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Posts Tagged ‘spain’

• Coach says report linking striker with transfer is ‘a lie’
• Liverpool and Aston Villa also linked with January bids

The Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola has dismissed Spanish media reports linking David Villa with a move away from the club in the January transfer window.

The sports newspaper Marca reported that the striker is preparing to move on from Barca just 19 months into the four-year deal agreed following his €40m transfer from Valencia.

The speculation over the Spain international’s future appears to have arisen from Guardiola’s decision to omit the forward from his starting line-up for Saturday’s 3-1 victory in the Clasico against Real Madrid.

Marca said Villa has been made available for transfer and had already been touted to “the great English clubs, mainly Chelsea, Liverpool and Aston Villa”, but Guardiola insists the speculation is nonsense.

Speaking to reporters in Japan ahead of Barcelona’s Fifa Club World Cup game against Al-Sadd, Guardiola said: “Marca lie. I have not spoken to David after the last match in Madrid, but all of the players are in my plans.

“I am the one who comes up with 25 different line-ups during the season because I feel that is the best thing to do. Most of the players that are here now will continue for the rest of this season and the next.”

Villa has scored five times in 15 league appearances this season, following his 18 goals in 34 games as Barca won the Primera Division title last season. He has made 75 appearances for the club in all competitions, scoring 32 goals.

David VillaBarcelonaChelseaTransfer windowAston VillaLiverpoolguardian.co.uk

It will be tricky for the authorities to work through the semantics of what the Liverpool striker is alleged to have said

What we don’t know for certain is the word Luis Suárez used. Patrice Evra alleges it was racist and uttered at least 10 times. Suárez admits he did say something but nothing, for someone with his upbringing in Uruguay, he considers racist or deserving of the Football Association charges that will bring lawyers from Manchester United and Liverpool opposite one another in the coming weeks. Here lies the problem for the FA and the reason why they are thinking about bringing in a QC with specialist knowledge to oversee the case.

In ordinary circumstances, the FA would appoint a three-man panel consisting of an independent chairman, an FA councillor and someone described as a “football expert”, meaning a former player or manager. The Guardian, however, has learned the FA might upgrade to a four-man commission because of the complexities of a case in which Suárez can, if necessary, point out he comes from a country where variations of the N-word are used very differently, and that it is actually quite common in Uruguay for men and women of all skin colours to have the nickname of El Negro or La Negra without any racist undertones.

Obdulio Varela, the 1950 World Cup-winning captain and one of the more famous footballers in Uruguayan history, is revered as El Negro Jefe (The Black Chief). Fernando Cáceres, who was in the Argentina squad at the 1994 World Cup, is another El Negro, as is Héctor Enrique, the Argentinian who played the pass for Diego Maradona to slalom through the England team in Mexico 1986. Then consider that Enrique, for example, is not even black, and it becomes even more confused.

Nor is this just a football thing. Rubén “El Negro” Rada is one of the more successful musicians in Uruguay, appearing in a sitcom called La Oveja Negra (The Black Sheep) and with a compilation of his work entitled El Album Negro. Héctor Lescano, the Uruguayan Minister of Sport and Tourism, is known in politics as El Negro Lescano. The late cartoonist and writer Roberto Fontanarrosa and the late singer Mercedes Sosa were two others. Both were white.

Elliott Turner, the author of An Illustrated Guide to Soccer and Spanish, posed the question recently of whether, in the Suárez case, “Anglo racial linguistic norms really offer the right and only lens by which to judge.” Turner, writing for The Run Of Play, pointed out that “on a superficial level, in the Spanish language one can use the term negro or güero or moreno, with no negative connotation.” Güero is white or light skinned; moreno means brown or dark.

So is it all fairly innocent in the Spanish-speaking world? Not quite. “All language exists in context,” Turner continued. “I’d say those terms only to family, friends or acquaintances. If you say the same term with anger in your eyes and hate in your heart, then its meaning can change 180 degrees.” Like the time, perhaps, Luis Aragonés referred to Thierry Henry as “negro de mierda” (”a black shit”) in 2004.

This is where Suárez may find himself being interrogated. He and Evra were, after all, arguing at the time, so it would be difficult for the Liverpool player to make a case that it was merely an alternative to “mate” or “pal”. Then there is the issue of whether ignorance should constitute any form of defence anyway. If a foreign visitor was stopped for driving on the wrong side of the road in England, would he get off simply because he could claim it was the norm where he was from? Suárez has lived in northern Europe since 2006, so an argument could be made he should have a decent grasp of what can and cannot be said outside of South America and would be acceptable in one country but unacceptable in another.

Negrito is another prime example. It turns out this is not the word central to the Suárez-Evra case, but it does reveal a little more about the nuances of the Spanish language, translating as “little black guy” and such a common part of the vernacular that team-mates use it on each other as an affectionate term. Take the message Dani Pacheco, the Liverpool player currently on loan at Rayo Vallecano, sent to his Spain Under-21 colleague Thiago Alcântara via Twitter recently. “Negrito, enjoy yourself,” it began.

Visitors to countries such as Uruguay and Argentina can, understandably, find it shocking if they are unaware of the semantics. “The key is the tone in which you say those words,” Sebastian Garcia, the South American football writer for Mundo Albiceleste, explains. “It can be extremely friendly to call someone ‘negrito’ but it can also be very offensive.”

In Brazil, it is negão, again with no racist connotation if none is meant. Other terms such as branco (white), moreno (dusky) and mulatto (mixed-race) are also commonly used in a non-offensive way. However they can, too, be used in a racist capacity. Again, it comes down to context.

Another example is of Javier Hernández, now Evra’s team-mate at United, in an interview on the Chivas Guadalajara website in 2007, where the Mexican is quoted complimenting “the goal of the Negrito,” talking about his team-mate Omar Esparza. As Garcia explains: “It all depends on the connotation, the way it is used, the tone, the intent.”

Even then, different rules are in operation. When Carlos Tevez started out at Boca Juniors he was known as El Monito (The Little Monkey). Diego Perotti, the Sevilla player, goes by the same nickname, because his father, Hugo, who played with Diego Maradona at Boca, was El Mono (affixing ‘ito’ and ‘ita’ to the end of words is to express that something is smaller). Could a player in England, of whatever race, ever be called this?

If nothing else, it highlights there might be shades of grey involved when it comes to deciding what is racist and what is not. But it is a complicated business and, in Suárez’s case, this is why the FA has allowed him more time than usual to respond to the charges. Liverpool say he will vigorously protest his innocence and the striker has said his words were not an insult but just his own “way of expressing myself. I called him something his team-mates at Manchester call him, and even they were surprised by his reaction. There were two parts of the discussion, one in Spanish, one in English.”

The delays have been frustrating for Liverpool, where they have offered Suárez their full backing, and also for United, where there is a feeling the dispute may have contributed towards Evra’s erratic recent form. One of football’s anti-racism bodies has complained behind the scenes that “people are tried for murder in less time.” But the semantics and cultural issues are so complex it is not something the men in suits at FA headquarters can learn in a crash course. No date has been set for the hearing and, with legal teams to assemble, a row that began between two rival players on a football pitch on 15 October could very likely go beyond Christmas.

Luis SuárezLiverpoolManchester UnitedDaniel Taylorguardian.co.uk

• Brighton manager claims United defender overreacted
• ‘I played seven years in Spain and was called everything’

Patrice Evra, the Manchester United defender at the centre of the Luis Suárez racism case, has been accused of overreacting and “crying like a baby” in an astonishing attack by Gus Poyet, a friend of the Liverpool striker.

Poyet’s condemnation flies in the face of the Kick It Out campaign’s instruction for footballers to report anything they consider to be racial slurs. But the Brighton manager believes Suárez has been harshly treated and his dismay about his fellow Uruguayan being charged by the Football Association manifested itself in an outburst about the behaviour of the alleged victim.

“I believe Luis Suárez, it’s simple,” Poyet said. “I played football for seven years in Spain and was called everything because I was from South America, and I never went out crying like a baby, like Patrice Evra, saying that someone had said something to me.”

Poyet, who has befriended Suárez since the striker moved to Liverpool from Ajax in January, is not convinced the FA has enough evidence to warrant a charge of using racial insults. Suárez has denied the allegations and will plead not guilty.

“I’m surprised, in a really sad way, that he has been charged,” Poyet said. “Really sad. I think it’s worse to charge someone because you trust one person when you have no proof.

“I’m really sad about this charge as it’s going to become too easy. I can make a complaint about any opposition manager and if I take it as far as I can he’s going to get charged. Why are we going to take one person’s word over another? It’s too risky.”

Those comments will go down badly at Old Trafford and may provoke the United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, into making a response when he holds his weekly press briefing on Friday. Evra, who alleges he was called a variation of the N-word “at least 10 times”, has decided not to comment until the case is heard.

Poyet, whose playing career includes spells at Real Zaragoza, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, appeared to be saying Evra should never have made a complaint. However, he contradicted that view when asked about the Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s comments that victims of racial slurs should shake hands with their abusers at the end of matches and not take the matter further. “I respect him as Fifa president but I don’t listen to him when he talks about football,” he said.

Luis SuárezLiverpoolBrighton & Hove AlbionRace issuesDaniel Taylorguardian.co.uk