There are 110 frames in that .gif file, which is appropriate, since this play by Houston Astros catcher Matt Pagnozzi allowed what turned out to be the winning run to score in the Astros' 110th loss of the year, a 2-1 defeat on Saturday night to the New York Yankees. The Astros then lost 5-1 on Sunday to the Yanks to close out the season at 51-111. They are the first team since the 1965 Mets to lose more than 106 games for the third consecutive season.
Seriously. Watch that gif again and again. The incompetence is absolutely mesmerizing.
I'm not sure I saw a worse play on a baseball field than this all season. The play got lost in the shuffle a bit during the game, as the focus of this game turned out to be on yet another 78-year-old Yankees pitcher making his last appearance of his career. This play isn't quite as terrible as this headscratcher from 2012, but it goes a long way toward summing up the Astros season. You don't lose 111 games by accident. It should come as no surprise that the Astros led the majors in errors. They also struck out more times than any team in major league history.
I'm sort of surprised they even won 51, to be honest. They can thank the Mariners for that, primarily – their 9-10 record against the M's constituting nearly a fifth of their wins. But after sweeping the Mariners in Seattle in mid-September (and seriously, how did everyone in Seattle NOT get fired after that?), the weary Astros faced a brutal stretch against good teams and hungry playoff contenders to close out the season – the Reds, Indians, Rangers and Yankees. The Astros thus closed out the season with a 15-game losing streak.
Speaking of a fifth, I think I would need to drink to watch this team. Fans aren't exactly tuning in or turning out in droves. The front office there has been pleading for patience, but there is only so much that fans are willing to put up with. Quite a few proud franchises have seen their fanbases dwindle through continued ineptitude – Toronto and Baltimore come to mind, the latter having done well to win some fans back with good play the past couple of years. In Seattle, the relationship between the Mariners organization and the fanbase is becoming almost adversarial – their misguided and pointless 71-91 season, combined with manager Eric Wedge resigning and essentially saying the front office were a bunch of passive-aggressive sissies without a clue, have only added to a decline which has turned what was once a 3,000,000 draw into a team drawing 9,000 for a September game in little more than a decade. You can win the fans back, of course, but winning is exactly what it takes to do so.
In the case of the Astros, I'm not sure where the hope is to be found. The thought was that the Astros would be OK with an ownership change and through establishing a Regional Sports Network on TV, as RSN's have proven to be quite a cash cow for other teams. Well, that hasn't worked out so well either (of course, if you're drawing 0.0 ratings for games, it's not exactly a good buy for an advertiser). Their new GM came from the talent-producing machine that is the St. Louis Cardinals, and one would think he's learned a thing or two about developing major league players while in St. Louis. Folks in Houston should hope so, because there weren't too many major leaguers out on the field this season.
Now that the beloved local nine have finished their terrible season at 76-86, are out of the playoffs and are no longer the Defending World Series Champions (even though technically that moniker holds true for another month), I am throwing my support behind the Cleveland Indians. This is purely for literary reasons – the main character in my novel is originally from Cleveland. He wears an Indians hat all the time: the retro red ones with the blue C that the club revived this year and not the ones with the terrible caricature on them.
The Blue Sharks are now friends of The LOSE. These guys are awesome.
The Official Fiancée of IN PLAY LOSE rightly pointed out this morning that it would be the squandering of a great opportunity not to take the time to write about a football match between Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde – a match which has come to take on some pretty major significance in qualifying for the World Cup, mind you, but also a match between two of the so-called “minnows” of the sport. The Equatoguineans are currently ranked 98th in the world, while the wonderfully named Blue Sharks of Cape Verde are actually ranked 44th. They have a dynamic and flamboyant coach named Lucio Antunes, a collection of pretty good young talent, and they were coming off a successful appearance at the Africa Cup of Nations earlier this year in which they reached the quarterfinals.
It all started badly for the Blue Sharks, however, in CAF Group B. Africa has five places in Brazil and the 40 qualifiers were divided into 10 four-team groups, with the group winners advancing to a final series of home-and-home playoffs to earn their spots in the World Cup. The Blue Sharks were beaten 2:1 at Sierra Leone and lost 2:1 on their home grounds, the Estádio da Várzea in Praia, to perpetual top-flight African side Tunisia. They then had a rather contentious third match on March 24 in Malabo, losing 4:3 away to the Equatoguineans, dropping them to 0-0-3. At 0 pts. and -3, they were pretty much eliminated from the competition.
During this key third match, Blue Sharks defender Fernando Varela was sent off for “unsporting conduct towards a match official.” There is a great scene in the movie Bull Durham where Crash Davis gets tossed for calling the umpire a cocksucker – the 100% guaranteed, surefire way to get run by an ump. The LOSE knows from his days of playing basketball that calling the referee a motherfucker is a guaranteed way to get T’d up. The LOSE is not sure what the magic words are which will get you red carded in football, and especially doesn’t know what they would be in Portuguese, the national tongue in Cape Verde, or in French, as the referee of this match in question was from Mali. Referees have, however, been known to study up on derogatory terms in foreign tongues prior to the game, so as not to let guys get away with talking shit. Or maybe Varela just called him a motherfucker straight out in English, that term having taken on some rather universal usage by now.
Whatever it was that he said/did, Varela got tossed and his behaviour earned him a four-game suspension as well. Not that it mattered, since the Blue Sharks were out of the competition at this point after a tough loss to the Equatoguineans, whose victory was primarily due to a hat trick scored by Emilio Nsue.
Who is, by the definition of FIFA, a Spaniard.
Welcome to the mess.
Recruiting foreign players is apparently nothing new in Equatorial Guinea. The rules seem straightforward enough, in principle – a player has to be a) born in a country, b) have a parent from that country, or c) have spent two years in that country. And yet rules for who is and who isn’t eligible to participate for a national team have not always been universally applied nor enforced by FIFA, due in part to the fact that it’s not always so simple to figure out. Football has always been a game of the masses – which, in the rest of the world, means the poor: migrants and immigrants and transitory populations whose movements aren't always that easy to document or track. And what further complicates things is that once you’ve started playing for a national team, you cannot switch. Even the most sophisticated national federations in the sport sometimes get flummoxed and come to discover a talented player actually technically isn’t a citizen. Figuring out who is and isn’t eligible can be tricky even if you’re organized and paying attention to these sorts of things.
And organization has always been rather lacking in African football, a wonderful game played by wonderfully talented players who seem to be undermined at nearly every turn by federations that are corrupt, disorganized, and dysfunctional. The LOSE is a big fan of the African game. I love me some Elephants and Super Eagles and Black Stars. But virtually every major African competition inevitably gets mired in some sort of squabble or bickering or infighting, often times involving paying the players (or some governing body or another refusing to do so). It all can be wildly entertaining, and yet it’s also quite sad. The game is administered by far too many would-be tycoons and grandstanding Ministers of Sport – big fish in small ponds caring far more about their own personal fortunes than anything else. The prevalence of said Ministers is particularly problematic, as matches take on even more of a governmental air than is the norm. FIFA strives to keep government politics out of the sport, but such set-ups make it almost impossible to do so.
So far this World Cup qualifying cycle, there have been SEVEN cases of African teams fielding ineligible players. The devil is in the details, and the recordkeeping doesn’t always match the bravado of the boss. The penalty for this is a 3:0 forfeit loss. FIFA doesn’t differentiate between those who don’t understand the rules and those who attempt to game the system, nor should they. Most of the time, I believe it’s the former. But in the case of Emilio Nsue, he was born in Mallorca and had made 51 appearances for Spanish age-level national teams. So it’s not like he is an unknown commodity. The Equatoguineans have been trying to persuade him to play for them for years – he turned down a chance to play in the 2012 African Cup of Nations, which the Equatoguineans co-hosted with Gabon – and he seems to have come back around to the idea of playing for Nzalang Nacíonal only when the hopes of someday playing for Spain have completely dissipated. Suffice to say, this was not going to be a particularly difficult case for FIFA to figure out.
Nsue captained the squad and scored three goals in the 4:3 win over the Blue Sharks in March, and then was out on the pitch on June 8 for the rematch with the Blue Sharks in Praia, a 2:1 win for the hosts which was essentially meaningless for all involved. The suspended Fernando Varela was not on the pitch for the Blue Sharks. Nor was Fernando Varela on the pitch a week later, a 1:0 win for the Blue Sharks over Sierra Leone that also meant nothing because the Blue Sharks were on the outside looking in. They were stuck on 6 pts. and -1 goal difference and trailing Tunisia’s 11 pts. and +4 with only one match left to play. Mathematically eliminated.
Until July, when they weren’t mathematically eliminated any more, because Nsue was ruled ineligible.
The results of both matches between the Equatoguineans and Cape Verde were thus officially awarded as 3:0 victories for the Blue Sharks, so Cape Verde picked up 3 extra pts. and a whole lot of goal difference. Suddenly, Cape Verde were sitting at 9 pts. and +5, and they actually had a chance to still advance. Their one game left was at Tunisia, where a win was unlikely.
But given a choice between slim and none, slim is the better option. (Yes, I just linked to Tunisian television. This blog just gets better and better.)
The LOSE loves the minnows, of course (as evidenced by my fondness for the Ultimate Good Guys this past summer in Brazil). There are usually one or two who find their way into the World Cup somehow, often in implausible ways, and they add some unpredictability and joie de vivre to the affair. Among those minnows who still have a chance to swim with the big fishes in Brazil next summer are Iceland, who are somehow in second place in a completely strange European group, and Jordan, who are ranked 73rd in the world but get to play a home-and-home with a South American team TBD in November for a spot in Brazil. Winning the World Cup is not really the point for nations such as these. (Nor should it be the point for much of anyone, to be honest, since only eight nations have won the damn thing.) The point is to get there, to be on that big stage for three games and to leave a legacy.
Cape Verde is a small, island nation of 500,000 people, and their shock 2:0 win over Tunisia in Radès was a cause for national celebration and joy. It’s a cool little country. Reaching the World Cup would be a great achievement for the Blue Sharks and for the nation as a whole, and now they were merely two games away from it.
But there was one problem: Fernando Varela was in the lineup for Cape Verde in that game with Tunisia. You remember him. He’s the guy who is suspended.
Apparently, the thinking in Cape Verde was that since the matches with the Equatoguineans had been declared forfeits, which means all individual statistics from the matches don’t count, Varela’s suspension therefore didn’t count either. Which isn't an unreasonable assumption, I suppose, but you might want to, oh, READ THE RULES FIRST. From FIFA’s Clause 18.4: "an expulsion automatically incurs suspension … even if imposed in a match that is later abandoned, annulled and/or forfeited."
And so the game, of course, goes down as a 3:0 win for the Tunisians, since the Blue Sharks fielded a suspended player who was ineligible.
How do you say "facepalm" in Portuguese? Or, better yet, how do you say "clusterfuck?"
I feel bad for the players, who were essentially administered into losing a golden opportunity. There is no excuse for that sort of thing. It’s ultimately the responsibility of coaches and administrators and clerks to figure this stuff out. It’s bad enough to get beat on the pitch. It’s worse to get beat a week later in a conference room in Switzerland. The Blue Sharks are a whimsical and jovial lot who deserved a fate far less vexing and confounding than this. It’s a big disappointment for a small country, as they now must give up their playoff spot to Tunisia. Not that I have anything against Les Aigles de Carthage. Given the state of affairs in the country, Tunisians could use a little good news right now.
And, really, that fact makes it easy to root for all 10 African sides left in the competition – all of those nations could use an infusion of joy and national pride to make day-to-day existence there a bit more palatable. Of the 10, two of them – Burkina Faso and Ethiopia – survived having to forfeit matches for using ineligible players. The latter case is particularly noteworthy in that the Walia Antelopes thought they’d wrapped up their group with a game to play. Their raucous 2:1 win over South Africa in Addis Ababa (thanks to one of the greatest own goals in history) set off delirium, as Ethiopia’s footballing fortunes have generally been terrible of late. Only then did they discover a rather boneheaded error – Minyahile Beyene had accrued too many yellow cards and was to serve a suspension in a June 8 game vs. Botswana, yet no one involved with either the Ethiopians or CAF seemed to notice, so there he was out on the pitch in Botswana. Uh, whoops. With the 3:0 forfeit loss, Ethiopia had now unclinched. But they had a chance to redeem themselves in their final match, an away game at the Central African Republic – which was playing an away game themselves. Apparently, you lose your right to host matches when you’ve got coup d’états and civil insurrection going on. The Ethiopians won the game 2:1, which was played in a vast, nearly empty stadium in Brazzaville. It’s fair to say that the CAR supporters didn’t travel in great numbers.
And along with the pair of forfeit survivors you also have Senegal, which doesn’t get to host a match in their home-and-home playoff with African kingpins Côte d’Ivoire. This is because there was a riot in the stadium the last time the two teams met in Dakar.
The relationship between FIFA and the United States has always been
somewhat complicated. There has always been something of a footballing
subculture in the U.S., given the immigrant nature of the society, but
you could never say prior to 1990 that the U.S. was a footballing
nation, as the sport languished far down on the pecking order. To a
governing body which possessed the same sort of envy/jealousy as the
IOC, the U.S. being not very good at soccer – nor very interested –
wasn’t really that much of a big deal. The overreaching flurry of the
North American Soccer League was amusing in the 1970s, but that
experiment – in which owners grossly overpaid for past-their-prime
players – wore out its welcome pretty quickly, as a discerning American
clientele quickly grew unimpressed.
Beginning in the late 1980s, however, FIFA came to understand that while it still administered the most popular sport in the world, there was considerable room to grow the game. Soccer may dominate the psyches of sports fans in Europe, South America and Africa, but HUGE potential markets still existed for the game. You can somewhat loosely divide the world into three camps based upon the sporting pastime of choice – there are soccer nations, cricket nations, and baseball nations. With each pastime comes a culture that has developed around it – a culture and history and tradition which, in some ways, is just as important as the actual game on the field, if not even moreso. With the notable exception of England, few nations actually have sporting cultures in which more than one of these three sporting pastimes thrive. Venezuela has never qualified for the World Cup, yet it produces many of the greatest baseball players in the world. Given that there are 1,000,000,000 people in cricket-mad India, you’d think you could find 11 decent footballers, yet the Blue Tigers are currently ranked 155th in the world and lost 5:2 on aggregate to the United Arab Emirates in the 2nd round of Asian qualifying for Brazil. FIFA’s expanding of the tournament – the number of invites rose from 16 to 24 in 1982 and then to 32 in 1998 – was done, in part, with the hopes that some of the world’s larger and/or more prosperous, less footballing-inclined nations would get it together and start playing the game at a high level. Some of these nations, like India and Canada, seem to be lost causes at this point, while growth in Southeast Asia has been rather modest, but FIFA’s growth initiatives seem to have succeeded, for the most part in places such as Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Australia and, yes, the United States.
And by “success,” it means more than just rolling out a team every four years in the World Cup. Sustained success means encouraging the development of the game’s infrastructure. The structure of the game in the five nations I just mentioned differs wildly from anything you’d find in Europe. South Korea and Japan have something akin to corporate professional leagues. The A-League in Australia and New Zealand is sort of an odd, Americanized hybrid. MLS in the U.S. does business in ways decidedly at odds with the rest of the globe, which frustrates the hell out of FIFA. In all of these places, the growth of the game of soccer has required, along with it, a creation of an accompanying culture surrounding the game. It’s really the only way in which the game – or any game, for that matter – can ultimately thrive.
It’s taken well over 20 years for this to occur in the United States, which was FIFA’s boldest enterprise given the love/hate relationship fostered on the sporting landscape between the U.S. and the rest of the world over the years. Foreign players themselves have always really enjoyed the United States – the nation possessing enough knowledgable fans on the fringes to make players feel welcome and appreciated but lacking the accompanying gossip-and-paparazzi culture that you find elsewhere. The game’s administrators, meanwhile – generally a bunch of grumpy old men with Napoleonic complexes – have approached the U.S. with considerable caution. Fact is, that the U.S. has shown time and again that it has the resources to do whatever the nation sets its mind to doing, and quite a few grumblers at football’s top levels have feared that the U.S. will eventually just roll out so much footballing talent so as to overwhelm everyone else. But the benefits of growing the game in one of the largest and richest nations on earth far exceeded the long-term risks. Awarding the 1994 World Cup to the U.S. was, therefore, sort of a no-brainer.
And in a curiously convenient twist in the run-up to 1990, FIFA banned Mexico from World Cup qualifying. The reasons stated for this ban – Mexico using overaged players in FIFA Youth qualifying, with the penalty applied to all levels of international play – provided fertile grounds for skepticism: Mexico being out of the competition meant a CONCACAF place freed up for a U.S. team which hadn’t been to the World Cup since 1950. It was thought FIFA was hedging its bets and trying to protect its new American investment, figuring an American appearance in Italy 1990 would bode well for 1994.
And the U.S. did, in fact, manage to qualify thanks to this miracle in Port-of-Spain, but they weren’t particularly good in Italy – which is EXACTLY how most of the footballing world wanted it to be and, in fact, still want it to be. American forays into the game have always been viewed with scorn and ridicule. American players never seem to be able to get a game with clubs abroad (with the exception of the goalkeepers, which Americans have always had tonnes of). In 1998, most every European and South American newspaper made a point of saying Brazil lost to Norway due to “the idiot American referee” awarding a late penalty – never mind that video replays revealed he had gotten the call correct. Playing for the USMNT means you’re going to be Public Enemy #1 wherever you go, with few exceptions – the players were somewhat surprised to discover neutral fans in South Africa actually rooting for them in 2010.
But 2010 was a watershed moment for American footballing. Not only did they win their group in South Africa, but the traits which have been developed over the course of 20 years – tenacity, determination, mental toughness in difficult environments – suddenly seemed enviable. More than one national team coach lamented his team’s lack of “American fortitude” in South Africa. After six consecutive appearances in the World Cup, the U.S. seems to have established an identity as a footballing nation. And qualification for 2014 has taken this to a new level altogether, as the U.S. has come to fully embrace one of the international game’s great traditions.
Fucking with their opponents.
In no sport is losing taken more personally than soccer. There are a number of cultural reasons for this, which are best understood by looking at the word ‘soccer’ itself – a colloquial bastardization of the term ‘association football.’ The ‘association’ part is key there – the game has developed in Europe and elsewhere as a loose association of clubs across all levels in multiple tiers of play. In a nation like England, there are zillions of clubs at all sorts of levels – from the EPL down through three more professional divisions, then regional leagues and county leagues and city leagues and the like. They all play by the same rules, as FIFA insists that the game be the same on every level of play. (This is why the time is kept on the field and not on the scoreboard – far more matches than not are played on this planet without a scoreboard than with.) And when we say ‘clubs,’ we really mean it – most clubs have memberships and field teams on multiple levels of their own. And clubs, of course, are inherently catered to some of particular interest or another. Soccer is an amalgamation of neighbourhood clubs, regional clubs, trade union clubs, corporate clubs, clubs representing ethnic groups or religious groups or students or what have you. Most all of the giant clubs on earth are of humble origins (Manchester United was a club for railroad workers, for example), and what’s separated them over time is performance. All clubs started on a level playing field at some point. To the extent your club is successful is, ultimately, entirely up to you.
In North America, we slap NEW YORK or CHICAGO across the jerseys and declare that team to represent a city – but given that almost every city in the U.S. has seen a professional sports franchise move away, it’s clear that such a construct is artificial. The only franchise in North America that bears any resemblance to a European club is the Green Bay Packers, who are community-owned. Clubs may grow and widen their fan support with success, but that original notion – a sporting club representing a particular subset of people – continues to exist. In fact, it is essential to the game of soccer. The complaint levied most often against Chelsea, as a great example, is that the club has chosen to disregard its traditions (never mind that its traditions didn’t include winning very often). The game becomes an extension of the subset of people who chose to originally support it – and thus matches can take on a metaphorical importance far greater than they should.
Americans find the fervor surrounding soccer somewhat baffling. There is no equivalent to it on the professional sports landscape. A better example in the U.S., in fact, is collegiate sports – something like Alabama v. Auburn being far closer to a European-style rivalry than any game between ‘NEW YORK’ and ‘CHICAGO.’ The football grounds become a soapbox and pulpit, an extension of your group and an expression of your aims. Some of the largest clubs in the world willingly perpetuate this. F.C. Barcelona v. Réal Madrid isn’t just a game – it’s a chance for Catalonia to get in a jab at Franco’s favourite club from years gone by. (And in a bit of turnabout, the city of Barcelona’s second largest club is called Español.) The Celtic-Rangers rivalry is even more disquieting, as it turns into the settling of old scores from the Protestant Reformation. Celtic was founded by Irish immigrants to Glasgow, and their success on the pitch has translated into a way for Catholics to bring to attention years of discrimination in the British Isles (Celtic has become the de facto club of choice for Catholics in Northern Ireland, as well as the entire Irish Republic). Rangers didn’t start out as a ‘protestant’ club, per sé, but have kept up that mystique because it’s been good business to do so. The wars on the pitch have extended to the streets of Glasgow and, indeed, across the Irish Sea. In a situation where the game becomes an expression of a cause, losing is a devastating psychological blow – which also means, of course, that winning is grounds for exhibiting the worst sort of victor’s behaviour. Not only is losing personal in soccer, but winning (and engaging in schadenfreude regarding the misfortune of your rivals) is a chance to gloat and taunt and mock. I mean, don’t get me wrong here, I love mocking the Dodgers at every turn, but there are limits. Actions which cross the line are met with horror in this country. It’s still a game, and there will be another one. The idea that a club would have this hard-core group of hoodlums who believe in further causing trouble at a match (and that in fact that group would be held in a certain level of esteem by the club) pretty much makes no sense to an American sports fan.
With the subtext surrounding the game of soccer, it’s no surprise that psychological warfare is a part of the game. Footballers and their coaches talk more trash in the press than any other athletes. That whole notion of ‘bulletin board material’ means nothing – if some subset of people has an issue with another subset of people, that bulletin board is always going to be fully stocked, anyway. Clubs, and their supporters, will go to all sorts of lengths and shenanigans to try and get their opponents off their games. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the most important games of all, which are the World Cup Qualifiers, where the whole point of having a home match is to make it as uncomfortable as possible for your opponents. You want to find a venue that maximizes your own team’s strengths and works to your favour. Some of the best examples of this are found in South America – Ecuador and Bolivia play their home matches high in the Andes to take advantage of the altitude; other nations try to take advantage of weather conditions or other unique characteristics. Away games at the highest level are meant to be hard.
And this notion which was completely lost in the U.S. for decades.
Mexico has always been the baddest dude on this particular block. They’ve dominated North American soccer for decades, and have developed both the reputation and attitude to accompany this. Along with some superior play on the field has come the creation of their own mystique: Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, which is, arguably, the greatest home-field advantage on earth. Combine 8,000 feet of altitude, searing heat, brutal smog and 105,000 fans and you have an absolute snakepit. The U.S., meanwhile, went years playing World Cup Qualifiers vs. El Tri in Los Angeles. This was done to maximize the gate receipts for the cash-strapped USSF. It was hard enough for the U.S. to compete with the Mexicans, but attempting to do so in a ‘home game’ where 90% of the fans are supporting the opposition made it almost impossible.
But in 2001, the U.S. decided to put a stop to this once and for all. They decided that, after years of being to Estadio Azteca (and an assortment of other difficult away games, as playing in Central America is tough stuff), it was time to create a home field advantage all of its own, and thus was born the once-every-four-years pilgrimage to Columbus – a place which has since become a house of horrors for El Tri. Columbus Crew Stadium is small, loud, the weather is usually terrible, and the crowd is 99% American. New American boss Jurgen Klinsmann, meanwhile, didn’t just stop at scheduling the Mexico qualifier in Columbus. A seasoned vet of football’s psychological wars, Klinsmann wanted to maximize the advantages when dealing with other CONCACAF opponents as well, which is how you end up with Costa Rica playing in a snowstorm at 5,280 feet of altitude in Denver:
The Ticos were miffed about this, of course, and made sure to play up their indignation in the run-up to the return match in San José, but they knew this was business as usual. Indeed, the U.S. and the Central American nations have been covert allies over the years in their quest to topple the Mexicans from the top of the totem pole, their contempt for El Tri exceeding their contempt for each other. An unforseen benefit of the growth of MLS has been that Central American and Caribbean players now have another option when it comes to playing professionally. The talent bases in Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama have grown considerably in the past two decades to boot.
