Two Reasons to Love Spanish Football + Kaka at Old Trafford Last Wednesday

Phil Ball covers La Liga for ESPN and writes brilliantly. Check out his archives, and this little tidbit from last week's Barcelona-Levante match:

Finally this week, it behoves us to mention the 62nd minute of Barcelona v Levante. This was the moment in which Oleguer Presas, Barça's politically prominent defender, was brought onto the field in substitution of Gio. The next significant moment was when Salva, Levante's equally politically prominent forward, was taken off the field after 76 minutes, which meant fourteen minutes during which something akin to the Spanish Civil War was re-enacted on the pitch at the Camp Nou. Thankfully, the players kept their distance, but Salva had been subjected to a high decibel count from the seventh minute, when he first touched the ball.

In case you don't know, in mid' February Oleguer, who has stepped into Guardiola's boots as the Barça-player-who-needs-to-keep-things-political, wrote an article in the Setmanari de Comunicació Directa (a magazine associated with the Catalan youth movement) which was also published in the Basque nationalist paper Berria. Nothing wrong with that, of course, in a democratic state, except that Oleguer was using the article to ask the question of whether he was indeed living in a democratic state. He's not the first person to do so, but his use of the case of the Basque hunger striker Iñaki de Jauna Chaos was, if not unfortunate, then at least guaranteed to raise the temperature of the Spanish Right by several predictable degrees. Oleguer, of course, is the same player who caused controversy two years ago by stating that even if he were picked for the World Cup squad, he would 'prefer' not to play, for political reasons. Luis Aragonés decided to avoid the growing storm and dropped him like the hot potato he was.

But the present controversy might not have happened, however, had the article not come to universal prominence through the reaction of Salva Ballesta, Levante's centre-forward and a player who has made little attempt to hide his own political views over the years. Salva, from a family with a military background, wears boots that sport the Spanish flag and celebrates his goals with the army salute. Nothing wrong with that either, except that Salva has made remarks in the press before that have been at best unfortunate, and this time, on the right-leaning radio station Cadena Ser, Salva was asked his opinion of Oleguer's article. Demonstrating the intellectual rigour of the average carrot, Salva declared that he considered Oleguer's article to be 'less than a piece of dog-shit'. Oleguer, of course, declined to join the slanging match, but everything was nicely set up for the Camp Nou.

Oleguer has been having a tough time of it since the article, and has been roundly booed in several stadia - which rather demonstrates his point about free speech, but anyway, it's a tricky issue. It was kinda nice, however, to see Salva get a few decibels back - although it was clear from his reaction as he walked off that he was happy as a sand-boy to be thus acknowledged by the ideological enemy.

Without wishing to take sides, such scenes sum up a side of Spanish football that is as fascinating as it is depressing. Salva hasn't gone quite so far as Di Canio, but you can be sure that he has pictures of the Italian player on his bedroom wall.

When people bemoan the fact that footballers are dumb airheads, they applaud when said players run out onto pitches to campaign against racism, to campaign against whatever - in acts that are rarely their initiative. Players speak a sort of language to the press that habitually says nothing, and their fame is rarely used for anything beyond the obvious. So when they get political, and write books (Oleguer has done that too), something gets wobbly in the state of sport.

Finally, the unfortunately-named Kaka and Rooney light it up at Old Trafford last week. Seriously, take Wednesday afternoon off for the return at San Siro: