Football Defenders Quotes

You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.

This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football’s version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.

I think a man with a helmet defending his country should make more money than a man with a helmet defending a football, don’t you think?

Whether it is Paul defending Judaism, Augustine pursing philosophical learnedness, Luther attempting complete ritual self-abasement, each finally realized he had given himself to secular forms of self-salvation and to a world filled with human achievement but empty of God.

Is there a reason for the sudden fashion for the eight-goal tie? Maybe it’s because defending is hard, and boring, and thankless, and most people who are paid a six-figure sum weekly do very little that is hard or boring or thankless.

It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing, keeping up with Jem, and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess. When she was calm enough to listen, she considered that a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend nor defend herself against, a world that did not want her.

I stood there, 220 pounds of ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, leaning against the faded walnut rail of the witness stand, home to a million sweaty palms. "To Speak for the Dead" (The Jake Lassiter Series) http://tinyurl.com/69eua2t

As soon as all the prizes had been given out, the band began to play a lively dance number. Rod Havelock, who had been watching closely, came up to claim Nancy and was only a second ahead of Al. “I guess I’d better get my dances in early,” the assistant purser teased. “I see I have a handsome rival.” Nancy laughed as they glided off. “I’m glad you did, because I must ask you a question. We are planning to open the mystery trunk tonight after this party is over. Will you come and help us investigate it?” “You bet I will,” Rod replied. “I can tell you now that the dancing will end at eleven o’clock sharp. Shall we say eleven-fifteen in your room?” “Perfect,” Nancy agreed. At this moment the music ended. Others came up to talk to the couple, and presently AI made his way toward Nancy. “May I have the next dance?” he asked. The whole evening was a joyful one for Nancy and her friends. They were claimed for every dance. Al asked the girl detective if she would accompany him to the lavish table of food that had been set up on the deck outside. She went along and they found Bess, George, and Nelda there with Bruce, Chipper, and Tubby. “Hey, have some of those delicious meatballs!” Tubby recommended. “Now, Tub, I thought you were staying away from all this fattening stuff?” Chipper teased. “Well, I had to try a little of each!” Tubby defended himself. When the music began to play again, Al asked Nancy to dance. “Sure, I’d like to,” she said. “I’m glad you would,” Al commented. “Next to football, dancing is my favorite pastime.

A study of thousands of juvenile court decisions found that when the local football team loses a game on the weekend, the judges make harsher decisions on the Monday (and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of the week). Black defendants disproportionately bear the brunt of that increased harshness. A different study looked at 1.5 million judicial decisions over three decades and similarly found that judges are more severe on days that follow a loss by the local city’s football team than they are on days that follow a win.

So, imagine you are five years old and have been brave enough to confess to your mother that your daddy rapes you every night, although he's said he'll kill you for telling. Now imagine that, as a practice run, you have to go to a courtroom that seems big as a football stadium. You have to answer questions a prosecutor asks you. And then you have to answer questions fired at you by a stranger, a lawyer who makes you so confused that you cry and ask him to stop. And because every defendant has the right to face his accuser, you have to do all this while your daddy is staring you down just six feet away.

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.