But back to Columbus – Mexico has had no luck whatsoever winning there, or even coming close. All three previous qualifiers there ended U.S. 2:0 Mexico: Dos a Cero. No longer is U.S.-Mexico defined by American misery at Azteca, where the U.S. managed a draw this year, and where they won a friendly in 2012, nor is it defined by El Tri being doted upon by adoring fans in L.A. or Houston or Miami or even at RFK in D.C. Instead, it’s now defined by Dos a Cero. Throw in a second round game from Korea in 2002, which also ended Dos a Cero, and you’ve got the makings of a serious mindfuck going on here. And in a qualifying campaign in which the Mexicans are struggling mightily, a trip to Columbus and the reminder of the mystique of Dos a Cero was about the last thing they needed.
And then this happened last Tuesday in Columbus:
Dos a Cero.
The joke going around was that the U.S. missed a penalty on purpose at the end to preserve the Dos a Cero narrative. Pretty much every newspaper in two countries uttered the phrase Dos a Cero. It was clear from the events in Columbus, but also from the runup and the aftermatch, which of the two footballing powers in this region currently has the upper hand.
The LOSE loves the game of soccer, and finds the culture surrounding it to be fascinating. It pleases me to see how the game has grown in this country and how the U.S. has begun to assert itself at the game’s highest level. Is the U.S. ‘elite’ as such? No, but few nations are. The expectations for Brazil 2014 will be high – but they SHOULD be high. 25 years has seen the creation of a professional league that is now among the Top 10 in attendance worldwide (a fact which surprises almost everyone on all sides of the oceans), has seen the U.S. set the gold standard for organizing World Cups in 1994, compete decently at the World Cup level in 2002 and 2010. Not only is the U.S. now playing soccer at a high level, but its also acting like it belongs there.
As it stands right now in “the Hex,” the U.S. and Costa Rica have punched their tickets to Brazil, while Honduras stands in 3rd place and is in good position. Panama and Mexico are tied for 4th on points and goal difference, with Panama technically ahead on goals scored. 4th place in CONCACAF gets you a ticket to a home-and-home playoff with New Zealand, which will create some logistical issues all its own. There are two games left in the group. Mexico plays Panama at Azteca and then this delicious scenario presents itself – Mexico has to play at Costa Rica, while Panama hosts the U.S. The Ticos and the U.S. have nothing else to play for, mind you, but both of them would love to further add to the misery that is El Tri in 2013. I imagine Costa Rica will go hard in that game, but the U.S. against Panama? Hmmm … would the Americans, oh, you know, maybe not put in their best effort in that game if it means dumping the Mexicans out of Brazil? I don’t mean, you know, maybe bring some young players and not put out the strongest XI and, well, maybe if you get down 1:0 you sort of square pass and go through the motions a little bit and, well, maybe not close out the space on Panamanian players quite so aggressively as you may have …
Far be it from me to say the U.S. would tank that game. Tanking is generally frowned upon in this country. But let’s be honest here – Jurgen Klinsmann knows full well from his days playing for Germany that, had a similar situation arose in Europe, any team would’ve gone into the dumper if it knocked the Germans out in the process. Think Argentina would do anything to benefit the Brazilians? Ever? The next-best thing to a win is a loss by your biggest rival, and any effort (or lack thereof) which contributes to their failures is, in fact, almost expected.
It’s a delicious scenario, actually – Mexico’s fortunes potentially being dependent upon their closest rival. Indeed, the extent to which the U.S. has become a footballing culture may not ultimately be defined by a win as much as a convenient, well-timed defeat.
Part of what makes the notion of nemesis so compelling is that it so illogical. It simply makes no sense after awhile. Most notions of nemesis start out with the nemesis being a superior opponent, but over time that morphs into a psychological hang-up. Often times in sport, the nemesis IS NOT necessarily the better player/team on paper, but they have developed and thus possess a mental edge. They believe they are inherently superior – and the other side believes they are inferior, if not outwardly then as reflected by their play.
Which brings me to the game this past Saturday at the L.A. Coliseum as The Good Guys, fresh off a rather typically annoying and frustrating loss at Auburn the week before, had to face off against their ultimate nemesis on the gridiron. And to give you the full effect, you shall be required to click the following link after every paragraph of this entry and listen to the song in its entirety before continuing reading:
That is the single most annoying song in the history of sports, which is performed by the world's most overrated marching band every single time that the Trojans of U.S.C. make a positive play on the football field. And I do mean every single time. First downs, sacks, you name it.
That song's just insufferable, isn't it? Well, the perpetual firing up of Tribute to Troy is done, in part, to annoy the living hell out of their opponents. And when the U.S.C. band travels with the team to away games, they do the exact same thing. They held an alumni pep rally at Union Square in San Francisco the night prior to a game against either Stanford or Cal, I cannot remember which. At the time, I happened to be eating on the open-air terrace atop the Macy's, which is located on the square. The band played that fucking song 5-6 times and I wanted to throw stuff at them. I was not alone.
Their Pac-10 opponents (all of whom absolutely DETEST the Trojans and refer to the school as the University of Spoiled Children) have come up with ways to try and fend off this scourge – Cal fans have been known to sing "What a boring boring song ... what a boring boring song ..." while I think it may have been one of the Arizona schools' band which played the song either off-key or backwards everytime the Trojans misstepped on the field. But part of the problem is the Trojans have rarely misstepped. They have a pedigree to match few in the game, with Rose Bowls and National Championships and Heisman Trophy winners galore. They are the single-most glamourous team in the country, with Hollywood stars turning up on the sidelines and a lineup usually stacking with future NFL talent. And there is no team they've tormented more than the Cougars over the years.
Prior to Saturday's game, the Cougars sported an 8-57-4 all-time record against the Trojans. They hadn't beaten the Trojans since 2002, and during that time the average U.S.C. margin of victory was 33 points. This included the single-most embarrassing moment in the history of Cougar football – a 69:0 win by U.S.C. in 2008. In Pullman, no less. Believe it or not, that game was actually merciful – U.S.C. ran out the clock at the end of the first half up 41-0 and with the ball on the W.S.U. 10 yard line, and then scored 28 points in the second half while handing off to the 4th string RB and running basically two plays the entire time. The Cougars never even crossed midfield.
Another season, the fired up Cougars decided to try an onside kick to start the game against the #1 ranked Trojans. They kicked off from their own 35, needing the ball to travel 10 yards to try and recover the kick, but the kicker got overexcited and shanked the kick sideways and out of bounds – at their own 34. Yes, the kick traveled -1 yard. USC promptly thanked them for the field position by scoring in three plays. It was a long day.
Aha but there is dissension in the ranks of Troy! Last season, their talent-laden squad bombed out and finished only with a 7-6 record (they missed W.S.U. on the schedule, obviously). They were marred by internal bickering which turned into a general sense of disinterest as the season progressed. The Trojans didn't seem to care, which was a stinging indictment of the regime of U.S.C. head coach Lane Kiffin, who has entered this season on something of a hot seat.
Meanwhile, The Good Guys are still in rebuild mode here, but the loss to Auburn showed some progress. There is more talent and some tenacity, particularly on defense. A large part of overcoming the nemeses, ultimately, comes down to believing that you can actually do so. Even with their improvement, USC's uncertain QB play, and the Trojans' hangover from last season seeming to have carried over, the oddsmakers set the line for this game at USC -15½, and I doubt even the faithful members of the Zzu Crew were willing to take that bet.
We're a realistic lot, we Zzu Crewers. We want to see some progress. Losing all of the time means not taking yourselves all that seriously. It also means that, when you do fell the giant, it feels even better. The wins feel almost like they should count as two ...
USC displaying less-than-stellar QB play
What, no Tribute to Troy? What's with the silence? Indeed, there was little for the Trojan faithful to crow about on Saturday night, as U.S.C. mustered only 14 first downs and 193 total yards, never completed a pass for more than 7 yards, and had an interception returned 70 yards by W.S.U. for a TD. It was a rarity in contemporary football, a game where both defenses dictated the game. It was tied 7:7 late, but some nimble footwork by a Cougar receiver and some bad Trojan tackling turned a short pass into a 50-yard gain late, which set up a FG attempt:
The kick is good!
The final score is Washington State 10:7 Southern Cal and, instead of chanting along to Tribute to Troy, the fans were chanting "Fi-re Kif-fin!" as the Cougars were taking a knee to run out the clock. And while the LOSE believes that it's important to be gracious winners, an exception is made when it comes to beating U.S.C. And by shutting up that band for the better part of the evening, the Good Guys have not only won a football game, but done a yeoman's act of community service in reducing the level of noise pollution. And it's important to enjoy the moment. With an all-time record now at 9-57-4, the moment doesn't come that often.
And just in case you were missing the song after a few minutes of silence, honorary Coug for the Day Andy up in Ontario found this link. Consider yourself warned. We are not responsible. Sincerely, the management.
Carson Palmer running the Raiders famous no-offense huddle.
I never had much interest in fantasy sports. I root for teams, and not for players unless they happen to play for teams I like. And the whole idea of obsessing over statistics means nothing to me. The objective of the game is to win. When you’re playing a real game, you don’t give a shit who scores what. Trust me, you don’t. So long as your team scores more than the other, it doesn’t matter whether or not you score 2 TD’s or go 3-for-4 or grab 15 rebounds. You don’t care. You care a lot more if you lose, of course – “maybe we would’ve won if I hadn’t gone 0-for-10 from the floor.”
This is particularly true in football and basketball, both of which require you to figure out on the fly what’s working and what isn’t. It’s all about making adjustments. Sometimes the adjustment is “give the ball to the other guy.” Go back and watch the NCAA championship game from last spring, and watch how Louisville wins the game by putting Russ Smith, their best player about 30 feet from the basket for the entire second half – thus spreading the floor out and creating more individual matchups they could win. Russ Smith had, by his lofty standards, a pretty bad game, and while players hate underperforming, winning championships is a pretty good tonic.
My other reason for not playing fantasy sports is that I cannot bring myself to draft players from teams that I dislike. They are the enemy. I finished second the one time I played in a fantasy baseball league, which was a NL-only league, in part because I steadfastly refused to draft anyone who played for the Dodgers. I want the Dodgers to go 0-162 and get no-hit 159 times. The Dodgers had some pitching that year which I could’ve used on my fantasy team – my team wound up being mostly St. Louis Cardinals, if I remember correctly, but it didn’t pitch all that well – but I wouldn’t ever want a Dodger to succeed. I hate everything about the Dodgers. I remember having to hope for some Dodger wins over San Diego back in 2010, when the Padres and Giants were battling for a division title. It made me feel so unclean that I thought about going to confessional afterwards. So I don’t want no stinkin’ Dodgers or Yankees or Dallas Cowboys associated with me in any way, shape, or form.
Others are certainly welcome to partake if it brings them an enjoyment of the game, of course. And I did always make it a point to participate in a different sort of office wagering shenanigans – dead pools. Journalists are particularly macabre sorts, of course, and every newsroom has a dead pool. We certainly didn’t want people to die, but we definitely didn’t want it happening while we were working the desk, because a famous politico or celebrity dying just meant MORE WORK. (And you call it a deadline because someone famous is likely to croak 10 minutes before it, just causing you more misery as you scramble to redo the next day’s edition.)
Most sports departments I was involved in, meanwhile, had their own version of the deadpool – figure out who would be the WORST team in the league before the season began. And since I love bad football, the NFL Dead Pool was my personal favourite of these.
It’s actually somewhat tricky picking the worst team in the NFL, because for years the league has tried to emphasize parity. The NFL’s great weapon for doing this, for years, was the schedule matrix used to determine the following season’s opponents. Teams could bomb out one season, have a ludicrously easy schedule the next, and promptly be in playoff contention. (That doesn’t really happen so much anymore, as the 32-team matrix is much less fluid and more locked in from year to year.) And the great unknown in a football season, of course, is injuries. That often tips the scale from a not-very-good team becoming truly awful, as their depth is depleted, but that’s hard to predict.
And it’s also hard to gauge how low the bar will be. Some years 2-14 will win by two games in the standings. Last year there were a pair of 2-14 teams. Yeech. One of those, the Kansas City Chiefs, probably wasn’t that much on the radar of deadpoolers at the start of the season. There was some talent there, but not enough to be that competitive, but they shouldn’t have been that bad. The Chiefs seemed to take on an attitude of “let’s get the coach and everyone in the front office fired” as the year wore on, and they had about the most awful thing imaginable happen off the field that left the whole organization in a state of shock. They get a mulligan. I’ve seen 8-8 predictions for the Chefs, which I think might be a tad optimistic, but they’re not deadpool-worthy this year.
The other 2-14ers of 2012, the Jacksonville Jaguars, really are that awful. They capped off their season with this ignoble performance against the Tennessee Titans (another team which looks pretty bad here at the start of 2013). I’m not sure who they’ve added to improve the squad. To be honest, I’m not even sure why the Jags exist in the first place. But hey, Tim Tebow is available now. I’m sure JAX is contemplating signing the local hero in an effort at trying to convince the Gator Nation to drive up from Gainesville and fill their empty seats at their blacked-out home games.
The temptation is always there to pick the Arizona Cardinals in the deadpool, but the Cardinals are never quite bad enough. My buddy Adell and I used to call them the 5-and-dimes, both because their owners – the Bidwell family – were/are notorious cheapskates, and also because Arizona was usually 5-10 going into the last game of the season. But 5-11 isn’t gonna cut it in a deadpool. The Cardinals may be even worse this year than last, simply because they’ve got two burgeoning juggernauts in their division – the 49ers and the Seahawks – but they also have a good sleeper deadpool pick as well, which would be the St. Louis Rams, who overachieved last season but still don’t seem all that long on talent.
Some good bets from past years aren’t so good anymore. Houston and Cincinnati are, like, actual good teams (which is kind of scary to think about), and the Detroit Lions went 4-12 last year but seemed to invent ways to lose games. Surely, they’re going to grow out of that at some point. That, and maybe they’ll finally learn how to tackle someone. The mistakes on the lakes – Cleveland and Buffalo – are much better deadpool bets, since both franchises seem bereft of both talent and ideas.
But there is one clearcut #1 deadpool selection at the start of the season, and that would be the Raiders. Gads, what a mess. They have home games v. Jacksonville and Tennessee this year, and those are the only two games on the schedule I can see them winning. Carson Palmer threw for 4,000 yds. last year and usually seemed to be the only guy on the field who knew where he was supposed to be lined up. Now he’s in Arizona. There goes the offense. They have an unsettled QB situation, a RB that’s always hurt, they lack playmakers on the outside. For “competitive” reasons, they’ve not yet named a starting QB for this Sunday’s game with the Colts – who do, in fact, have a QB, and Andrew Luck’s gonna throw for a billion yards on that sieve of a Raiders’ defense. This team is terrible, the front office is a mess, the ownership situation is muddled. ‘Commitment to Excellence’ should be replaced by ‘Commitment to Incompetence,’ since I cannot recall a sound football decision made since they last went to the Super Bowl.
So with the 1st pick in the NFL Deadpool, gimme the Raiders. But I’m open to other nominations.
