One of my pet peeves is sportswriters who use tarot-card cliches in their stories. It’s a tired, old device, it’s far too predictable (heh), and it screws up my Google news searches for the word "tarot."
Even so, I was hardly prepared for the vitriol in this sports column from the UK. The writer — some guy covering a European soccer match — actually goes so far as to call tarot readers "hags."
Hags.
I’m not sure, but I think he just insulted most of my friends in the Tarot Association of the British Isles.
If you can stomach the overwritten, overwrought prose of a hyperventilating soccer writer, here’s the story:
How Celta’s plan to get lucky backfired
Holy virgins, sacred cows and rabbits’ feet; four-leaf clovers, lucky heather and luckier charms; propaganda, prayers and providence; plus the odd sneaky trick or two. Some people will do whatever it takes for a victory. Act of faith or act of fiddling, anything goes. Because when the going gets tough, the tough get desperate, clinging to everything and anything they can – no matter how suspicious, no matter how silly.
Like Real Madrid’s Brotherhood of the Burning Stake supporters’ club or their Together We Can campaign, an entire existence founded on the hope of one half-decent performance in a sea of turgidity. Like the contractual small print – dubbed "Crapping-yourself Clauses" by Uruguayan Pablo García – that prevents players facing their cowardly former teams. Or the cash-stuffed suitcases that do the rounds as season after season reaches its climax.
Then there’s the Gimnàstic de Tarragona coach so terrified of all things yellow that he banned sweetcorn from pre-match meals and miraculously watched his team earn half a chance of survival, the Mallorca-based mystic who implored the club to expel their cuddly devil mascot, and the Racing Santander coach who put a lucky elf in his attack and watched his side climb to their highest ever place. Or how about the former Betis coach whose mother lit ten candles before every game, the current Betis coach who takes time off from throwing lollipops at opponents to sprinkle salt round the pitch, and the Betis president who worships virgins and the Christ of the Great Power almost as much as he worships himself?
Yet while that’s a little strange – if hardly surprising in a country where hags dealing Tarot cards and lies pack the telly almost as much as desperate aristocratic playboys – Celta de Vigo went one better this weekend. And they did so by bringing all the oddness together under one roof, like a giant superstition supermarket designed to finally bring a little success. It was Celta de Vigo versus Real Madrid, the team with the league’s worst home record against the team with the best away record, and Celta decided that they could do with a little help. Expected to push for a Uefa Cup place, instead they’ve won just once at home all season, conceding more than anyone else, and sit a solitary point and a single place off the relegation zone.
So while Athletic Bilbao, the side below them, decided that the best way to get a little help was for the players to put their hands into their pockets and cough up €1,000 each to subsidise the fans’ travel and tickets to an unbelievable but ultimately heartbreaking last-minute 5-4 defeat in Santander, Celta decided that the best way to get a little help was to ask the fans to put their hands in their pockets and pull out all the lucky charms they could.
From garlic cloves to garish crosses, from holy water to holier pants, lucky undies so old it’s only the stubborn under-stains holding them together, the fans responded. There were charm bracelets, patron saints, religious relics and ridiculous rituals, while the club even offered up a sacred cow. Not a real cow but not just any cow either: a lucky, Celta de Vigo Cow Parade cow – blue and white, with blond plaits and a horny helmet, taken to training, signed by the team and paraded round the pitch before the match. Over on the bench, meanwhile, Celta boasted a teenage magician in Fernando Vázquez – the man universally known as Harry Potter. With this much help, this much luck, magic and divine intervention, they couldn’t lose. Except that there was a tiny flaw in the plan: it, like their defending, was rubbish.
It goes on … and on … and on … but I had enough. Even far across an ocean and half a continent away, I smell someone with very little charm or good fortune of his own.
