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| Wait a minute, something is missing here ... |
The Lose has played 4-on-5 before. It is not pretty. You can do OK on defense, as you sink into something of a rhombus or a square and try to get them to shoot outside. Offense is where the problem comes – they can mark you up and leave a 5th guy free, either a little guy to scamper around and pickpocket you or, more commonly, a big guy to roam about the key and try to swat your shot to jesus. Fortunately, it usually does not last for very long, since it is likely near the end of the game when this occurs. And at first, it is something of a challenge that you embrace, but reality sets in pretty quickly. Credit to the Golden Eagles here, who very nearly sent the game to double OT. Kids will play hard under any circumstance. Never believe any college coach who claims the effort is not there. Kids will play hard under even the most hopeless of circumstances.
To the buzzard points!
• We all want Sepp Blatter gone. He is up for reëlection as head of FIFA this spring, and we fans of the beautiful game can all agree that the organization is bloated, corrupt, and in desperate need for reform. Unfortunately, we are not the ones doing the voting. It’s the heads of the FAs from the 210 members who do the voting. Three candidates have come forth to challenge Blatter in the election – Portuguese footballing great Luis Figo, Dutch FA bigwig Michael van Praag, and Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who appears to be the most viable opposition candidate. The Americans want Blatter gone, the Brits want him gone, and the Europeans want him gone as well – but that is only about 55 votes. So where are the other votes going to come from?
To get some insight into this predicament, consider the two recent confederation championships which took place. First up was the Asian championship, taking place in Australia and won by the home side in a 2:1 victory over South Korea after extra time which certainly was entertaining and thrilling for the home fans, if not necessarily all that well played. Well-played football seems to have gone missing on the continent of late – Asian sides took 3/36 available points at the last World Cup, and there was not a single team ranked in the Top 50 in the world at the start of the tourney in Australia. Asian federations have been a big benificiary of FIFA's global initiatives to grow the game. FIFA is awash with cash, and Uncle Sepp has been a big proponent of grants and other financial incentives to help the rest of the world catch up to the Europeans and South Americans. This has made him many friends, of course, but if there has been any major improvement on the field, it sure was not evident in Australia. (The prime exception being the Chinese, who have decided to make a concerted effort to get corruption and other nonsense out of the game, and promptly won their group in Australia.) FIFA has kept the euros flowing, but who knows where they have gone. So, even with an Asian representative up for election, he is unlikely to mine many votes out of his own confederation.
And then there is Africa. Welcome back to the mess. A quick summary of the CAF's African Cup of Nations:
– The tourney was originally scheduled for Morocco, but the hosts wanted to delay the tourney due to concerns about Ebola – a somewhat odd request, since one of the quarantined nations, Guinea, was playing their home qualifiers in Morocco.
– CAF refuses the reschedule, yanks the tourney away from Morocco, fines them a total of $10 million and throws the Moroccans out of the 2015 tourney and the next two AFCONs after that.
– Needing to find a new host in a hurry, CAF settles on Equatorial Guinea, who have plenty of time on their hands because they have been thrown out of qualifying for fielding ineligible players. (Stop me if you think that you have heard this one before.)
– The host nation, ranked 118th in the world, rises up and reaches the quarterfinals, where they face a Tunisia side rated 90 places higher. Tunisia has a 1-0 lead late in stoppage time, an Equatoguinean flops in the box and a penalty is given. Calling it a soft penalty would be an affront to softness. The hosts convert, leveling the score and sending it on to extra time, at which point an Equatoguinean player flops again and a free kick is awarded – which is expertly taken, I must admit, and which gives the hosts the lead. The Tunisians are incensed, and a fight ensues between the two benches which has to be broken up by security forces. At the close of the game, a 2:1 upset win for the hosts, the Tunisian players promptly chase the Mauritian referee off the field and down the tunnel as he is hurried away by security forces.
– CAF fines the referee $50,000, suspends him six months and, probably more importantly, delists him, meaning he will likely never work in international football. They also fine the Tunisians $50,000 for nearly starting a riot. The Tunisian FA's response is to have their head guy resign from the CAF board and openly state that the match was fixed. CAF then threatens to kick the Tunisians out of the next AFCON in 2017 unless they apologize.
– In the semifinals, the hosts are playing Ghana in Malabo and the referee isn't having any nonsense. He awards a penalty to the Black Stars late in the first half after denying endless foolish appeals from the home side for fouls. This outrages everyone, even though he was kind in not sending off the Equatoguinean keeper, who probably deserved it. Ghana scores twice in quick succession, taking a 2-0 lead at half, at which point the fans start throwing water bottles onto the pitch. The players have to be escorted off the pitch under cover of riot police shields. In the second half, Ghana scores again to make it 3-0, at which point all hell breaks loose. The Ghanaian fans leave the stands and take refuge on the athletics track encircling the pitch. There are water bottles, stones, pieces of shattered mirrors, pieces of stair and all sorts of other debris being flinged out of the stands. The players are all standing in the center of the pitch, that being the only place safe in the whole building, as riot police charge into the stands and police helicopters buzz the stadium, chasing away spectators.
