Crisis in Glasgow, Morbo in Madrid: A Gala Derby Weekend Lands Before the International Break

Football seldom hands out gifts this generous: a gala weekend of derby fixtures lands just before an engorged international break, and while some rivalries need no introduction, others have been far longer in the waiting — and a few, frankly, are spurious in their definition but shoehorned in anyway for maximum drama. The pressure cooker is Glasgow, where Celtic limp toward the latest edition of the Old Firm — or Glasgow derby, delete according to your adherence to Scottish company law — in the grip of a proper slump. Thursday night's defeat to Ferencvaros in European competition, the so-called Bigger Vase, was not a great result for angry Martin O'Neill's Celtic, arriving three days before the derby itself and four days after losing to Rangers in the same fixture. Back-to-back derby defeats would border on catastrophe. In Spain, the capital braces itself for Atlético against Real Madrid, a fixture where Diego Simeone and José Mourinho will drag the morbo ruckus to the touchlines. A football match might actually break out amid the tactical gamesmanship, though with these two managers involved, nothing can be guaranteed. The Guardian's Football Daily also carried a lovely reader tale this week, one that feels almost surreal in the modern era. Nicholas Larkin recalls Friday-night sessions at West Ham's Chadwell Heath training ground with his junior Sunday league team, back when anyone could drive into the car park and walk through the gym to the sports hall. One evening, he and a teammate arrived to discover their session had been cancelled — and half of the West Ham first team were running drills instead. With no mobile phones and nowhere to go, the youngsters were invited to join in. An Arsenal fan who cared little for West Ham's players, Larkin nevertheless left with a lasting memory of goalkeeper Ludek Miklosko, a lovely man who spent the hour playing with the boys and encouraging them to shoot. The newsletter's letters page also settled, once and for all, whether it is possible to dig yourself out of a hole. One reader invoked Baron Munchhausen, who famously pulled himself from a swamp by his own hair. Another pointed out that anyone who has actually dug a trench, moat or ditch knows there is some downward digging to start, but most of the work goes sideways — and that escaping a steep-sided hole with nothing but a shovel means carving a gentler slope back to ground level. Or, as the intellectual leviathan Homer J Simpson so eloquently put it: “dig up, stupid!” — a sentiment shared, apparently, by 1,056 others.