superclásico

'For a century, one duel has halved Buenos Aires. The God of one half is the Devil of the other"

- Eduardo Galeano

Occasionally in life, the stars align. Shining specks in the night sky meet, forming patterns that are romanticised from the safety of planet Earth. Get a little closer - approximately 4.24 light-years closer - and a star bares its teeth. Face a ball of furiously burning gases, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star suddenly loses a touch of its charm.

Back down to Earth, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, two more combustible entities are set to collide. The constellation of the Copa Libertadores, South America's top club competition, has guided bitter rivals Boca Juniors and River Plate towards a stellar collision that will dwarf the magnitude of cosmic activity.

It's been 58 years since the inauguration of the Copa Libertadores, yet the first that has graced a final between Boca Juniors and River Plate. If fate wasn't clear enough, this year's final is the last that will be played over two-legs at each team's home ground, meaning that both Boca and River will take their turn to welcome their arch nemesis to their own, spitting cauldron.

The derby, the superclásico, is widely considered to be the greatest in world football, and is regularly dubbed the holy grail of the sport's 'bucket list'; attend a superclásico and you've done it all. Take a stroll through Buenos Aires and the presence of the two teams is unavoidable. Whether it be the ragged replica shirts, the branded shop fronts or the murals of Riquelme and Aimar, the city breathes from two lungs, one blue and yellow, the other red and white.

fight

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" - Mike Tyson

It's 6:15 on Sunday morning. Two hours have passed since my confused alarm chimed on its day off. My tired eyes fixate on the screen illuminating the room, and the peace of dawn is broken by high-pitched growling of Joe Rogan and co. The television pixels construct an image from over 5,200 miles away, in Las Vegas, where one of the most important sporting events of the year has descended into unadulterated chaos.

Conor McGregor is not a personality associated with calm. The Irishman is the shot of whisky that so often fuels a late Saturday night - a figuration that has become a commercial reality through his Proper 12 venture - and one of few people on this planet that can get me to set a 5:15am alarm on a Sunday morning. His opponent, Khabib Nurmagomedov, personifies everything expected with a bruiser from the Dagestan region of Russia: unaesthetic, rough, robust.

Three minutes and three seconds into the fourth round of the biggest UFC fight of all time, the tactical skill of Nurmagomedov choked the ego of McGregor. After months of media attention, hype and cash, the Russian bear suffocated the octagon's green and gold oxygen supply to the point of blurry-eyed submission. For ten seconds, Khabib was the golden boy and his legacy was stamped in the blood-stained canvas of the UFC.

Then the Dagestan fighter initiated a riot. As he flew over the cage and towards McGregor's team, the glitz of Las Vegas descended into a brawl outside your local Wetherspoons. The technical quality that illuminated a championship fight became a distant memory as wild, un-calculated punches were thrown from all parties. It was raw violence,  but I couldn't stop watching.

social media

"Comparison is the thief of joy" - Franklin D. Roosevelt

On the 07:41, tired fingers repeat downwards movements on tired screens. Change the backdrop to a sterile, white lab and you feel part of a nineties sci-fi movie. The robotic routine repeats.

Swipe, swipe, swipe, tap tap, swipe, tap tap, swipe... 

As the train heads towards a world of screens, retinas dart momentarily away in search of a break, before being fixated back to a conveyor belt of images that appear below. To the untrained mind, the photos that rush by show no more than a display saturated with unoriginal aesthetics: bikinis, bars, beaches, boyfriends, blurrrr... the scrolling hits top gear. 

The picture I'm presenting is not one that would be sent onto the conveyor belt itself. Whilst it sounds like a dystopian mirage constructed in Charlie Brooker's imagination, this is a reality that lies much closer to home than 90% of what appears on our screens. 

Yet our brains don't agree. Whilst our exteriors represent a glassy haze, our minds are going twelve rounds. Every photo represents an opportunity for our self-esteem to compare and contrast, collating evidence by which to cripple itself. We put ourselves up against selected, filtered, edited supermodels in the most corrupt game of Top Trumps the world has ever seen. 

adulthood

As the 07:41 train to Horsham trundles towards the platform, at 07:43, auto-pilot is in operation. In fact, the body is in cruise control from the moment the alarm goes off: snooze, alarm, snooze, alarm, up, shower, hairdryer, clothes, teeth, breakfast, walk, station, machine, ticket, platform.

The day's first hour leaves the brain dormant. In such vacant moments, the realities of post-university life dawn. On the platform, one glance left and right reveals generations of routine. My one month of commuting into the city is a microcosm compared to those alongside me. The biosphere of adulthood drifts towards responsibility, one train at a time.

A train carriage is a melting pot of professional diversity. All it takes is a sense of intrigue and you're whisked onto a safari of the British commute. C-level executives send micro-troops into virtual battle on their iPhone screens, sometimes even paying for bonuses with their corporate coiffeur. Others engage in personal conversations via WhatsApp, sending loving, angry or even sexually explicit messages to their respective other halves. Then there's us, collectively observing the above.

