Rendits a l'espectacle culé...

Let’s hope cynicism doesn't win the day at Stamford Bridge

Those fortunate enough to have been in front of our televisions during Barcelona’s 6-2 triumph at the Bernabéu on Saturday evening might have been mistaken, through our purrings with pleasure and whoops of excitement, for antagonists towards Real Madrid.

It would also be an error to deem anti-Chelsea anyone fervently hoping that Pep Guardiola’s scintillating team prevail at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday.

Football like Barcelona have been playing this season — and Real were playing when Zinédine Zidane occupied the place in our hearts now devoted to Lionel Messi — edifies and elevates us to the level of the cricket crowd who, during a fiercely contested Ashes series, will rise to salute a visiting player’s fine innings.

If you think this an exaggeration, cast your mind back six years to Old Trafford on the night that the Brazilian Ronaldo was cheered off after scoring the hat-trick that knocked Manchester United out of the Champions League.

So no genuine enthusiast should be ashamed of wanting to see Messi, Xavi Hernández, Andrés Iniesta and the rest collect the trophy in Rome on May 27. Although Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea are riveting sides, Guardiola’s Barcelona, even more than Arsène Wenger’s team or Sir Alex Ferguson’s, represent the ideal of pure football as judged not only by artistic impression — which is in the eye of the beholder — but the number of fouls conceded.

That is why Barcelona had every right to be outraged by the weakness of Wolfgang Stark, the German referee, in dealing with Chelsea at the Nou Camp, where Guus Hiddink’s men committed three times as many fouls as Guardiola’s but picked up the same number of yellow cards (two) and lost an important player, Carles Puyol, for the second leg. Fouls are awarded for a purpose: to punish an intention to cheat. They were never meant to be used tactically, as in the modern game.

To be fair to Hiddink, he did not squeal when one of his South Koreans was cynically chopped down in the 2002 World Cup semi-final by Michael Ballack, the German accepting suspension from the final as the price of preventing a possible equaliser, so he could consistently argue that Barcelona were making too much of their treatment at the hands of Ballack and company last week. But the interests of football demand more skill-friendly refereeing.

Unfortunately for Barcelona, who habitually record low foul counts because they like to get on with the game, refereeing in Europe has become more English than the English in the sense of allowing physical intervention. Uefa should do something about it because football is not wrestling and our game should cherish the precious quality that sets it apart: the opportunity for deftness to overcome power that makes it suitable for people of all sizes without weight classification.

That applies to everyone from Messi, Xavi and Iniesta to the boy (or girl) in the playground. Or should. But Barcelona got a rough deal at the Bridge four years ago — John Terry scored the aggregate winner after Ricardo Carvalho had fouled the goalkeeper, Víctor Valdés, and Pierluigi Collina, Uefa’s favourite referee, ignored protests — and I fear they may be up against more than a very good team this week.

It was always going to be tougher than at the Bernabéu, where the Spanish league’s inferiority to the English was starkly exposed, and even Latin-style officiating might not be enough to see them through. But let’s have a fair fight rather than an exercise in cynicism, because, to the football- lover, kicking, tugging and diving prove nothing.

Glory brings mixed blessings for fans of United

When I hear the word ‘culture,’ ” Hermann Goering said, “I reach for my gun.” The word that does it for me is “leveraged”, as in the American takeovers of Manchester United and Liverpool. A more apposite Americanism would be “sub-prime mortgage”, for a degree of uncertainty on the part of the lenders is reflected in high interest rates, which in turn swell the loans. If this is “leverage”, you can keep it. And Michel Platini, whose intentions continue to be grotesquely misrepresented in England, has every right to detest it.

Maybe this crossed the Uefa president’s mind at Old Trafford on Wednesday when he heard the chants for Carlos Tévez of “Fergie, Fergie, sign him up.” Obliging the fans should be no problem for Sir Alex Ferguson, who helped United’s football operation to make a profit of nearly £70 million in the year for which accounts were recently published: enough not only to secure Tévez but keep Cristiano Ronaldo out of Real Madrid’s reach, with plenty left over to do other things to keep United at the forefront of the game.Unfortunately, every penny of profit Ferguson and his players persuade the fans to pour into the club goes instead to service the Glazers’ debts.

This is why it is a mixed blessing to be a United fan. On the one hand, you get to celebrate title after title. On the other, you obtain an uncomfortable insight into how it feels to be a doormat. And this is why the dominant position of English clubs in Europe would probably be strengthened — rather than weakened, as the battalions of ignorance constantly imply — by Platini’s policies on debt.

Platini is used to English dominance. In 1983, when he received the first of three European Footballer of the Year awards, Hamburg were European champions; it was to be the only year of eight in which an English club were not. It didn’t keep Platini awake at nights then and it doesn’t now. He would just prefer it to be as before, without “leveraged” takeovers by absentees.

His instinct is to enhance the dignity of fans, not in England specifically but everywhere. The forces ranged against him are powerful enough without the assistance of mythology.