Joan Haddock, lightning and thunder

Since we couldn't beat almost anyone and everything seems to indicate that we have been paying a former referee for nothing – beyond round-trip commissions – we could at least recover a little of the aesthetics.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
16 February 2024 Friday 09:26
7 Reads
Joan Haddock, lightning and thunder

Since we couldn't beat almost anyone and everything seems to indicate that we have been paying a former referee for nothing – beyond round-trip commissions – we could at least recover a little of the aesthetics. In the last Barça match against Granada, Joan Laporta, definitively embedded in Captain Haddock, according to Catalunya Ràdio, became angry, shouted and cursed and, apparently, made trays of canapes fly in the antebox due to the game of the team that he presides over and which is named after the one who was our team.

A president dressed in a suit, tie and shirt, throwing trays of canapes on the floor, looks very much like a shabby, Caribbean dictator, part of the A Team. The only thing missing, in addition to friends and ex-brothers-in-law, is an advisor like M.A. and we have the party. But, because of his best years, I prefer to remember him as a character from Tintin: “Attila from the wardrobe, zucchini with a diploma, a billion lightning bolts and thunder, the penultimate one has tied us!”

As the novelist George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, the beginning is always half the disaster, and so, at the risk of being rote, Haddock made his appearance in “The Blue Elephant with the Golden Claws” and little by little he won. leadership. He ran for president of the club of his life and won because he was handsome, young and slender, with some class, and because he scammed us by saying that he had a crush on Beckham. Also because we came from characters prior to the existence of clear-line Belgian comics such as Núñez, Gaspart and Reina who were more Bruguera drawings.

In that first delivery and mandate, Haddock is the captain of the ship Karabudjan. In the next mandate, after finding Red Rackman's treasure, he will live in luxury at Moulinsart Castle. Rackman must be the Mendes of the Tintin universe. The joke of his second campaign was that he settled Messi's situation with a barbecue. Nothing, a little lie.

But Haddock, at least, was a guy with flaws but also principles. And since we don't show off with ethics or competition, we could try to do it with elegance and aesthetics, and for a president to behave like a spoiled child for whom everyone laughs at him, it may not be the most dignified thing for a club that represented a beautiful and honest way of winning and also losing. We don't want Nobitas, but we don't want Captain Haddock either.