Barney Ronay

1 week ago | irishexaminer.com | Barney Ronay

Thereā€™s always that guy. Never be that guy. Fight the urge to become that guy, to yearn always for the old, good, safe things, to feel headphone-panic and selfie-disgust, to see moral decay in haircuts. Except, sometimes it turns out you just are that guy, propped up in your easy chair, eyes blazing, smelling slightly of damp laundry, and holding forth on a theme as old as all human life. That theme is always the same. You know that thing you like? Well, itā€™s actually bad.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Barney Ronay

Sound the trumpets, beat the drum, let loose the buttock-rockets of hope. One of the strangest and most unsatisfying things about the Covid-19 pandemic, among a great many deeply strange and unsatisfying things, is that it never actually had a shared end date or ceremonial send-off. Jarringly so, because this was a period in the national life built around a rigid roster of public events. The numerical rules. The weekly banging of pots in honour of people you secretly consider to be serfs.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Barney Ronay

Reasons to be cheerful. Hmm. Let’s see. Well, it’s only 1-0. There’s that. And this is a significant achievement given Arsenal were basically suffocated in the opening 20 minutes of this semi-final first leg, unable to breathe in their own stadium, stretched thin, starved of air and light by the deep blue machine of the Paris Saint-Germain press.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Barney Ronay

Football is often compared to theatre. Sometimes it just is theatre. With 63 minutes gone at Anfield, and Liverpool already 3-1 up, Mohamed Salah took the ball on the right in an empty square of deep green, veered inside, and then paused, leaving just enough time time for the entire home crowd to freeze the moment, to see a snapshot of what was about to happen.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Barney Ronay

Back in his pomp as an era-defining, generational dog-torturer, the great Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov did an interesting experiment with shapes. This involved showing a dog called Vampire a combination of circles and ovals. Circles meant he was about to be fed. Ovals meant no food and possibly, maybe, at a push, being electrocuted. Before long Vampire was showing the familiar conditioned response, salivating when he saw a circle, shying away from the oval.