Death foretold?

What do you write about something so far away that it shouldn’t involve us? Something, which at first sight is so late, that it’s not even an ingredient for a TV dinner. Why should you hope to make sense of something which looks so already robbed of its novelty that even the TV channel will be showing it later than its scheduled start?
Just as certain is the fate of the bull in the ring even before the start of the fight, almost surely is the 2006-07 Spanish League title.The little issue of the math aside, it’s already in Madrid - four empty seasons late, and after a wonderfully long rejection of the hard-sold pre-ordained truism that David Beckham would win the world (for once, on a football field) with Real Madrid, the world’s greatest football club. On Sunday (or early Monday, depending on your comfort and time zone), the last day of Beckham’s horribly-underachieved Spanish deputation, it will finally come true, helped in no small measure by the Italy-isation of a Spanish club and the hunger of a horse-faced Dutchman. Finally, belatedly, order will be restored.
What else, in all probability, will be decided is that while it is one thing being a galactico, it’s something else altogether being a prima donna. And as this season in Spain winds down to a last-weekend photo-finish in a three-horse race - as stats tell us, 23 years after it last happened - FC Barcelona, the reigning champions, will be learning this fact the hard way. Forced to keep up with Real, in their final game they will also forever be looking over their shoulders to see how close Sevilla, the third team in the fray, have got.
Level on points with their bitter rivals, after the dust would have settled, Barcelona will have to come to terms with the fact that it was not in the dying minutes of the penultimate weekend against Espanyol that the title slipped from their grasp, but that they had lost the plot long before. Probably, with the creation of a Brazilian faction and a non-Brazilian one as the season progressed; surely, on that cold February day at Racing Santander when a sulking Samuel Eto’o - on return from a lengthy injury lay-off - suited down but refused to take the field. In a league as demanding this if you feel the need to shoot off your mouth, you should rather shoot yourself in the foot.
So much for the sporting big picture - the points, the permutation, crisis and controversy. Now, the football and its time-traversing, mindless afflictions.
This job can be strange. You can take your work home, but paradoxically you cannot bring yourself to the workplace. Even as a sports writer, you cannot be a fan. It forces you to clamp up and dispassionately, unbiasedly present facts as they are, but not allow yourself to present your leanings, however illogical. Don’t, for that’s not your brief. Instead, it tells you to further curb any torment that now ordinarily doesn’t show since there’s been this huge effort to tame it. But then, why should footballing victory and defeat in the land of bull-fighting even affect you?
However embroiled you are with the ups and downs of a team in faraway Spain, however entwined you think the course of our life is with the outcome of a league in a different sporting stratosphere, you’d look silly letting that show. But then how do you account for attachments, however distant and inexplicable?
You can’t tell the world that, but maybe, the lines were always blurred and you were always the first reader, the first fan and that’s why you’re here in the first place. That you can’t be the superstitious oddball who won’t change the Lionel Messi screensaver on the computer lest it disturb some weird equilibrium since the team’s playing later in the evening. Or how do you tell the world that, on matchday, the frequency of your toilet-breaks rise as Barca’s performance dips and that it’s not to do with increasing beer intake or a weakening bladder, but that’s where you can feverishly, almost foolishly pray, helplessly invoke some forgotten person or idea.
And while, you forever maintained that Barca’s means at finding victory was triumph in itself, this Sunday as they chase Real for the first time in three seasons, it all forces a rethink, a fresh futile attempt to make crazy sense of it all. You can argue all through the night that when they were the Dream Team in modern football - arrogantly head and shoulders above the rest - and when they won four titles in a row (1991 to 94), Barcelona had to, in three of them, wait for the last game of the season to get it right. Two of them involved Real Madrid, just like the situation will be on Sunday night. And the current Barca side, Dream Team Deux, chasing a hattrick of titles, can perhaps do it again.
But then, even with all its Nick Hornby-esque trappings, does it really matter? Maybe it does. Enjoy the heartbreak, but keep the faith...