Been a lot of talk the last few days about supposed anti football, who plays it and who played it first, the usual childish stuff, some even accused me of agreeing with Messi and that Rangers had played anti football against Barca. To be clear, I never have and I never will, because the style of football played by Rangers in Wattie's last spell was not actually anti football inmho, it was defensively minded to be sure, perhaps even overly cautious and boring to watch...if you were not a Gers fan, but that's the nature of football, an awful lot can be ignored if the results are good and to be fair to Rangers the results they got were good. Apprently the first time anyone used the phrase to describe a team was Cruyff in 2002 about Brazil. So what is it's definition? According to Wiki: "Anti-football" is a lethargic passing style of football that relies only on passing and an extremely defensive, aggressive physical, robust style of play of football where one team deploys their whole team, except the striker, behind the ball. In doing so, they try their best to stop the opposition from scoring, rather than trying to win the game themselves. It is also used to criticize the playing style of teams who have no intention to play properly and prevent the game from moving on with actions such as (but not limited to): shooting the ball forward without trying to reach any players, intentionally diving and stopping the play during several minutes or shooting the ball away when a free-kick is awarded, to win time (usually penalized with a yellow card if too flagrant). Seems pretty tame stuff to me? No suggestion of an overreliance on violence and constantly fouling the opposition, likewise no mention of playing the man more often than the ball. Interestly enough Cruyff also accused Holland of playing anti football against Spain in the 2010 WC final, on this occasion I tend to agree with him on the basis that the Dutch were simply brutal, more concerned with stopping Spain by any means necessary than trying to win, they were not necessarily very defensive, so on that basis alone I see no comparision with how Rangers or Celtic for that matter played against Barca. To me, the worst examples of what I would define as anti football were in european matches I watched as a kid, one in particular stands out, the infamous Celtic V Atletico Madrid match at Parkhead. As disgraceful a preformance as you are ever likely to witness. Atletico literally kicked Celtic (and Jinky in particular) off the park getting 3 reds in the process, and without exageration, if their whole team had been red carded it would not have been harsh. Another which springs to mind was Scotland v Uruguay at the world cup, same as Madrid, the Uruguayans were not interested in football, practically every tackle was a foul on a Scotland player, it was abhorrent. I saw plenty of games in Europe involving British teams and my abiding memory is of almost every Italian and Spanish team being willing to do almost anything to rile their opponents into an act of retaliation and sometimes it worked and British players were sent off, as planned by the opposition. During this era anti football was unheard of but no one ever talks about these teams' anti football, maybe it was'nt, it was far worse, it was simple cheating on an epic scale, and there is not much that annoys fans more than cheating, that is the very epitome of anti football, and should be reserved - like the much overused "Legend"- for teams who really deserve it, and nothing that Rangers, or Celtic did in their matches was anywhere near anti football, and to use the term is not only an insult to those clubs, it excuses or dilutes the seriousness of clubs like Aletico and Inter Milan and others, whose actions in going to any extrem to win, that is anti football.
Messi, surely was aware of the Rangers corrupt playing methods. Wasn't the Rangers Media, Sun , or Record or something bumming last week when Celtic were about to face Barca that Messi and Inesta were nearly signing for the Huns some years ago. No doubt Davie Murray would have hopped aboard his Private Jet and went down to talk to them and explain the great scheme he had of paying. Some people think that Messi was just talkinf about the style of Football the Huns played but he was also trying to convey their cheating. Of course Messi was too afraid to say outright because he knew the way some Hun fans reacted to Catholic saying or doing anything against their interests. He didn't want the Lennon treatment.
