BatiGol Weekly 64: When I’m 64

I have a confession. I spent much of Sunday morning standing at my kitchen counter with a whetstone and a sharpening steel, putting a new edge to my cooking knives. While this sounds pretty cool and badass, it’s not. It’s just that the blades had gone dull from chopping up watermelons and cabbages and onions and such and could barely get through butter, and I was tired of trying to slice garlic with an implement roughly as sharp as Borja’s shiny shiny dome.

And then, as I whispered the paring knife down the steel for the hundredth time, I realized what I’d been brought to: chores. During the morning. On a Sunday. Yes, during the time when I should be wearing a purple shirt and yelling abuse at what’s unfolding on my screen and occasionally explaining to the police when they stop by that no, there’s no fight going on, but Fiorentina need to a rightback so badly that it makes me scream. Instead, I found myself standing in the kitchen and doing stuff that needed doing. Like a rational, sane person. I could barely handle it.

It’s not just that Paul McCartney’s saccharine musings match up to this week’s BGW numerically. Rather, it’s that the list of quotidian activities he lists—mending a fuse, knitting a sweater, digging up weeds—cuts a little to close to how we’ve been spending our weekends without Fiorentina and those other poor little clubs by whose apposite, non-Viola nature we define ourselves. We need our club football back, or I’m probably going to find myself dusting. And I just can’t have that.

International break headlines

This week’s transfer rumors come with an extra helping of schadenfreude.

In our latest desperate attempt to stave off this week’s ennui, we rated the current squad by how they might do as coaches after they retire.

We’ll give into the break by refreshing you on which Viola players are with their national teams. But we won’t like it.

The kids on loan in the Lega Pro and Serie D are tearing it up right now. Here’s your full update.

We just saw a list of how much every club in the top 5 leagues in Europe paid to assemble their squads. It’s, um, a little bit more dire than we’d like.

And holy smokes, Nikola Kalinic scored an absolute peach against Kosovo.

Comment of the week

This is the sort of week in which hypothetical statements are pretty much all we’ve got to talk about, and mark@ has some pertinent ruminations on tactics.

6 more days until Fiorentina resume their business with a match against Atalanta. Hang on, folks. We’re almost there.