We danced to John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear.” We cut the seven-tiered cake, electing not to take the smear-it-on-our-faces route. We visited and laughed and toasted. We held hands and mingled. But after a while, I began to notice that I hadn’t seen any of the tuxedo-clad groomsmen--particularly Marlboro Man’s friends from college--for quite some time. “What happened to all the guys?” I asked. “Oh,” he said. “They’re down in the men’s locker room.” “Oh, really?” I asked. “Are they smoking cigars or something?” “Well…” He hesitated, grinning. “They’re watching a football game.” I laughed. “What game are they watching?” It had to be a good one. “It’s…ASU is playing Nebraska,” he answered. ASU? His alma mater? Playing Nebraska? Defending national champions? How had I missed this? Marlboro Man hadn’t said a word. He was such a rabid college football fan, I couldn’t believe such a monumental game hadn’t been cause to reschedule the wedding date. Aside from ranching, football had always been Marlboro Man’s primary interest in life. He’d played in high school and part of college. He watched every televised ASU game religiously--for the nontelevised games, he relied on live reporting from Tony, his best friend, who attended every game in person. “I didn’t even know they were playing!” I said. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have known. It was September, after all. But it just hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d been a little on the busy side, I guess, getting ready to change my entire life and all. “How come you’re not down there watching it?” I asked. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “You might get hit on.” He chuckled his sweet, sexy chuckle. I laughed. I could just see it--a drunk old guest scooting down the bar, eyeing my poufy white dress and spouting off pickup lines: You live around here? I sure like what you’re wearing… So…you married? Marlboro Man wasn’t in any immediate danger. Of that I was absolutely certain. “Go watch the game!” I insisted, motioning downstairs. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t need to.” He wanted to watch the game so badly I could see it in the air. “No, seriously!” I said. “I need to go hang with the girls anyway. Go. Now.” I turned my back and walked away, refusing even to look back. I wanted to make it easy on him. I wouldn’t see him for over an hour. Poor Marlboro Man. Unsure of the protocol for grooms watching college football during their wedding receptions, he’d darted in and out of the locker room for the entire first half. The agony he must have felt. The deep, sustained agony. I was so glad he’d finally joined the guys.

Before they’re done my internal monologue is already going through the paces: Robert Loggia’s sure had some interesting parts over the years, hasn’t he? Like when he played that growly assistant football coach in Necessary Roughness. And that leads me to: Hey, you know who else made an appearance in that movie? Roger Craig. And the next thing you know, I’m at Memorial Stadium. Again. This time it’s 1981, and Roger’s dressed in red, jetting 94 yards down the Astroturf for a touchdown, with a pair of Florida State defenders helplessly flapping along in his wake. The school record for longest run from scrimmage that was, and it stood for twenty years, until Eric Crouch got 95 with that impossible run at Mizzou. And that gets me to consider: Who’d win in a footrace between Crouch and Craig, if Craig were in his prime, of course? Hmmm…

After the emergence of quantum mechanics in the early 1900s, many great theorists, including Albert Einstein, tried to find the microscopic theoretical underpinnings of superconductivity but to no avail. A quantum mechanical picture of superconductivity did not exist. It was Cooper's ingenious physical insight, known as the Cooper pair, that unlocked the quantum secrets of superconductivity. Under typical circumstances, the individual electrons flowing in a piece of metal wire experience resistance because they repel each other, much like the defending players in rugby or football interfere with the movement of the player with the ball. However, Cooper showed that by using the wave-like property of electrons, they can "pair up," thus changing their repulsive properties in the metal and allowing them to conduct without resistance.

If someone is attacking you, regardless of what technique they are attacking with, the highest probability of winning that encounter is to immediately attack that person with everything you’ve got. Kicks, knees, elbow strikes, open palm strikes, chops, punches, etc., thrown rapidly and with as much power you can generate. The key to this kind of defensive theory is that once you initiate your counter-attack, you don’t stop throwing techniques until your opponent is incapacitated. Some schools call this a “blitz” type of attack, which is borrowed from American football, but regardless of the name, it is a solid, proven method of counter-attacking. Finding yourself in the position of “getting jumped” by one or more thugs, for instance, would be a perfect example of utilizing this kind of counter-attack. Remember the action verses reaction gap we covered earlier? I suggest you should take some time and do a little research on what is known about this interaction. Action is always faster than reaction. That just makes common sense, doesn’t it? So, if you are waiting on your opponent to make the first move out of some archaic martial arts dogma about not striking first, then you are already behind before the fight starts. To win, you must cause your opponent to react rather that act. They must be the one that is a millisecond behind, always attempting to catch up to what is going on. You must become the initiator, but only after you have determined the level of force needed to control the situation. Once you have determined that, and it is very helpful to rehearse various scenarios prior to actually being involved in them, then it is a matter of always causing your opponent to react during that situation. This concept has been pressure tested numerous times, it works and works very effectively.