– For this chaotic mess, CAF fines Equatorial Guinea only $100,000. They should, by all rights, not be allowed to play a home match before spectators, but CAF allows the 3rd-place game in Malabo to go ahead anyway. It's a slap on the wrist. (To make matters worse, I now read that the president of Equatorial Guinea has pardoned all 150 or so people who were arrested during the mayhem.) It's a disgraceful scene all around.
– The final of this tourney was appropriately daffy, a 0:0 draw between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire which went to penalties. Many African Cup of Nations finals go that route, since after six games with quick turnarounds in 95° heat, the players have almost nothing left in the tank. This penalty shootout went 11 rounds before Côte d'Ivoire won on a goal from their goalkeeper – and their backup goalkeeper, no less, who had been pressed into service when their regular #1 suffered an injury. It was a terrific win for the Elephants, but the whole tournament was an exercise in Theatre of the Absurd.
CAF president Issa Hayatou put forth this gem of a response when asked about the Malabo upheaval during a press conference:
"The press always dramatise, particularly the western press. When something bad happens in Europe, they say it's an error. When something happens in Africa, they begin talking about corruption. What happened in that [abondoned 2012] match between Serbia and Italy? It's the same as what happened here, but when it's Africa it's different. It's irrelevant that it's a semifinal. It's a football match. The western media are simply here to perpetuate colonisation."
Uh ... huh?
And what does Uncle Sepp think? He being on hand for the final in Bata, he offered up this rambling response:
"Good news is no news, bad news is news. We only talk about the bad. Football – which is such a good thing – let it live, leave it in peace, it's well organised, let them do it. I don't see the negative side of African football that the media presents. It's normal, we criticise what's good, never what's bad. The unhappy role of the media is to assume and to forecast. In the past, the government made a decision and the media passed it on. Today, we make decisions and the media have already presented it. We become slaves to the media who have already given an opinion. The media can play a role, must play a role, but they must play a role where the notions of respect and fair play are the basics. Today the world opens the newspapers, watches television, and sees only murders and killing. We never talk about princesses marrying any more."
Welcome to Uncle Sepp's Fantasyland.
And as you may have guessed, CAF members are among Blatter's biggest supporters. He wasn't about to bad mouth them, even though the greatest showcase of the continent had turned into an ungodly mess. Nope, you're not going to find any no votes on that continent.
So good luck getting rid of Sepp Blatter. That is two giant federations who will likely bloc vote to keep him in power. We appear to be stuck with him for the forseeable future. It will be interesting to see what comes about in 2017, when FIFA awards the 2026 World Cup. The Americans are the logical choice as hosts, but the Americans are also leading the charge to get rid of Sepp, and he is known to have a bit of a vindictive streak in him. Then again, there is still the possibility that FIFA is keeping the Americans in reserve if/when the Qatar thing fizzles. The politics of football seem to be growing even more murky.
• Speaking of Qatar, Friend of The Lose journalist Stefan Fatsis wrote this piece for Slate about the recently-concluded world championships of team handball which touch place in the country. The article is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the home nation, who went out and bought a team for the event, and even bought some spectators as well. (Nor is the piece a ringing endorsement of handball, whose internal politics make FIFA look angelic.) It paints a less-than-rosy picture of the nation's ability to host an international event as massive as the World Cup. Now, The Lose has no axe to grind with Qatar, which is a small country that has achieved a remarkable amount of prosperity and success in a short period of time. It's just that this World Cup proposal makes no sense, and never has made any sense. The original plans called for building stadia in cities that don't even exist yet. Where are they going to put a million visitors, or more? And doing this in June, when temperatures reach 125° in the nation, is nuts. They insist they can air condition the stadia, but what fan zones? That is where the real danger from the heat actually lies. In order to believe this proposal, you must first suspend disbelief. Organizers insist they are going to pull this off, and insist the constant allegations of corruption are merely sour grapes. I cannot help but be skeptical.
• Why is George Karl coaching the Sacramento Kings? George has always been at his best working on the fringes of the NBA – he was a huge success in Seattle, Milwaukee, and Denver – but taking this job is a head-scratcher. Now, for the purposes of full-disclosure, The Lose made no bones about the belief that this franchise would be better suited being relocated to Seattle, and also admitted that I used to be a former season ticket holder in Seattle. That being said, I believed it was the right move for the long-term benefit of the franchise. A healthy franchise in a rich market, backed by the richest ownership group in the history of sports, would have a far more likely chance to thrive and grow and succeed over the long term.
