I suppose you've all seen that FC Barcelona won the Champions League title last night with a gutsy 2-1 win over Arsenal. The players deserve it; they've all done an excellent job all season. Their effort and commitment, week-in and week-out, has been very impressive. Ronaldinho and Eto'o are the stars, but Belletti's game-winning goal showed that the other nine guys are just as important.

Barça's greatest strength, I think, is that it has 18 players who are all above-average and fill out a complete squad. No position is undermanned. Every one of these guys is capable of playing with the best.

My personal favorites are Van Bronckhorst and Sylvinho; neither is very well-known but both are very solid players who quietly do their jobs nearly to perfection. They play the position I used to play when I was a kid, left fullback, and so of course I identify with them. I was never a good player, but I was left-footed, fairly tall, in good shape, and not afraid of contact. Our coach was a bit overambitious; he wanted us to play the onside trap when we should have been practicing clearing kicks. I wasn't good enough to make the high-school team, though, and switched over to cross-country. 

Van Bronckhorst is of mixed Dutch-Indonesian ancestry; apparently there's a long-established community of these folks, comparable to Anglo-Indians. Most of them emigrated to the Netherlands after Indonesia became independent.

So Barça wins the championship and thousands of people spill out on the streets to hoot and holler and carry on, which is just fine as long as it doesn't get too illegal. I think we can all distinguish a good-natured celebration from one that has turned ugly, and it got ugly last night. 45 arrested, 109 injured, six shops broken into and sacked, police assaulted, traffic lights and newsstands destroyed, rioters torching garbage skips and setting up barricades, rubber bullets flying. Disgusting. If I were the cops I'd have arrested a hell of a lot more rioters and if I were the judge I'd throw the entire law book at them.

It's a damned shame for the players, who seem to be a genuinely admirable lot, family guys who go to church instead of snorting coke. They deserve better. They've given us their best this season. It's very rare for a team to win both the Spanish league and the Champions the same year. Quite an achievement.