A violent El Clasico, a strange Champions League final, and the universe explained by James Milner’s face

Hello! Welcome back to Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s look back at the last seven days in kicking balls into nets. This week our sponsors are: Neil Warnock’s hairline, Neil Warnock’s self-satisfied grin, and Neil Warnock’s inevitable relegation.

This week’s headline news was, of course, the confirmation that the Champions League final will be contested by two sides that don’t actually make sense. In the red corner, Liverpool, who went to Rome with a three-goal aggregate lead and nearly mucked it up. In the white, defending champions Real Madrid, whose progress past Bayern Munich was based on two things. One, they’ve got some really good players. Two, the flow of the universe bends to their will.

With 20 goals across the two semi-finals, you’d think it would be difficult to pick a stand-out moment. But that would be to overlook Roma’s first goal, a Liverpool own goal, which came about when a Dejan Lovren clearance hit James Milner in the head. Which looked like this.

This unfortunate marriage of ball and face is, in this column’s estimation, probably the most important thing to happen in this young millenium. It’s an embodied koan: stare long enough at Milner’s face, caught at that precise moment between knowing nothing and knowing nothing else, and enlightenment will surely follow.

Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?

If the Big Bang created the universe, what exploded?

Thanks, James. Keep up the good work.

The English Premier League is a strange business. There’s the actual stuff of it: the football. Good games and bad games, fun ones and boring ones. Some seasons are thrilling. Others are underwhelming. Some are even processions. Just like every other football league ever.

And then there’s the constant, aggressive reminder that the Premier League is, well, the premier league. The loudest, the shiniest, the biggest, the bestest, the richest but somehow still the fairest. Where anyone can beat anyone, and where anything can happen. This is hype, of course: a self-sustaining act of mass delusion that plays up the chaos of football — “Only in the Premier League!” — while eliding the frequent tedium and one-sidedness.

The tension between these two aspects of the Eee Pee Ell is never more obvious than when a side strolls to the title. Instantly, the big clashes at the end of the season, the marquee games that should be the Premier League at its fullest and most glorious, are rendered strange and empty. Chelsea beat Liverpool one-nil at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, and it was fine. The sun was shining, Olivier Giroud scored a nice header, and Chelsea kept their chances of Champions League qualification alive.

The Race For Fourth™ is important, of course. Maybe even crucial, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s fundamentally administrative, and so nowhere near as animating.

Fortunately for the Premier League’s boosters, and those giddy souls that have to negotiate the television deals, there’s still plenty left in the relegation stramash. Stoke City are down, to the gleeful laughter of every single Arsenal fan in the world. But West Bromwich Albion are still scrapping away: since Darren Moore took over, the worst team in the league have taken 11 points from 5 games, including wins over Manchester United and Spurs and a draw with Liverpool.

(If you’re interested, that’s three more points than Alan “When you’re the king, you can do what you want” Pardew managed in his 18 league games.)

Above them, Huddersfield squeezed a point out of City, which means that we go into the final week with four teams in danger of joining Stoke. West Brom still need a complicated conjunction of incompetence from the teams above them, while Swansea and Southampton play one another on Tuesday night. Huddersfield play Chelsea on Wednesday. And we have just one request for whatever grand force is guiding the universe: Please, give us a final day with some proper intrigue, some back and forth, and a chance to enjoy several mutations of the As It Stands table.

Of course, one way to deal with the end of season blues, and the emptiness of games that should mean everything and don’t mean much at all, is to have a big old fight. The first foul of Sunday’s clásico came 15 seconds in, and by the end Real Madrid and Barcelona had served up four goals, 28 fouls, eight yellow cards, one straight red, and a gluttonous portion of pushing, shouting, diving, appealing, and that weird head-nuzzling thing that footballers enjoy so much.

It’s a strange dance, the footballing scrap. Perhaps we should think of it as its own martial art, a kind of social judo in which the combatants attempt to provoke their opponent into landing the first blow, thus earning a red card. A whole series of conventions have grown up, based what referees will and will not tolerate. Heads can touch, but you cannot thrust; you can push in the chest, but not above the neck; and whatever happens to any part of you, if you go down, you hold your face.

Grown men, the lot of them.

Ferguson underwent brain surgery this weekend, and since it’s impossible to write at any length about this without it turning into a premature obituary, we’re just going to cross our fingers and hope he pulls through. Please enjoy this video of Ferguson in his latter-day role as Proud Father of Many Fine Footballers, congratulating Nani and Cristiano Ronaldo on their Euro 2012 victory.

We’re all familiar with the great love stories: Cupid and Psyche, Romeo and Juliet, Cristiano Ronaldo and Cristiano Ronaldo. But for some reason — probably the machinations of Big Love and their well-funded PR operation — hate stories aren’t given quite the same respect. And one of the great hate stories of our time came to an end on Thursday.

We speak, of course, of the animosity felt by Diego Costa for Arsenal Football Club. These star-crossed loathers met for perhaps the last time in the Europa League semi-final, with Atletico holding the advantage in the tie. Did Costa score? Of course he did. Did Costa generally cut about the place in precisely the expected fashion? Like you even have to ask.

Costa scored plenty against Arsenal while at Chelsea, and once managed to get half of Arsenal’s defence sent off for treading on his toe. More generally, he manifested as the precise opposite of everything Arsenal embodied, good and bad. Here was a club praised for their commitment to aesthetics, but criticised for their fragility, incompetence, and drifting focus. And here, to keep the universe in balance, Costa, a snickering dervish of gristle and spite. A wind-up merchant, hidden inside a brilliant striker, hidden inside another wind-up merchant.

And now this beautiful relationship is over. Costa is back in Spain, and even if the clubs run into each other in Europe again, Arsène Wenger will have gone and Arsenal, whatever they are, won’t be Arsenal. Won’t be “oh, Arsenal”. And so Costa won’t be Costa, however hard he tries. Each created the another, and as one fades, so the other can only be diminished.

At this moment, the job of Rangers manager must count as one of the trickiest on earth. Tradition, expectation, and history all insist that Rangers should be competing with Celtic at the top of Scottish football. Reality notes, a touch awkwardly, that Celtic are 13 points ahead of Rangers in the table, and that the aggregate score of the five Old Firm derbies this season was Celtic 14-2 Rangers.

That gap is not unbridgeable, of course. But it will take time, strategy, patience, and cleverness. It will take a manager that knows what he’s doing and a club that knows how to support him. And Rangers have appointed Steven Gerrard, who you may remember from such managerial successes as playing for Liverpool, playing for England, and, er, playing for Liverpool.

It’s certainly not impossible that Gerrard has it in him to be an excellent manager. But Rangers are guessing, and in the meantime they’re gambling that his presence, personality, and name will galvanise the squad. Or maybe they’ve decided there’s a profitable future in borrowing kids from Liverpool’s reserve and youth teams. Meanwhile Gerrard has decided to launch his managerial career at a club where the prospect of failure looms a lot larger than success.

Ultimately, this is the kind of gap between what is and what should be that can swallow managers whole. Also he’s going to say “This does not slip” at some point, and one of his players will giggle, and it’ll be awkward as hell.

A nutmeg and a completed pass? That’s just showing off.

Finally, a note for those that achieved something special this week. Congratulations to: