Univ. D. Sancho-visita ao Museu N. Arte Antiga

Visita em 18.03.2016 ao Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Fotos da Biblioteca e tela de Joaquín Sorolla

Desporto-Cruyff

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/postscript-johan-cruyff-total-footballer

Postscript: Johan Cruyff, Total Footballer

Johan Cruyff’s ability to read the game was unsurpassed, but it wasn’t just his solo skills that set him apart. Photograph by Imago / BPI / Shutterstock / REX

On April 9, 1975, Leeds United, then the best football team in England, hosted a match against Barcelona, the famous Spanish club, in the semifinal of the European Cup—the precursor to the Champions League, in which Europe’s top clubs compete. That drizzly evening, my father took me to Elland Road, Leeds’s home ground, where Johan Cruyff, the greatest player in the world, led Barca onto the pitch in their famous blue-and-purple-striped jerseys.

From our perch in the east-side stands known as Lowfields, I strained to get a closer look. Of course, I wanted Leeds, my team, to win its two-game series against Barcelona, en route to its first-ever European Cup final. But for a twelve-year-old football nut, to have the privilege of seeing Cruyff, the Dutch master, was beyond thrilling. At the time, I often played soccer three times a day—twice at school, and again afterward. On weekends, I would play all day. Cruyff was, for me, the ultimate footballer.

At Ajax Amsterdam, where he had played from 1964 to 1973, he established himself as a wonderfully creative player. He could gain control of the ball in an instant; he could pass short or long; he could dribble effortlessly, dropping his shoulder to swerve past defenders; he could score with the inside and outside of both feet. And he could do all of this from practically anywhere on the pitch. Nominally, he was a center forward, his team’s primary striker. But in an era when most soccer players, even the very best ones, stuck rigidly to their positions, Ajax’s manager, Rinus Michels, encouraged Cruyff to roam at will. One minute he would dash into the penalty box to take a shot. Then you’d see him picking up the ball from his goalkeeper, or taking a free kick, or directing his colleagues from midfield. His positional sense and ability to read the game were unsurpassed. The sportswriter David Miller called him “Pythagoras in boots.”

But it wasn’t just Cruyff’s solo skills that set him apart: he made his teammates better. Under the leadership of Michels, and later as a manager himself, he helped to perfect the fluid playing style known as Total Football, in which, rather than executing set plays and chasing down long passes, players constantly exchanged positions, moving into open space and making sharp passes in order to flummox the opposing team’s defense. With Cruyff as its orchestrator, this style of play wasn’t just effective: it was beautiful to watch.

Total Football wasn’t an entirely new concept. During the nineteen-fifties, the Hungarian national team had pioneered some of its elements, as had the great club sides Real Madrid, of Spain, and Santos, of Brazil, and also, strange as it may sound, Burnley F.C., which won the English league title in 1960. But it was Michels’s Ajax, with Cruyff as its fulcrum and inspiration, that perfected the free-flowing method of play. Ajax won successive European Cup victories in 1971, 1972, and 1973, making its opposition look leaden and flat-footed. The Dutch team, which was largely made up of Ajax players, adopted the same style of play, and at the 1974 World Cup, which was held in West Germany, it dazzled its way to the final against the host nation, knocking out Argentina, East Germany, and the defending champions, Brazil, in the process.

Now here he was in West Yorkshire, a slim figure with collar-length brown hair. In 1973, he had moved from Ajax to Barcelona in exchange for a record transfer fee of roughly two million dollars. At the time, the Catalan club was overshadowed by Real Madrid, but the money it had spent on Cruyff was turning out to be a sound investment. Barcelona won La Liga in his first season, which had qualified the team for the European Cup and brought him to Leeds.

Thankfully for me and the fifty thousand other Leeds fans who were at the match, Cruyff didn’t have one of his better nights. Rather than playing Total Football, Barcelona adopted a defensive posture, evidently hoping to escape with a tie and win the second leg of the contest back home. Leeds took the match, two goals to one; a few weeks later, it played Barcelona to a draw in Spain and booked its ticket to the final. (Alas, my team lost, two-nil, to Bayern Munich.)

Reviewing that game in Leeds on YouTube today, I was struck anew, despite Barcelona’s loss, by Cruyff’s pace and movement, and his acute sense of what was happening around him. At one point, he appeared behind his own defense to clear the ball. In the second half, he set up his team’s goal and almost created another.

Cruyff never did win the European Cup while playing for Barcelona. But in 1992, as the club’s manager, he led it to its first European title. Indeed, it was as a manager that he cemented his position as one of the most influential figures in football history. First at Ajax, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and then at Barcelona, from 1988 to 1996, he took the strategic principles that Michels had taught him and added some touches of his own—for example, by deploying a diamond formation in midfield. Always, however, he emphasized the basics of Total Football: technical skills (which he believed had to be taught at an early age), movement, pace, and flexibility. “In my teams, the goalie is the first attacker, and the striker is the first defender,” he said.

As Cruyff’s principles proved successful, other coaches copied or adapted them. On Thursday, Pep Guardiola, who led Barcelona to enormous success while managing the club from 2008 to 2012, said that Cruyff “painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since have merely restored or improved it.” The religious metaphor was fitting. “Cruyff’s admirers don’t just like the way he and his teams played. They believe the world could be a better place if his vision of football prevailed. Cruyffian football, they feel, is more beautiful, more fun and more spiritual than other approaches,” David Winner wrote earlier this month, in an insightful Bleacher Report piece called “The Church of Cruyff.”

You can find me in the Cruyffian pews, too, but it is as a player, rather than as a manager, that I will primarily remember him. In the very first minute of the 1974 World Cup final, which was played in Munich, he received a pass near the halfway line. With almost the entire West German team between him and the goal, there was no apparent threat. But after quickly controlling the ball Cruyff accelerated like a hare, swerved past one German player, slipped between two others, and darted into the penalty area, where he was tripped up. The referee called a foul, and Johan Neeskens (another fine player, if not quite in Cruyff’s class) stepped up to the penalty spot and scored. The Dutch were up a goal before a German player had even touched the ball.

After that stunning opening, the Dutch team appeared to slacken, and the Germans, to the horror of my eleven-year-old self, and other Cruyff devotees everywhere, came back to win, two to one. Our hero was named the player of the tournament, though.

Twenty-five years later, the International Federation of Football History & Statistics voted him the European Player of the Century. Was he better than Pelé or Maradona or Lionel Messi? The arguments will go on forever. But he was certainly on their level, and his artistry was appreciated well beyond his sport. “Cruyff was a better dancer than Nureyev,” the Dutch choreographer Rudi van Dantzig once remarked. “He was a better mover.”

Tempos difíceis-atentado em Bruxelas

 

 

Cartoons-Steve Cutts

Música-Flowers will bloom

Nicolau Breyner

Reflexão-LBC e Augusto FS

LBC - Tempos difíceis, muito muito difíceis!...Estamos assim...

AFS - Pois estamos!

Também lá estive a fazer uma apresentação sobre o tratamento da asma com recurso ao ciclo holístico do feijão, na sua vertente metano-simbiótica, vulgarmente conhecida por aromaterapia do cheiro a esterco. O remédio é milagroso! Os indivíduos afectado por crises de asma, submetidos a esta terapia ancestral, encontram espontaneamente um impulso para híper ventilar e em segundos estão curados.

Os interesses da industria farmacêutica procuram por todos os meios ocultar esta cura fantástica, tendo chegado ao extremo de convencer governos a proibir as bombas de mau cheiro no carnaval, não fossem os sofredores perceber onde estava a cura e deixar de comprar as “bombinhas” na farmácia.

No blog da Comunidade Céptica Portuguesa (COMCEPT)

A “medicina esogética” é mais uma a acrescentar à panóplia de terapias holísticas que se encontra pela Internet ou nas feiras místicas. Seria interessante até que o evento tivesse sido organizado de modo a incutir espírito crítico nos alunos, embora para que tal fosse verdadeiramente educativo, fosse necessário um exemplo menos óbvio. Gostaria de acreditar que no ensino superior nas áreas da saúde existisse abertura de espírito para incorporar sentido crítico, lógica e rigor para identificar possíveis contradições entre saberes. Infelizmente, nada indica que tenha sido essa a razão para organizar este evento, já que a ESEnfCVPOA oferece como formação contínua, um curso de cromopuntura.

Se leitura de auras, acupunctura às cores e cura por cristais é patrocinada por uma escola superior de Enfermagem, em breve, os nossos profissionais de saúde vão poder estagiar em Vilar de Perdizes.

 

Reflexão-Elizabeth Drew (infraestruturas nos USA)

E assim vamos (sobre)vivendo...

(Excertos de um artigo de Elizabeth Drew sobre a degradação das Infraestruturas no USA)

A Country breaking down 

By Elizabeth Drew (16.02.2016)

...

The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate highway system, but not everyone has access to it—a division largely based on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.

...

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) conducts a study of where the United States stands in providing needed infrastructure in various sectors. Though the organization obviously has an interest in the creation of more construction jobs, its analyses, based as they are on information from other studies, are taken seriously by nonpartisan experts in the field. In the ASCE’s most recent report card, issued in 2013, the combined sectors received an overall grade of D+. In the various sectors, the grades were: aviation, D; bridges, C+; inland waterways, D–; ports, C; rail, C+; roads, D; mass transit, D; schools, D; hazardous waste, D; drinking water, D. No sector received an A. That none of the infrastructure categories received an F is hardly grounds for celebration.

...

We watched in horror in August 2007 when during the evening rush hour a bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi River collapsed, killing thirteen people and injuring another 145. In Washington State in 2013 a bridge with two cars on it collapsed. The ASCE’s 2013 report card said that one in nine bridges was structurally deficient; that as of 2013 the average age of the nation’s 607,380 bridges was forty-two years, while the Federal Highway Administration estimates that “more than 30 percent of existing bridges have exceeded their fifty-year design life.” According to the ASCE, to have safe bridges by 2028, the US needs to invest $20.5 billion per year, but current spending annually on bridges is $12.8 billion.

...

Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead, by Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, brings a clear focus to a sprawling phenomenon: the inadequate care now given to our nation’s modes of transportation. Her thesis is that we’re stuck. Traffic is clogged, flights are delayed, trains are late, bridges collapse, public transit breaks down—and the political system is incapable of making the investments that would keep these things from happening.

...

Luiz Boavida Carvalho

Música-Asian Kung Fu Generation

Reflexão-LBC (NHK Japan)

Enquanto decorria o Sporting-Benfica para o Campeonato Nacional, e cujo resultado desconheço completamente (São 22.08!), eu deliciava-me com a mais recém descoberta em termos de canais na televisão (NOS). No 216, a NHK Japan, via um documentário sobre uma escola japonesa atingida pelo Tsunami. E lembrei-me, uma vez mais, das consecutivas queixas com que nos martirizamos no dia a dia. Sim, porque comparando-as com os verdadeiros dramas que aquelas crianças do documentário viveram e ainda vivem, não posso deixar de achar curioso a diferença de perspectiva. Crianças que perderam os pais, a mãe e a irmã, etc., e assistiram - ao vivo...- àquela perda, sem nada puderem fazer.
Um povo como este, que sobrevive a catástrofes como esta, ou às da II Guerra Mundial com as bombas atómicas lançadas em Hiroshima e Nagasaki, tem de ser necessariamente uma gente diferente.

ano de 2015

2015
Janeiro-Ataque ao Charlie Hebdo
Fevereiro-Saída da Consulgal
Março-avião da German Wings despenha-se nos alpes
Abril-Nascimento do Vicente
Junho-Jesus no Sporting
Setembro-início do processo contra Consulgal
Outubro-PSD/PP vença as eleições, mas PS é que forma governo
Novembro-Ataque terrorista em Paris (160 mortos)

Teatro-Casino da Trafaria

Em 23.01.2016, João Vasco (professor de teatro na Universidade Sênior de almada com a Luzia) numa peça no Casino da Trafaria