Football Daily has never had much time for conspiracy theories. Lee Harvey Oswald dunnit, Stanley Kubrick didn’t fake the moon landing, Vinícius Jr doesn’t have a body double and Miranda isn’t a secret traitor. But our Spidey senses picked up when the UK government announced their Be Ready campaign on Thursday night.
In case you missed it, or live outside the UK and couldn’t care less about this weird little island, we’ve lifted this from our news story: “Every Briton is being urged to stock up to nine litres of bottled water and three days’ worth of food in new government guidance designed to ensure that households can survive a weather, cyber or other serious emergency. The Be Ready campaign is aimed at persuading people to stock up with supplies to last 72 hours, amid growing official concern about the impact of the climate crisis, technological dependency and hostile state threats.” War’s a comin’, in other words, so you’d better buy some tomato soup (10 tins of), mushroom soup (eight tins of, for consumption cold) and ice cream (vanilla, one large tub of). Here’s where it gets interesting.
The government released their three-day survival plan on Thursday afternoon, three days before the event most likely to cause World War III: José Mourinho’s first Clásico since 2013. Barcelona meet Real Madrid at the Camp Nou on Sunday and suddenly the government are telling us we may need to hunker down. José may be the most charismatic baddie since Dirty Den’s most recent death, but not even he is capable of starting the geopolitical answer to El Clásico.
Sunday’s match will spark a form of global conflict, even if it’s just a load of strangers caterwauling at each other on the internet rather than talking to their children, reading a book or practising any of the gazillion behaviours that would make their lives and the world a better place. Mourinho’s relationship with Barcelona could fill a book, never mind a teatime email. There is love lost, but it’s decades since it went missing.
These days they can’t stand the thought of each other, never mind the sight. There is an argument (NB: Football Daily doesn’t actually want to argue) that Mourinho’s greatest achievement in football, apart from finishing second with Manchester United in 2017-18, was to take a La Liga title off probably the greatest club side of all time. He also drove Pep Guardiola into a sabbatical – but that, and the Realpolitik of the Bernabéu dressing-room, took so much out of Mourinho that he has never been the same since that triumphant 2011-12 season.
The Camp Nou was the venue for Mourinho’s “most beautiful defeat” (you know the one, when not even a good hosing could douse his celebrations) and his most humiliating defeat a few months later. He can’t afford any kind of defeat on Sunday: Madrid are six points behind Barcelona, who have won all nine league games, scoring 39 goals in the process. But Mourinho’s team have scored four goals in each of their last three matches and, even in the absence of the suspended Vinícius Jr , have attacking threats galore.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
