this week’s easy weekend reading

The last of the excerpts from El Macca – I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

– César:  [Macca, Solari and I’d] “use humour to keep our spirits up.  We were always having a laugh.  One thing Solari and I would do to wind up Macca was to make up expressions in English.  We used to spend all day coming up with phrases in English, but not your usual English.  There are Spanish phrases that don’t translate properly in English, but end up sounding funny.  We invented our own English between ourselves.  For instance, “I shit in your tooth” is the literal translation of the well-used Spanish expression “me cago en tus muelas.” It doesn’t mean anything in English…  “Me cago en la leche” is “I shit on the milk” in English, but we’d even mix up the languages for Macca by throwing in a bit of French to really do his head in, and it’d become “I shit on the lait.“”

– [pre-season tour to China, July 2003]:  “We were told where to sit on the plane: Raúl sat with Morientes, Zidane with Makelele, Munitis with Helguera, Guti with Rubén, Figo with Salgado, Casillas with Pavón, Roberto Carlos with Ronaldo, me with Solari and Beckham with Cambiasso.  I could see those two weren’t going to be able to communicate at all so I asked Cambiasso if he wanted to swap.  Then we had the two Argentines together and the two English – as we would pair up to renew the England v. Argentina rivalry over many a highly charged game of table tennis and pool.”