Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press
Bow your heads. Let us take a moment to celebrate the relentless devotion that Winnipeg has for its hockey team, and lament the fact that none of us will ever love anything nearly so much as that city loves the Jets.
“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image,
because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
– Marshall McLuhan
Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.
–Robert Harrick, “To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time”
For the better part of the last five years, at least since Euro 2008 signaled the dawn of a Spanish renaissance in the sport, the Spanish men’s national football team has ridden a possession-heavy, triangular passing-based game to great success and historic heights, and not only by Spanish standards. The style they have made their own, affectionately dubbed tiki-taka for its quick passing, had its roots in the Ajax/Netherlands “total football” system of the 1970s. When the greatest Dutch player ever, Johann Cruyff, became FC Barcelona’s manager in 1988, he brought the total football mentality with him and placed the greatest burden in the field on his most talented midfielder, Josep Guardiola. Guardiola ascended to the throne at Barcelona in June 2008 and left it four years later having put together perhaps the greatest list of accomplishments in any four-year span in the history of club soccer.
Tuesdays With Horry 