During this evening's Copa del Rey final, won by Atletico Madrid in extra time at the Bernabeu (big win, that one), Jose Mourinho and Cristiano Ronaldo were both sent off. The latter was unjustified, though Cristiano probably could've been sent off for kicking Juanfran off the ball earlier, and there's no way to know what Jose actually said.
This might be better than the Champions League final itself. Heineken decided to run a gag where if a guy could get his girl to go along with buying stadium seats for $1899, he would win tickets to the final in London. One man actually rose above the odds and they were steep odds and won the tickets.
The people who whip up these fancy second-tier finals (UEFA. They're called UEFA.) concocted a nice little PR thingamajig by pairing one fan from Benfica and one fan from Chelsea with a top notch freestyler in a race through Amsterdam to the Arena. They would hope to determine a winner through various stuns and what-nots.
Just days after the club granted a young boy with cancer his Make-A-Wish wish a friendly against the senior side, the fans of the Portland came up with a choreograph. Only it's not your typical collective this one was for gay tolerance, fresh on the heels of the spate (yes, two is a spate in this respect) of outings in professional sports.
Leonardo, the PSG director not the Ninja Turtle, isn't exactly having a fine few weeks. After Thiago Silva was sent off for lightly placing his hands on the referee last week, Leonardo decided it would be a smart idea to bump the referee in the tunnel. This may result in a suspension or worse, a points deduction for PSG.
This begins as the worst sitter-miss you've ever seen, then becomes the worst pitch you've ever seen, and then you take the VHS out of the VCR and wonder what time machine this video from 1987 just arrived from.
Actually it's this weekend and it's Willian Ribeiro of Campinense who became the victim of poor landscaping, groundskeeping, or some gnome beneath the pitch punching at the grass at opportune times.
Of all the footballers to get a song...Kevin Constant. And not a terrace song which involves three lines and rhyming striker with pterodactyl. Proper song. Sort of. His name's Don Rik. It's an Italian rap. And it involves a lot of lyrics about Kevin Constant, as well as other footballers.
Ajax has some of the best or at least community-immersed kit launches of any club in the world. A couple of years back they brought out the new kit by crashing a pick-up match in the park with a camera crew, then handing over the shirts to the players they'd just....treated kindly. Several years ago they did a shirt swap in downtown Amsterdam.
Kenny Cooper scored a pk to bring the game even. The world scored a great gif(t) as he attempted to celebrate. Isn't it the portly one who's supposed to fall over?
This one's for the lovers of tactics. Pep held a lecture in Argentina in which he explained the role of Lionel Messi as the false nine in his Barcelona side. Shockingly, there's more to it than a simple "get the best player alive" and then fifteen minutes of kitty cat photos. The video is in Spanish so it's obviously better if one speaks the language, but there is a description at the YouTube site.
Despite knowing nothing about the situation being mentioned surrounding Anfield, this is a wonderful series of photos put together by The Guardian. Apparently these are the remnants of Liverpool's practice of buying up property around Anfield:
In the mid-90s Liverpool began buying houses around their Anfield ground and leaving them empty, with the intention of expanding the stadium.
You might've heard, but Germany invaded Spain and now everyone loves Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich and they're the best ever. Of course.
In what is surely a rare, if not unique, occurrence, the two Champions League finalists met in the league days later after booking their tickets to the final.
This is a sort of fantastic encapsulation of what social media has done to the "news" or whatever you'd like to call it these days. ("Retelling what you already read about on the internet at six o'clock"?) The dramatic buildup to Jose's whereabouts this morning, something which somehow went to Twitter, was.
Italian comedy show La Iene sent an emissary to Paris to ask for the autographs of some PSG stars. Only the photos were Photoshopped with the player's head on the body of another man. Doing things with yet another man. They're not flattering, no.
It's in Italian, but the reactions from the players are good enough without speaking the language.