If someone is attacking you, regardless of what technique they are attacking with, the highest probability of winning that encounter is to immediately attack that person with everything you’ve got. Kicks, knees, elbow strikes, open palm strikes, chops, punches, etc., thrown rapidly and with as much power you can generate. The key to this kind of defensive theory is that once you initiate your counter-attack, you don’t stop throwing techniques until your opponent is incapacitated. Some schools call this a “blitz” type of attack, which is borrowed from American football, but regardless of the name, it is a solid, proven method of counter-attacking. Finding yourself in the position of “getting jumped” by one or more thugs, for instance, would be a perfect example of utilizing this kind of counter-attack.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it. A part-time science teacher and high school football coach, John T. Scopes, challenged the new law. William Jennings Bryan, the aging populist and former Democratic presidential nominee, was enlisted to take up the creationist cause in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Bryan withered in the summer heat of the outdoor courtroom in 1925, and melted under questioning about biblical literalism from his opponent, Clarence Darrow. The trial ended with a $100 fine of the high school science teacher. Bryan died five days later.

The only Hitler of Germany was one who adopted the way of atrocities and cruelties for a limited period; he was evil-minded, whereas every leader of Israel was and is characteristically similar to Hitler for several decades of victimising; despite that, they are not evil characters. The Western states eliminated Hitler, but those countries supported and perpetuated the leaders of Israel, and still, they remain on such distinctive policies; it is the worst hypocrisy in human history. Virtually, it will be a self-suicidal move of the Muslim world, especially the Arab States, as religiously, politically, morally, and principally, to recognize Israel, ignoring the Palestinians, in the presence of the United Nations resolutions. Indeed, Israel exists; however, it is an unreal reality as the concept and context of the real validity of Palestinians. Factually, recognition of Israel by the Muslim States and Arab dictators means a license of hegemony, allowing Israel to dominate the Muslim world. The Muslims of the world absolutely will never agree with it and dismiss such a move of Arab dictators. The tiny democracy of the world, Israel seems as an authority upon the United Nations since it does what it wants. Israel is not afraid nor frightened; its state is just the warmonger and the hate-sponsor within humanity. Israel is the creation of the West, supported by the West, and licensed to kill by the West; the Muslim rulers expect a fruitful solution from them; I realize it is an endless stupidity. Spirit of Palestine *** If you do not understand The international law that You constituted yourself If you do not obey and respect Your laws and resolutions We have the right to defend our land By our way, by all means, Whether you call it terrorism Or something else For us, It is the fight for freedom You cannot accept the truth We cannot accept the lies Truth always prevails We will never surrender Nor yield to the evil And genocide forces We are the spirit of Palestine Long live Palestine, Long live Palestine At every cost. Palestine Never Disappears *** They stole Palestine Our land and then our homes They threw us out At gunpoint For our determination And rights We throw the stones They trigger bullets The champions of human rights Watch that, Clapping and cheering As like it is a football match And the football referee is Israel However, Palestine will never disappear Never; never; never We will fight without fear Until we recover and have that Palestine is Crying *** Under the flames of the guns Palestine is crying The Arab world is cowardly silent, West and the rest of the world, Deliberately ignoring justice Even also they are criminally denying Whereas Palestinians are dying If there are no weapons: There will be neither terrible wars Nor criminal deaths, nor tensions Manufacture oxygen of life expectations It is a beautiful destination For all destinations I wish I could fragrance peace and love In the minds and hearts of two Generations of two real brothers. Day Of Mourning, Not Mother’s Day *** A lot of Mothers of Palestine are crying And burying their children, who became The victim of Israel’s cruelty Those mothers have no children To celebrate their Mother’s Day It is a Day of Mourning for those mothers Not Mother’s Day Oh, Palestine, cry, cry, not on Israel But on Muslims who are dead sleeping. Ahed Tamimi Of Palestine The Voice Of Freedom *** You can trigger bullets Upon those, Who stay determined You can shoot Or place under house arrest Hundreds of thousands As such Ahed Tamimi However, You cannot stop The voices, for the freedom And Self-determination You will hear In every second, minute Every hour, every day Until you understand And realize, Voices of the human rights

I think a man with a helmet defending his country should make more than a man with a helmet defending a football, don't you think?

