Monday, September 29, 2008

Barca and Espanyol Fans In Old School Video Game


The Catalan derby this weekend between Barcelona and Espanyol was a thriller. Barca pulled off the comeback win against a 10-man Espanyol after an 85th minute equalizer from Thierry Henry and then Leo Messi converted a dubious penalty kick (weren't they all this last weekend?) in the 103rd minute. (By the way, take a look at the shot graphic on that link, Barca outshot them 33 to 5.)

Yeah, that's right, the 103rd minute. Not a typo. Which gets me to the reason for the old Tank Wars graphic up top.

Seems during the match the visiting Blaugrana fans decided to turn the match into their own personal old-school video game as they tossed flares on to the home fans. Naturally, this did not go over well and ended up in the match being stopped for 8 minutes in the second half.

After the jump, see the video of the flare toss. The first is better than the second, and the end of the video has a nice chant with the word "Puta" involved, although my Spanish is about as good as Newcastle United's football team so I could be wrong.



Needless to say, the emotions were running high after the controversial match concluded after the witching hour. My parents used to tell me, nothing good comes from actions at that time of the night. I would submit to you that they were wrong because I get to read about these sorts of things from The Guardian Blog:

Way after midnight under the hulking concrete stands of the Lluís Companys stadium Barcelona's Thierry Henry shrugged, washing his hands conveniently clean, and Leo Messi beamed. Espanyol's broken players mostly bit their tongues and walked on by silently simmering, as the coaches Pep Guardiola and Tintín Márquez tried to impose peace. But few were having it.

Samuel Eto'o returned to the scene of the crime, glorying in it. The Espanyol president Daniel Sánchez Llibre spontaneously combusted. A kerfuffle broke out and suddenly Gerard Piqué was squaring up to an Espanyol director. "I don't want to call it a robbery because they'll charge me for it," snapped Sánchez Llibre, forgetting how much he liked La Liga when Espanyol were top. "This league is completely prostituted."
Puta, indeed.

Update: The Offside has another video of the flare throwing.

5 comments:

BackBergtt said...

tank wars was a huge part of my life. god bless you gentlemen for reminding me of it.

The Fan's Attic said...

Georger: i could not for the life of me remember the name of the game that occupied so much of my sixth grade year. it took some desperate emails to the group that got zero response and blind googling to figure it out.

strong like bull smart like tractor said...

Tank Wars? Hmm, I thought that game was named Scorched Earth...I played quite a bit of that game in junior high.

The Fan's Attic said...

I probably played the bastardized version. But, you can find both on the intertubes.

jjf3 said...

damn, I hadn't even thought about this for nearly 15 years or so...I used to play this at work when I was there at like 2 am, running mainframe jobs that would take hours to run, but had to be monitored all the time. This was back when I was working for a startup, and 80-hour weeks and shitty pay were regular parts of my life (we actually spent one evening/morning calculating that we could make more per hour at McDonald's). This game prevented total brain meltdown, though it was really way too easy after awhile, even at 2 am on 4 hours sleep...