BLEACHERS BREW EST. MAY 2006

Someone asked me how my blog and newspaper column came to be titled "Bleachers Brew". It's like this, it's an amalgam of sorts of two things: The bleachers area in the stadium/arena where I used to sit when I would watch baseball, football, and basketball games and Miles Davis' great jazz album Bitches Brew. That's how it got culled together. I originally planned on calling it "The View from the Big Chair" that is a nod to Tears For Fear's second album, Songs from the Big Chair. So there.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Los Galacticos the Sequel


There are two football clubs that I have sworn my undying loyalty to -- Liverpool and the defunct New York Cosmos.

The other teams I like are Juventus (because I was a Zidane and Del Pierro fan) and Barcelona.

Wait a minute. Back track on the last team.

Yes, I committed treachery of the highest order to Catalunya when I switched sides just like Luis Figo. Yes, I did admire Raul for being a great footballer for Madrid but I rooted for Barcelona until Fiorentino Perez brought over Zizou from Turin. You see I am a huge fan of the French National Football Team and Zinedine Zidane. When he moved to Spain, it was painful to switch allegiances from Barcelona to Madrid but I did.

They had brought in many of my favorite footballers -- Roberto Carlos and Michael Owen(sadly he did not display the form he did when he was at Liverpool). David Beckham and Ronaldo are cool but not really my faves more so since the former played for Manchester United.

I thought the white kit with the Siemens Mobile was and it still is one of the coolest football uniforms ever. And I have six of them -- the white with Siemens Mobile, the gray version, the white with Siemens only, a Zidane, a Robinho, and a Carlos.

Even as the galacticos faded and left -- Figo for Inter Milan, Ronaldo to AC Milan, Zidane to retirement, and Owen to Newcastle -- I stayed on as they held on for one great moment to win the Primera Liga title in the last years of Beckham and Carlos in white. Sure I was ecstatic as they beat Mallorca for the title and hastened the end of Barca's Frank Rijkaard's tenure as manager. But it was a matter of time.

I have since switched one final time to the club that I first rooted for in the Spanish League... Barcelona. Not even the new galacticos -- they did sign Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo and are setting their sights on David Villa -- will make me switch again.

More so that it seems possible that Francesc Fabregas will return to Barca. And why not? The team has Thierry Henry, Sam Eto'o, and Lionel Messi. They have Bojan Krcic, Carles Puyol, and Andres Iniesta.


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