Arguably the nation’s greatest public university and its greatest college football program can both be found on the same campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Michigan students, lettermen, alumni, faculty, and fans take a great deal of pride in that unique combination—and they watch the source of their pride very closely. They believe it’s not just Michigan’s victories that matter—on and off the field—but the values behind them that are so important, values that place a premium on community, achievement, and integrity. When they feel those values are threatened, they rise to defend them.

What kind of law do you practice?” “Oh, just about any kind of law you need. In a town like Tallahassee it pays to diversify. I like to say the one thing I won’t do is defend FSU football players. I’m a Gator and can’t cross that line.” Bosch guessed he was speaking to some sort of state rivalry but it was beyond him. His

Let’s remember that it would afterward create inventions unimaginable to previous generations, outracing sound via the telegraph and flooding silences with the music of the phonograph—and harnessing electricity to illuminate the darkness with delicate glass bulbs; and it would invent the motion picture so that people in darkened theaters could dream while still awake; and it would loft human beings into the world of the birds above our heads in winged apparatuses that would eventually soar across continents and then across oceans; and it would via assembly-line innovation make the horseless carriage available to the working man; and it would invent baseball and football and basketball; and it would in two wars defend civilization and democracy from totalitarian tyranny; and it would invent jazz and blues and rock and roll; and it would invent a device that could make what was happening in one place appear instantly to other people thousands of miles away; and it would make this device available to almost everyone; and it would vault our species beyond Earth’s gravity and onto other heavenly bodies, depositing one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve men onto the white surface of the moon; and it would invent the computer and it would invent the Internet, with its endless information going to and fro over the surface of the Earth. All of these things and so many more were made possible by that one document written in that hot room in Philadelphia over the course of one hundred days—that promise to the future of the world.

To fault myth for not being very good theory is like faulting a dancer for not being a very good football player. The appropriate response is not to defend against such charges but to point out, 'Dance is not poorly executed football; it's not football at all. Something completely different is going on there.

The defender must first think defensively, but he must also think offensively. For an attacker it is the other way around. Somewhere they meet.

The presence of the 14 Basques was a fairly accurate reflection of the region’s overwhelming influence on the early years of Spanish football. There are tales told, similar to those of the north-east of England, in which scouts in the region are forever hollering down holes in the ground, out of which would pop monstrous defenders, solid goalkeepers and prodigious goalscorers. In fact the Spanish talk of the cantera (quarry) from which good young ’uns emerge, hewn from the rock of their particular regions. The Basques have always had more cause to celebrate the philosophy of the cantera than most, due to their insistence, from the early years of the century, on using only local players in their teams. This policy is still carried on by Athletic Bilbao, courting controversy in certain circles because their approach has always been coloured by suggestions of Basque racial purity and xenophobia – predictably and strenuously denied by those who support the practice.

I have this instinct for knowing when a defence is going to relax, or when a defender will make a mistake,’ he once said. ‘Something inside me says, Gerd, go this way; Gerd, go that. I don’t know what it is.’ A killer who claimed to hear voices. Serial goalscorer.

he wanted to confirm a personal theory: that a reserve team, like any other, could serve as a university of football; because all teams behave, react and respond the same way. Whether superstars or Sunday league, there’s always a player who is jealous of a team-mate, another who is always late, a joker, an obedient one fearful of punishment and eager to please, a quiet one, a rebel . . . It was also educational because it helped prepare for the fact that every opponent is different: some are offensive, others timid, some defend in their own box, others counter-attack. Working with the B team gave Guardiola the perfect opportunity to try and find solutions to the kinds of problems he would encounter working with a higher profile team; yet enabled him to do so away from the spotlight and glare of the media.

And, of course, motorcycles are somewhat dangerous, as are most things worth doing—flying, mountain climbing, horseback riding, defending your country, skydiving, arresting felons, football, auto racing, boxing, firefighting, scuba diving, etc. You don’t do these things to be safe; you do them after deciding what kind of life you want to lead, careful or exciting.

As it turned out, Moss and the Patriots were hotter than the game-time temperature of 84 degrees. They ran the Jets off the field in a 38–14 rout highlighted by Moss’s 51-yard touchdown against triple coverage and 183 receiving yards on nine catches. “He was born to play football,” Brady said of his newest and most lethal weapon. The quarterback had it all now. He was getting serious with his relatively new girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen (his ex-girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, had just given birth to their son, Jack), and now he was being paired on the field with a perfect partner of a different kind. Brady wasn’t seeing the Oakland Randy Moss. He was seeing the Minnesota Moss, the vintage Moss, the 6´4˝ receiver who ran past defenders and jumped over them with ease. Brady had all day to throw to Moss and Welker, who caught the first of the quarterback’s three touchdown passes. He wasn’t sacked while posting a quarterback rating of 146.6, his best in nearly five years. Man, this was a great day for the winning coach all around. On the other sideline, Eric Mangini had made a big mistake by sticking with his quarterback, Chad Pennington, a former teammate of Moss’s at Marshall, when the outcome was no longer in doubt, subjecting his starter to some unnecessary hits as he played on an injured ankle. Pennington was annoyed enough to pull himself from the game with 6:51 left and New England leading by 17. “That was the first time I’ve ever done that,” Pennington said. Mangini played the fool on this Sunday, and Belichick surely got the biggest kick out of that. But the losing coach actually won a game within the game in the first half that the overwhelming majority of people inside Giants Stadium knew absolutely nothing about. It had started in the days before this opener, when Mangini informed his former boss that the Jets would not tolerate in their own stadium an illegal yet common Patriots practice: the videotaping of opposing coaches’ signals from the sideline. The message to Belichick was simple: Don’t do it in our house. It was something of an open secret that New England had been illegally taping opposing coaches during games for some time, and yet the first public mention of improper spying involving Belichick’s Patriots actually assigned them the collective role of victim. Following a 21–0 Miami victory in December 2006, a couple of Dolphins told the Palm Beach Post that the team had “bought” past game tapes that included audio of Brady making calls at the line, and that the information taken from those tapes had helped them shut out Brady and sack him four times. “I’ve never seen him so flustered,” said Miami linebacker Zach Thomas.

New York’s attack, dubbed “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” by Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum, was the NBA’s most predictable. “Windshield wipers offer more variety than the Knicks’ offense,” mused New York magazine writer Chris Smith. For many years, their possessions often went something like this: a guard would dribble down to the wing and dump an entry pass into Ewing on the block. The center, forced to deal with the spacing of a crowded Twister mat, would turn and face the basket, deciding instantly whether he had enough time to get off a shot before a second and third defender could swarm. If he didn’t have a good look, he would kick the ball out to reset the offense, or, in what was often a victory for the defense, set up a wide-open perimeter try for a shooting-deficient teammate. “If this were football, every time [his teammates] shoot, they’d be accused of intentional grounding,” New York Post columnist Peter Vecsey wrote. Every now and then, there was a pick-and-roll mixed in, or a cross screen to shake things up. When the universe allowed, a Ewing kick-out would lead to a made jumper by one of the guards. But even when players misfired, Ewing was often there to corral the miss, then gracefully put it back for a score. If his teammates were leaving messes, the 7-footer was the Bounty paper towel cleaning up after them.

Manufacturers continued to market their protective equipment as central to athletic success as well as safety. Yet in defending themselves against product liability lawsuits, they emphasized the lack of relationship between helmets and the injuries of individual plaintiffs. Manufacturers

Seeing a football match. One player was appreciating the other when his shot was on the goal and defended by the goalkeeper. The person should not be satisfied with the direction of the shot, but also converting the shot into the goal

By this time, most of the defendants had resumed their normal lives. They were all out on bail. They were working, attending college, playing football, dating girls and, for at least a few months in the year, enjoying home cooking. It was pleasant being accused of being a gang rapist, having your picture published in national magazines along with pictures of convicted sexual offenders. But as media coverage of the case receded and then virtually disappeared, they could resume the nearly quotidian rhythm of their lives.

