Stretching the City Limits

'City break' means different things to different people. To me it normally means walking round a city, pausing to stop in every bar that sells beer along the way, as evidenced here in Prague (March '11) and Porto (October '10)...

... note to self: buy a new hooded-jumper.

If you do your research properly though, 'city break' can actually mean 'regional break', which often results in the thing that every traveller secretly wants to find, the near-mystical 'place off the beaten track', alternatively described as 'the place where all the annoying bastard tourists aren't'.

In Barcelona we went to Montserrat, which is quite a way out of the city but still fairly popular with tourists and therefore well-served by transport links. It still felt very much felt like the 'place off the beaten track', especially when it emerged that it was actually located in a cloud.

Drawing a very rough radius line with Barcelona as the centre and Montserrat as the edge shows that you can actually get quite far 'out of the way' on this principle...

...all the way to Google's copyright symbol, in fact. Doing the same with Madrid - which we're visiting at the end of next month - results in the following...

...which includes the very-interesting looking Segovia (NNW, or top left for the non-map readers amongst you) and the incredible Toledo (SS... oh, for God's sake - AT THE BOTTOM), which has some stunningly picturesque views.

Visits to one or both are looking likely.

Tevez, the Punchline in an Experimental Saga?

Photo from eplreport

Perhaps inevitably it is football that finally forced my hand to start the personal blog I had till now managed to (just) avoid investing significant time in. Last night, Carlos Tevez crossed the line from being the type of whinging modern-day footballer who people love to hate and journalists love to write stories about and entered the strange zone reserved for workers who strike without union permission and, seemingly, without provocation. In any other job Carlos would most likely be sacked and, maybe, that's what will happen to him in the end.

The Carlos Tevez Saga - now with more chapters than The Twilight Saga and significantly more controversial - is really the by-product of The Manchester City Saga, which in itself is top-flight football in microcosm: sport as business pushed to its absolute limits.

Other than the obvious sour taste of experiencing a player so out of touch with reality that he apparently fails to recognise the worldly truth that literally thousands of people would have done for free what he declined to do last night for a reported £150,000 a week, the latest Saga entry left me with two thoughts;

1 - I'm currently reading the outstanding Moneyball for a second time. The book (now a film, due in the UK in November) often takes business theory and applies it to the game of baseball. What it never does is consider 'boom and bust' economics. If it did it would probably conclude that teams experience boom and bust (just look at Leeds United) but not whole sports. The Tevez Saga is endemic of the fact that the only people guaranteed to make money in football are now players and agents - employees of the businesses involved in the footballing economy. In an economy where turning a profit collectively is becoming increasingly difficult and individuals continue to drain money from it, how long before it hits a bust?

2 - The Manchester City Experiment (as they themselves loved to call it under Garry Cook's stewardship) now looks to have its first high profile failure. Sure, Jerome Boatang (who, incidentally, played for Bayern in their 2-0 victory against City) left after a season where he only made sixteen appearances, Mario Balotelli has (and will continue to have) his problems, Emmanuel Adebayor voiced his concerns and now occupies the weird hinterland reserved for the expensive loanee, but these are mere shadows of the man so hailed when he first arrived that he may as well have been dubbed 'Brian' on the spot. Now it seems (and well done everyone who spotted this punchline), he's just a very naughty boy and one that threatens to derail The Experimental Saga Of Manchester City Football Club.