For Part I of “Nonidentical Twins”, please click here.
At the height of Moorish rule in Spain, their capital city was not Granada, but Cordoba. Cordoba was an established but weathered Roman settlement on the banks of the Guadalquivir River at the foothills of the Sierra Morena. Its strategic location offered three major advantages for Continue reading
The Magic Fans of St Etienne. Somebody clearly had a go at peeling it off before my camera and I got to it.
Granada CF had a sublime second half of the 2018/2019 La Segunda campaign, coming from 5th place in March to earn promotion back to La Liga by finishing the season in 2nd place. Yet arguably more impressive than the East Andalusian club’s hard-fought journey to Spain’s top flight has been its outrageous Continue reading
35,000.
That figure means various things to various people. It is the maximum capacity of the Estadio La Romareda, home of Real Zaragoza. It is apparently the number of people who die each year in the USA from antibiotic-resistant microbes. And it is the amount of inhabitants of the market town of Beverley, just north of my beloved Kingston Upon Hull.
It is also the number of fans that followed SG Dynamo Dresden to the Olympiastadion in Berlin for a cup tie against Hertha BSC.
You probably Continue reading
The North Stand Kollective of Brighton & Hove Albion have really been making a name for themselves in recent seasons. This design is perhaps not the most creative, but its execution is excellent, and it looks very clean.
Two games in eight hours played in cities located in two different Spanish provinces? Not a problem for the FBTG crew, but it made for a tight schedule. We dedicated our recent Sunday to the Beautiful Game as it is played in the lower leagues in the Continue reading
The ethnic Han account for approximately 92% of the population of the People’s Republic of China. A couple hundred other ethnic groups are formally recognised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), though possibly thousands more exist unofficially within the world’s most populous country. In his book “The Emperor Far Away”, author David Eimer literally and figuratively explores four geographic regions of China where the Han Chinese are outnumbered by their reluctant compatriots, and his work directly inspired this article.
The picture he paints is bleak. While the Han Continue reading
The international breaks are usually moments in the Football calendar that bore the FBTG crew, partly because the fixtures are seldom particularly competitive, and partly because we’re not really patriotic folk. But the past 7 days have been interesting for a number of reasons. Sergio Ramos became the most-capped Spaniard to play for the national team EVER. Scotland emphatically got themselves back on track by firing 6 past San Marino. And another mouth-wateringly high score was overshadowed in Sofia, as members of the Continue reading
