I figured, I've dealt with with the sarcasm of Bruce Arena more than once, how bad could this guy be?
He wasn't bad, but he wasn't fun, either.
Sean Wheelock of the BBC tried to warm Strachan up by telling him he had a funny tidbit, then mentioned that MLS All-Star coach Steve Nicol had said that since he'd been a Rangers supporter in his youth, he'd really wanted to beat Celtic.
We'd thought it was cute that Stevie would go back to his childhood for inspiration, but Strachan just look confused and shook his head.
"That's not funny," he said.
He was so adamant about it, that we laughed.
"It's not," he insisted, grand arbiter of all things funny.
We chuckled a little more. Even Celtic's press guy was snickering at the sight of Strachan getting indignant about nothing, essentially.
He was a good sport about most of the questions, though. My favorite was what he said about player fitness. I'd asked him to estimate the fitness of his players.
“I don’t know how fit they are,” said Strachan. “You’re either fit or you’re not fully fit. It’s a crazy thing in football, someone saying they're 90 percent fit. How do they know? I couldn’t tell you how fit they are – that’s mumbo jumbo.”
There's more from Strachan in the article I wrote for espn.com.
3 comments:
Gah, when you put it that way (last paragraph in ESPN article) ... how can I not root for Celtic?
And the whole Landon v. World is like Riquelme v. World, but less poetic and tragic. Dudes have brains that function outside of football, can we just forgive them for that?
Rock on, Landon (and Riquelme).
I'd agree with you about the Riquelme comparison, and it makes me laugh a little to think that's how the Argentines tend to do things, dark and poetic and tragic, with some smelly cigs and a swig of matte thrown in to help tell the tale.
Yep. The difference in the Riquelme and Landon thing is the difference between Good Ol' Latin American Angst and/or Fatalism and Good Ol' American Pragmatism.
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