Words to the wise can be lost in translation
At just about this time every year I start fanning my armpits about the Premier League and all its works and pomps, writes .
‘Counting the ceiling tiles’ was the apt phrase I saw during the week, but I have to confess my interest was piqued last week by the Marcelo Bielsa controversy*.
It wasn’t that the Leeds United manager was accused of spying, or replied to those charges. It was neither the revelation of the depth of his analysis nor the details of his tactical approach.
What caught my eye was the identity of his translator, Frenchman Salim Lamrani, who is not really a translator, but a journalist. And not just a journalist, but one with an ideological edge to him.
“Lamrani is a prolific author with a number of published books to his name,” according to the Leeds Live website. “He has spoken at conferences in Cuba, England, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Boliva, and the USA alongside the likes of Noam Chomsky, Ken Livingstone and Howard Zinn.”
Where to begin?
For one thing you can drift idly into dreams that when Lamrani starts ‘translating’ questions for the Leeds manager what he’s actually saying is that the capitalist running dogs are trying to manufacture consent by trapping Bielsa into support for the ruling infrastructure and that when Bielsa has his comments translated as ‘yes, absolutely the referee needs his eyes checked’, what he’s murmured to his translator is that moral equivalence is a doctrine fatally flawed by the proponent’s starting position.
Because I don’t have a qualification in lipreading I have to leave this speculation in the realm of fantasy, but whatever the two men whisper to each other must surely be at a level far above the manufactured outrage, the bad-faith whingeing, the false bonhomie, the studied management-speak.
The Lamrani-Bielsa case is tantalising because despite the idle notions sketched out above, up to now the post-game comments of the Leeds manager are not notably more eloquent than those of his peers. In fact, the situation is reminiscent of a scene many years ago, when we were just being introduced, via TV, to the silken touches and silkier jerseys of Italy’s Serie A.
In those games we glimpsed a procession of managers in beautifully-cut Italian suits, scarves exquisitely knotted, as they fretted in the technical areas. Anyway, one evening one of your columnist’s brothers punctured the balloon entirely as some manager or other glowered out at his midfielders, muttering suavely.
“You realise he’s just roaring ‘lump it up to the front, big man! In the mixer! ‘Ave it!’” And of course he was right. It was just all in Italian and sounded nicer.
We probably shouldn’t over-romanticise the Lamrani-Bielsa relationship either, and in particular Lamrani’s influence. The story of Albert Einstein’s driver is instructive here.
Supposedly Einstein went on a lecture tour of the States once and his assigned driver, after a couple of weeks, said, ‘I’ve heard you give that talk ten or eleven times and I reckon I could give it myself now.’ ‘Knock yourself out,’ said Einstein, ‘I’ll sit at the back and watch.’ The driver duly went on stage and gave a word-perfect rendition at the next college they visited, a fluent explication of complex physics to a packed auditorium.
Then the moderator asked for questions, and the lengthy opening query ranged from subatomic particles to string theory and back to relativity.
Einstein stirred in the back row, but his driver rose to the challenge. ‘I’m afraid I’m disappointed,’ he said. “I expected more from these students. That question’s so basic I’m going to invite my driver up to answer it ...“
NFL stomach for battle
Thanks to the correspondent who pointed me towards a few lines in the New York Times about a health risk associated with American football.
Not concussion, but obesity.
The linemen, those huge blockers who clash when the ball is snapped, are encouraged to get bigger and bigger while playing, but it shouldn’t surprise that many of them struggle to shed their eating habit when they finish.
The obvious parallel here is rugby, and I recall a former international saying to me that in his (amateur) day, players tended to put on weight when they retired, as they were no longer training as hard. However, he added that nowadays recently retired players tend to be slimmer as they shed the playing weight needed to absorb the collisions involved.
In the NFL the average weight of those linemen has gone from an average of 249lbs (112.9kg) in the 1970s to an average of 315lbs (142kg) these days, and many of them struggle with obesity-related health issues when they retire — diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac problems.
Every GAA secretary’s worst nightmare realised at Camp Nou
Great to see that even in the sleek, machine-tooled world of professional sport, there’s still room for human error.
Last week, Barcelona beat Levante in the Copa Del Rey in Spain, 3-0. Barcelona were 2-1 down from the first leg, but back at the Camp Nou, they had two goals from Ousmane Dembele and, inevitably, Lionel Messi, to see them through, 4-2 on aggregate.
So far so good, but since then, Levante president, Quico Catalan, said his club have complained to the Spanish Football Federation: Levante said Barcelona’s Chumi, who played in the first match, was ineligible.
Levante said Chumi should be suspended, after picking up five yellow cards playing for Barcelona B. Barcelona boss, Ernesto Valverde, disagreed, saying the 19-year-old was eligible for a cup game, and that he was banned for a La Liga game against Eibar.
“We have no doubt about Chumi, neither before, nor after, nor during,” said Valverde. The Spanish football federation rejected Levante’s complaint.
We’ll park for the time being a) the fact that someone named Catalan is trying to get Barcelona thrown out of a competition, and b) the fact that someone named Chumi picked up five yellow cards. What keeps me chuckling is the thought that somewhere in the vast reaches of the Camp Nou, there’s someone flicking through a rulebook and telling the manager he’s okay to play, and, if not, there’s always the DRA on Friday night, alright?
Poet Mary Oliver’s words will live on
A goodbye here to the great Mary Oliver, who passed away last week. Success came to her relatively late in life, but her work struck a chord with people and is known far more widely than you’d expect of 21st-century poetry. No wonder, with lines like these:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real.
She did.