Some of these people have been programmed into this routine for longer than I have been alive. The previous 23 years probably seem like a bit of a blur for them, a frightening prospect for this year's rookie. From the up, down, left, right dynamism of university, travelling and every adventure that graces our early adulthood, we suddenly attach ourselves to a binary cord between home and office, receding to the mean. Damn.

david silva

"He's a player that often looks like the only grown-up on the pitch" - Barney Ronay on David Silva

When I sat down to binge-watch the new Amazon Prime documentary All or Nothing, I was drowning in pre-conceptions. The behind-the-scenes look into Manchester City's title-winning 2017/18 season has triggered the first seismic shift in the tectonic plates of this fledgling Premier League, as fans and professionals agitate towards their respective standpoints. Fascinating, cringy, classless and compulsory viewing are just some of the jury's verdicts so far, and I don't think I need to tell you which came courtesy of their Portuguese rival.

Personally, I loved it. As a football fan, there's no better elixir to quench our thirst than taking a glance into the extra dimensions of the game. Multiple times a week we fixate on 90 minutes of football, but there's no denying that we are only engaging in the sport at its most superficial form. We focus on the feet of our heroes, and villains, whilst their psyche is speculated upon but rarely confirmed. Our insight into the minds of players and managers often come through a post-match interview diluted with PR spiel and then we re left to spend another week debating over who's annoyed and who's not.

It was the documentary's breaking of these lines that really caught my imagination. Being the fly-on-the-wall finally became a reality, and our wings took flight into Pep Guardiola team-talks, the City dressing room, and the personal lives of their squad. One particular personal life tapped into an emotion that I never thought a football documentary would, and that was David Silva.

07:41

"In football blogging, the good things can change in a second" - Didier Drogba

It is with the words of a legend that we wave goodbye to Time to Make Some Mates, just how it would have intended. The name that carried this page through the 2016/17 season, of which I spent on loan in the South American non-league, and the dormant 2016/17 season, spent out of action with a drink problem, has been amicably shown the door. 

As any great obituary should do, here's a quick flashback to the true origin of the name: 

"I thought I would very quickly explain why the title of this blog is what it is. At first glance it appears completely irrelevant and one would probably question why I have avoided every possible Argentinean stereotype (Let's Get Messi and The Hand of Blog were close contenders). However I decided to go with something that has epitomised Argentinean culture from the moment I landed to the moment I write this post....

The Mate.

Just to get it out the way, 'The Mate' is not the bloke you go down the pub with or that person you vaguely know that you bump into in a club. In Argentina, 'The Mate' is life. Mate is a hot drink that is consumed at all times of the day, no matter the activity or social occasion." - (The Wonder of Mate, August 2016)

So now that's out of the way, the truth. The name was impractical, confusing and an all-round terrible attempt at being (a) cultured and (b) witty. Believe it or not, I do possess acquaintances that I'd regard as 'mates', and so the apparent public cry for friendship made next to no sense. By the time I had explained what Argentinean mate was, attention spans had drifted into the abyss and the moment passed. So just as with Arsene Wenger, Time to Make Some Mates is officially #OUT.

Whilst I'm sure Unai Emery will do a decent job at the Emirates, I wanted to recruit a more creative replacement to lead the blog into the 2018/19 season. As I flicked through random words in both English and Spanish, the options got tackier than the 'Força' ('strength' in Portuguese) year abroad tattoo on my wrist. However, a solution soon came my way courtesy of ThamesLink rail.

As an English graduate, ditching the words for numbers is rare. Yet, as I stood on my commuter train this morning considering my dilemma, there it was.

This blog started as a travel blog, and continued that way for 35 articles, so it would be a shame to ditch that completely. The problem I have is that very recently I've entered adulthood and my life consists of a new routine of eat, sleep, get on a train, work, repeat. The only travel in my life revolves around the trains between Hertfordshire and Central London. I guess you could call it micro-travel. Anyway, it was good enough for me and I now own a blog named after a time on a train timetable.

Now you won't be surprised if its late...

It's 07:41, enjoy the content.

Cologne Christmas Special

So... we're back.

Whilst there was an ever-so-slim chance of this blog continuing after the South American adventure had finished, the bleak reality of hangovers, lectures and grey British skies soon put an end to that. As the blog was showered with a mixture of praise and piss-taking comments on Nottingham's finest nights out, I couldn't help but feel a sense of vacancy without it in my life. I mean, it was nice to verbally share life thoughts with actual English humans instead of a non-responsive blogging site, but the writing was something I missed.

I couldn't just start again though - there was no chance that I was going to illustrate a night in Ocean as an opener to the comeback tour - and I needed a reason to write. With that in mind, a pre-Christmas trip to Cologne in Germany was the ideal opportunity to soak in some blog magic and ensure that Time to Make Some Mates could make a suitably stunning return to the spotlight. It was the Robbie to my Take That.

The glamour of the comeback was quickly brought back down to Earth as a 5am start at Manchester airport somberly drizzled all over my parade (this ego-driven stance may or may not continue but for now I'm enjoying it). I flew out to Germany with my girlfriend Coralie, yet the Scrooges at RyanAir made sure that our £20 fare would not allow us to sit together and we were promptly separated. We weren't the only ones and a variety of puzzled families and couples went their separate ways to find their cramped individual seats on Michael O'Leary's capital-sucking sleigh. Talk about the charm of the Irish...