Instead, the Kings are still in Sacramento and now owned by Vivek Ranadivé, who has acted like something of a nutjob. He fired coach Mike Malone after an 11-13 start, saying that he wasn't playing an attractive enough style of basketball, then replaced him with NBA lifer/retread coach Tyrone Corbin, at which point the Kings started playing much flashier and attractive ball – if your definition of 'attractive' involves losing all the time. Now they've fired Corbin and hired Karl.
The Lose giggled a bit when I was reading some of the local press, back in 2013, talking about how great it would be to have new ownership of the Kings. They would have a tricked out building, they would be able to spend money on free agents, yadda yadda yadda. Anyone who thinks that Sacramento is ever going to be an attractive destination for free agents is a fool. (I have written about this before as well.) The Kings rose to relevance and prominence early this millennium through keen draft research and savvy trades. They have consistently whiffed on both fronts since then, are now laden with strange, unfitting pieces and bad contracts and a superstar, DeMarcus Cousins, who is toiling away in obscurity and counting down the days until he can leave. The franchise may have a new arena coming in a few years, but so what? Everyone has gotten a new arena recently, even the most awful franchises in sports. That revenue, in and of itself, is not going to make you any better, and is not going to bring a franchise back to life.
The Lose resists engaging in schadenfreude whenever possible, but it's going to be really difficult to do that in a few years, when the Cousins-less Sacramento Kings are still terrible, and when the Kevin Durant-less OKC Blunder are losing 55 games and drawing 10,000 people. At that point, the NBA will have two dead franchises on their hands. Franchises can change course, of course, but the former continues to be incompetent and the latter continues to be cheap and not particularly bright, having squandered their chance to win an NBA championship and then made the horrible James Harden trade.
And I cannot for the life of me understand why George Karl would want to get back into coaching bad enough to take a job coaching the Kings. At least his previous stops had some talent and creativity in their midsts, very little of which is apparent over in the Central Valley. Now, if anyone can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Sacto, it would be Karl, but this seems like to much for even his ample magical abilities to pull off.
• Basketball lost a couple of its greatest minds this past week with the deaths of Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian. The Lose's dislike of the notion of the college basketball coach is well-documented, but these are two guys who I always admired. The former was professorial, the latter more of a used car salesman. The two of them plied their trades mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, when college basketball was somewhat crazy – the buildings were weird, the coaches were out of their minds, the strategies were wildly variant, and the games could be 42-40 one day and 100-98 the next.
The best compliment that I could ever give Dean Smith is that his players always made great pros, because they were so well-prepared and fundamentally sound that the transition to the next level often seemed seamless. They could play so slow as to sufficate the clock and drive you crazy – remember, it was after N.C. froze out Virginia 47-45 in a #1-#2 matchup that the NCAA moved to add a shot clock – but then his teams could also run and gun, and they could motion offense you to death if they wanted. Whatever game you wanted to play, North Carolina was better at it than you were.
As for Jerry Tarkanian, I met him once at a speaking engagement, and he was hysterically funny. How could you not want to play for that guy? He coached the greatest team I've ever seen which didn't win a championship, the 1991 team that went undefeated during the regular season and lost to Duke in the national semifinals, and his first truly great team – a 1977 unit that reached the Final Four and averaged 110 pts. a game – completely changed the way the game was played from then on. Tarkanian also fought the NCAA for years – and won – and called them out for being selfish hypocrites long before it was fashionable to do so.
The game of college basketball, which is mired in sluggish play and manned by cookie cutter CEO coaches on the sidelines, could use both Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian right now – one to actually make individual players better in all phases, and the other to make the game fun again.
• Finally, The Lose is a worldly sort who likes all sorts of sports, and certainly likes seeing them done well, and so I'll definitely be paying attention here to the ICC World Cup 2015 taking place in Australia and New Zealand. Yes, cricket. I have played cricket before and rather enjoyed it. I find Test matches dry as tea in the Sahara, but the 1-day format of the ICC World Cup suits my short attention span ... wait, what was I talking about? Lest you sneer at cricket, keep in mind that the grudge match on Saturday ... or was it Sunday, what the hell time is it in Australia? ... between India and Pakistan was thought to be the most watched cricket match in history, with over 1,000,000,000 people tuning in. That's a lot of zeroes. This is serious business. (India won, by the way, continuing their World Cup mastery of their rivals.) The host Aussies are the favourites, and England got thrashed by the hosts in a sorry display certain to draw the ire back home. The Lose needs to find some appropriate rooting interests. I always have a soft spot for Bangladesh, of course, and I will root for Ireland in almost any sport. The up-and-comers in the sport are apparently from Afghanistan, who are thought to be quite talented and wildly inconsistent. Yep, there is my team to root for right there.
