Daily Musings — 7th March 2017
Yesterday marked the 115th anniversary of the founding of Real Madrid.
I didn’t talk about it as I didn’t want two football related topics in my musings. I have a soft spot for Real Madrid having watched Real Madrid TV a lot when I was younger and first getting into football.
For me, Real Madrid are the biggest club in the world. The essence of the club is that it is the best, which has lead its’ presidents to be trigger happy, although Florentino Perez takes it to far. I feel Perez is 100% businessman, 0% fan. You need a ratio of 70:30 to run a club well in my humble opinion.
Real Madrid have often been accused of being a fascist club. It cannot be denied that Franco used the club for his own purposes and Bernabeu himself was a fascist. But there were board members who died fighting for the Communists against Franco, Atletico de Madrid for a while were run by the air force and Paulino Alcántara, the Filipino midfielder who is Barcelona’s youngest player and goalscorer and who held the goalscoring record until Messi broke, fought for fascists. Saying Real are fascists and Barcelona and Atletico are innocent isn’t valid. I learnt this from White Storm: 101 Years of Real Madrid, a cracking book from British journalist Phil Ball. To paraphrase Ball, for 115 years, a white storm has been brewing over the skies of Europe.
The BBC today confirmed The Night Manager is set to return for a second series. The series is based on the 1993 novel of the same name. But the first series ended where the novel did. As such, the story has to be an original. Still the first series starred Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. The two actors showed their experience and quality. Indeed, the characters themselves are interesting, so if a good story can be written, the second series could make for really good television.
Poachers in France have shot a rhino dead and poached its’ horns. It is believed to be the first case of its’ kind in Europe. White rhinos had been at the brink of extinction at the end of the 19th Century. I can’t believe something like this could happen. Something has to be done to limit the amount of money that can be made in the trade, to deter people from getting involved. Indeed, China’s ban on the ivory trade resulted in the deaths of two rare elephants in Borneo almost immediately as the price of illegal tusks increased. It does amaze me that people can hurt defenseless animals in this way, and the day poaching is defeated will be a good day indeed.