half, the battle cry had changed, goalkeeper Santiago Cañizares shouting: "Come on lads, for fuck's sake, let's avoid this becoming an embarrassment."
Greatest entertainers
Atlético - at the Calderón, at least. As if three successive 4-3s weren't enough, there was a 6-3 and a game of comic genius against Getafe, in which Perea punched Belenguer, Maniche tried to maim Cata Díaz, Granero got in a fight with a ball-boy, Pato started on the subs, Aguirre started on Pato, the goalie coach refused to give the ball back, Maxi got taken out, and so in fact did just about everyone else. It was slapstick violence at its best, every tackle leaving fans wincing and laughing in equal measures, and in the middle of it all Clos Gómez lost the plot and started dishing out cards like a croupier on crack. Twelve in less than half an hour, plus six reds, including one for Sevillian simpleton Reyes, who'd only been on the pitch quarter of an hour, and Aguirre's No2 for "making observations". It finished nine against nine, eight minutes into additional time. When Manu de Moral was handed the record-breaking eighteenth card in the 94th minute, the Calderón roared its approval, chanting: "We want more! We want more!"
Best goal
Getafe's he's-behind-you moment at Madrid was the season's funniest, and Javier Arizmendi's strike in the same stadium, when he sent Fabio Cannavaro sliding dementedly by like a McDonald's worker on his way to the chip pan, was the most unexpected. But there have been better - like Marcos Senna against Betis, a Fernando Varela hit that was plain indecent, and Cazorla's perfect one-two against Barça. Ronaldinho briefly reappeared to score a phenomenal overhead kick only to be overshadowed by what Kun Aguero did at the other end - probably the best of the Argentinian's catalogue of great goals. And then there was Álvaro Negredo's flick-up-and-finish. But this column's favourite was this beauty from Valladolid - the fastest goal in La Liga history.
Best coach
Unai Emery: does exactly what he says on the screen. The Almería coach went on telly with a tactics board and explained how he was going to defeat Real Madrid 24 hours before going into the arena and doing precisely that - the high point of an exceptional season. Manuel Pellegrini not only led Villarreal to their best-ever finish but did so having had to rebuild his team after Riquelme's departure. But the winner has to be Racing Santander manager Marcelino García, who took his side to a first ever, thoroughly improbable, European place in 94 years of history.
Player of the year
Runner up: Iker Casillas. Normally the Zamora award goes to the keeper with the best defence. Not this time: Iker faced more shots than anyone else in Spain but performed weekly miracles like he was having a nice cup of tea.
First: Sergio Aguero. The milk. The consecrated bread. Born of a whore mother. The dog's dinglie-danglies. With his low-slung balance, skill, quick feet, acceleration, vision, strength and goals (19 of them, if you believe Marca; 20 according to the Federation), 19-year-old Aguero was unbelievable this season, finally taking an otherwise fairly average Atlético back to the Champions League. The "New Messi" could turn out to be the new Maradona. And not just because he's marrying El Diego's daughter.
Team of the season
GK: Iker Casillas, Madrid.
RB: Dani Alves, Sevilla.
CB: Gonzalo Rodríguez, Villarreal.
CB: Fabricio Coloccini, Deportivo.
LB: Joan Capdevila, Villarreal.
RM: Wesley Sneijder, Madrid.
CM: Marcos Senna, Villarreal.
CM: Seydou Keita, Sevilla.
LM: Santi Cazorla, Villarreal.
S: Sergio Aguero, Atlético.
S: Dani Guiza, Mallorca.
Subs: Edu (Betis), Ibagaza (Mallorca), Raúl, Heinze, Pepe and Guti (Madrid), Milito and Messi (Barça), Garay (Racing), Fabiano (Sevilla), Casquero (Getafe), Pires and Nihat (Villarreal), Forlán (Atlético), Llorente (Valladolid).
And, finally, some of 2007-08's choicest quotes
"[Espanyol president] Daniel Sanchez Llibre's behaviour was infantile and absurd" - So said Joan Laporta, the man who stripped to his undies at airport security.
"We might as well give up on football, grab a coffee and start playing cards if this is what's going to happen" - Zaragoza keeper César Sánchez bitches about the refs, while Zaragoza fans wonder why he and his team-mates didn't come up with that idea 38 weeks earlier.
"I miss tea" - Thierry Henry sums up every ex-pat's Spanish hell.
"I've got at least four or five of the squad behind me" - Valencia coach Ronald Koeman neglects to add the words, "brandishing knives".
"When I went to Valencia, Joaquín was worth €30m; now he's worth 30" - Koeman doesn't so much cut off his nose to spite his face as hack at it with a scythe.
"Ronaldinho is training in the gym today" - Aye, right.
"What is black one day is white the next" - Xavi Hernández reports back from the Neverland ranch.
"Stick a collar on him" - Bernd Schuster explains the best way to stop Leo Messi. And later blames it on his son - the Schuster really writing Bernd's blog.
"Barça are more than a club and you, Sir Norman, are more than an architect" - Joan Laporta reaches for the architect's hand while everyone else reaches for the sick bucket.
