High On Insanity

I'm actually getting a bit bored of slagging of James Lawton. If only one day he would write something that wasn't so badly written and badly argued to be laughable I could stop. Today he continues his masturbation over Barcelona, although he does manage stop that briefly to match his Barcelona as "Champions of Football" of yesterday with Ryan Giggs as "Footballer of the Years". Like any masturbation it is of course best done in privacy rather than in a national newspaper. I'll not quote much from it, imagine it, James Lawton masturbating, if you must. I'll just point out a couple of his errors of logic. First off he says this:

Among other things, it tells us quite how much can happen in a single year of football; how a landscape can be changed so radically the old one is almost beyond recall.

And later he says this:

Certainly, there is no sense here that the wrong team finished up with the greatest trophy offered by club football. Barcelona, let's not forget, were claiming the prize for the second time in four years – and on precisely the same terms negotiated by the brilliant Josep Guardiola's predecessor, Frank Rijkaard.

If he'd simply said "this years final was better than last years final", fair enough (although you could probably argue that last years was closer, tenser, more dramatic and more interesting throughout its 120+ minutes if you so wished). What James Lawton does is, on the one hand, claim that this final represents a sea change, a totally new way of football, then, on the other hand, he tells us that Barcelona did exactly what they have been doing for the last 4 years, so where's the change? To argue a case for a sea change based on two games of football seems a stupidly small sample, even for James Lawton. I could demonstrate something entirely different based on 4 games of football - our semi-final games against Arsenal and Barcelona's semi-final games against Chelsea - that we are the side that play beautiful attacking football, whereas Barcelona are a bunch of cloggers. It would be wrong, but it wouldn't be quite as wrong as James Lawton is.
And James Lawton even mentions the Chelsea games. If I want to make an argument, an over the top, stupid argument, and something that disproves my argument exists, what do I do? I either ignore it, or I make a point of challenging it. What does James Lawton do:

Certainly, as the fans of Barça threw themselves joyously into the Fontana de Trevi here in the small hours of yesterday morning, it was not so easy to remember the mood in Moscow last year after the slugfest between Manchester United and Chelsea. But then if you tried hard enough it did percolate through the prism of Barcelona's beautiful display of exquisite and inventive ball control. It centred on the awed reaction of a Spanish observer in the Luzhniki Stadium to the pace and the pummelling pressure produced by both teams before United's shoot-out victory. "My God," said the Spaniard, "only English football could produce such football at this level." ...

Some no doubt will claim that the status quo would very likely have been maintained if Uefa had appointed a passably competent referee for the second leg of the semi-final at Stamford Bridge, and there is no question Chelsea all but obliterated Barcelona's magic until the moment Iniesta rescued his team with that late strike.

He doesn't do either, he just mentions it. If Barcelona are so "magical", so great at football, why couldn't they play anything remotely like the beautiful game against Chelsea? If this is such a great victory for football that, he writes later, "lights up the world," are we just meant to ignore the semi-final? If you want to glory in Barcelona's beautiful play as epoch-changing tell us why they couldn't produce it in the semi-final, how their great play produced one shot on target - that's some attacking football isn't it (And I should point out that I'm not slagging of Barcelona here, they do play great football, I'm slagging off James Lawton's hyperbole, hyperbole that can't even be bothered with plain old logic). And the even more obvious contradiction in the argument is that he tells us this anecdote about, "only English football could produce such football at this level," and proceeds to tell us how Chelsea managed to completely stifle the game against Barcelona. If the final had been between Chelsea and Barcelona would he have used that anecdote and then said, "but they were wrong, because a combination of English and Spanish football produced something very similar this year," or would he have simply bemoaned how those nasty men from Chelsea ruined the dreams of the magic people from Barcelona and stamped on the dreams of little children everywhere?
If Barcelona were truly changing the landscape of football wouldn't this year's semi-final have been impossible? Which is to say, if Chelsea are still going out to stifle their opponents, rather than trying to beat them at "the beautiful game" then nothing has changed has it? There's been no radical shift in anything. Even James Lawton says that 4 years ago Barcelona won with the same principles that they won it with this time, so in 4 years the landscape has changed not a jot.