The fixer is less concerned with atmosphere and empathy. They are there to get the job done. Like the defender in football, they can anticipate danger, stop the opposition from attacking and prevent goals being scored.

In a town like Tallahassee it pays to diversify. I like to say the one thing I won’t do is defend FSU football players. I’m a Gator and can’t cross that line.

If mutual decimation of the McLaughlins and the McLeans marked the end of Charlestown’s “gangster era,” a host of gangs endured in the Town. These were less criminal bands than expressions of territorial allegiance. Every street and alley, every park and pier had its own ragged troop which hung on the corner, played football, baseball, and street hockey, and defended its turf against all comers. The Wildcats hung at the corner of Frothingham and Lincoln streets, the Bearcats at Walker and Russell streets, the Falcons outside the Edwards School, the Cobras on Elm Street, the Jokers in Hayes Square, the Highlanders on High Street, the Crusaders at the Training Field. Each had its distinctive football jersey (on which members wore their street addresses), its own legends and traditions. The Highlanders, for example, took their identity from the Bunker Hill Monument, which towered over their hangout at the top of Monument Avenue. On weekends and summer afternoons, they gathered there to wait for out-of-town tourists visiting the revolutionary battleground. When one approached, an eager boy would step forward and launch his spiel, learned by rote from other Highlanders: “The Monument is 221 feet high, has 294 winding stairs and no elevators. They say the quickest way up is to walk, the quickest way down is to fall. The Monument is fifteen feet square. Its cornerstone was laid in 1825 by Daniel Webster. The statue you see in the foreground is that of Colonel William Prescott standing in the same position as when he gave that brave and famous command, ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’ The British made three attempts to gain the hill …” And so forth. An engaging raconteur could parlay this patter into a fifty-cent tip.

The league match ended in a tense 1-1 draw, which kept Barcelona eight points clear at the top. Lionel scored a penalty and then with ten minutes to go, Cristiano scored a penalty. Messi 1 Ronaldo 1. ‘Anything you do, Ronaldo does too!’ Andrés said with a big smile on his face. Lionel’s teammates loved to tease him about his Ballon d’Or rival. They needed their star to be at his very best. In the Copa del Rey final, Lionel was desperate to be the matchwinner. He tried dropping deep, he tried moving out to the wing but nothing worked. Wherever he went, he was surrounded by defenders. Then in extra time, Cristiano scored to give Real the victory. Messi 1 Ronaldo 2. Lionel was furious. He always hated losing but losing against Ronaldo and Real Madrid was the worst feeling ever. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked his teammates. ‘We have to win the Champions League semi-final now!

The first leg was away at the Bernabeu and Guardiola asked his players to put lots of pressure on the Real defenders. ‘Tackle, tackle, tackle but don’t be reckless! Remember, we’re at home in the second leg.’ The Madrid fans booed Lionel every time he touched the ball. He was used to that. He never stopped running but Real were marking him out of the match. ‘Something has to change!’ Lionel thought. He was getting more and more frustrated with himself. After sixty minutes, the match did change; Madrid’s defender Pepe was sent off for a dangerous tackle. ‘Come on, we’ve got to take advantage of the extra man!’ Carles shouted from defence. The Barcelona pressure was building. Xavi passed to Ibrahim Afellay on the right wing. Ibrahim dribbled into the area and looked up. ‘I’m here!’ Lionel called. He had made a great run in between the centre-backs and he steered the ball into the net.

Safe-side’ is the term used when you want to pass the ball to the receiver on the opposite side of where the defender is. For example, if the defender is marking the player’s right shoulder, the pass is played to the left. The defender therefore will find it more difficult to intercept. ]

Political parties became like football teams. You defended your team, not because it was good but because it was yours. You voted for this politician or that politician, not because you liked his ideas, but because he was from your party, he spoke your dialect, or you could see yourself sharing a beer with him at the kopitiam. Taken to the extreme, parties could poison democracy... Individuals changed theirs minds. Their views evolved. Part manifestos seldom did.