US senator Eugene McCarthy (best known for inspiring a band who went on to spawn cult heroes Stereolab... or was that Joseph McCarthy?) once said:
"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important."
The parallels between football and politics are endless.
In Spanish, the word for a political party and a football match are exactly the same. Curiously (and curiously appropriately in the case of the current UK administration!), the same word can be translated back into English as "split", "broken" or "cut into two".
Any Spanish-based readers who are remotely interested in the beautiful game and with spare cash to invest in satellite dishes and digiboxes will be more than familiar with the Monday-evening Canal + prog "El Día Despues".
Not to be confused with the 1980s post-nuclear TV movie "The Day After", this is a several-hour long dissection of the weekend's football - formerly featuring my "homeboy" Michael Robinson, no less - where, in addition to analysis of goals, fouls, penalties, near-misses and saves, every detail of a number of important matches are scrutinised in detail with the help of various pundits, some very, very long telephoto lenses and a crack team of lipreaders.
Profanities directed at the referees, bench talk, crowd gurning and on-pitch asides are filmed and occasionally subtitled, leaving little to the imagination.
Now it seems that British journalists have deemed this a good way of dissecting the spanking-new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that is intended to govern the country for the next five years.
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