Real Madrid blamed the referee for its failure to beat archrival Barcelona after defender Raúl Albiol was sent off for grabbing Barcelona’s David Villa around the neck to prevent him from scoring.
The acrimonious match ended at 1-1, both goals coming from the penalty spot.
The battle of the Manchesters in the F.A. Cup semifinal at Wembley was won by City against United. The blue half of Manchester has waited 35 years for a victory of this magnitude over the Reds, and its Italian coach, Roberto Mancini, celebrated on the field with his English assistant, David Platt, as if he had won the Cup, not simply taken a stride toward it.
Fair enough. Mancini’s role very likely depends on his showing something for all the millions of pounds that the Abu Dhabi owners have poured into the team, giving him the global players of his choosing. The only goal of an often dour game came from the towering Ivorian, Yaya Touré, and the most significant highlights of the contest were violent.
United’s Paul Scholes was, justifiably, ejected midway through the second half for a tackle so wild and so high that it lacerated the upper thigh of Pablo Zabaleta. “One of his red mist moments,” his coach, Alex Ferguson, said afterward.
Red mist also descended at the end of City’s 1-0 victory. Players on both sides acted like schoolyard brats. City’s Mario Balotelli and United’s Rio Ferdinand were in the thick of the malevolence. And when Mancini was told that Balotelli had set it off by approaching the United players and winking toward them, the City coach responded: “Every time, people say it’s Balotelli’s fault. We should put him in jail, for this?”
The jokes are not funny.
Ferguson’s explanation that the red mist is just the way that Scholes is cannot excuse a truly gifted midfield player who has now been shown the red card 10 times in his career.
And Balotelli’s contribution to his first season as a £24 million, or $40 million, imported star thus far can seem, even to City followers, more trouble than he is worth.
On the Spanish side, José Mourinho’s insinuations that referees contrive to send off only his villains, and not Barcelona’s, is like a worn-out record.
Why must we accept that, with the prestige and the Hollywood-style rewards, such high-profile sports events descend into unsportsmanlike mayhem? Real Madrid has fired better team managers than Mourinho for failing to live up to the grandeur that its president, Florentino Pérez, and its customers demand.
Pérez once dismissed Vicente Del Bosque days after he coached the team to a victory in the Champions League final.
Del Bosque, a Real man from his youth, has the misfortune to have a lugubrious face. And so, while his team played and won excellently enough, the president explained that an institution like Real Madrid needed a more glamorous person in charge of its team.
Madrid has been chopping and changing ever since, while all that Del Bosque has achieved is to coach Spain to victory in the World Cup last year. Solid and sincere, and thoroughly knowing, he may be. But you do have to look beyond the face to appreciate him.
Whether Mourinho will win for Real what Del Bosque has won is doubtful. He purposefully gives the impression that Madrid is not for him, that he would very much like to use its team to become the first man to win the Champions League for three different clubs in three different countries. And then, as he repeats at regular intervals, he will return to England.
He has his eyes on Manchester United, even though the incumbent, Alex Ferguson, shows no signs of retiring until the club kicks him out.
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