The OG

I don’t even … what the …

“Look, football is cruel. Moments change matches. And sometimes, not always the best team wins. Sometimes you don’t get what you deserve.”
              
– Mark Sampson, Head Coach of England Women’s National Team

ONE of the many peculiarities about soccer which makes it both intriguing and maddening is the fact that, for a game in which it’s so damn hard to score, it’s comparatively easy to score on yourself. This happens exponentially more regularly in soccer than in any other sport. Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings did this, of course, and no play epitomized the 0-16 Detroit Lions more than Dan Orlovsky doing this. You might see the odd basketball tipped in by a defender. Own goals can occur in hockey, of course, but are still quite rare. Occasionally, you pull the goalie and thus empty the net – during a delayed penalty, or going with six skaters late in the game – and the worst thing imaginable then happens, or occasionally something completely ridiculous will occur. The most dubious of these was in 1986, in Game 7 of a Stanley Cup playoff series between Edmonton and Calgary, when the Oilers’ Steve Smith put it in his own net and it proved to be the series-deciding goal.

But those are oddball one-offs. Scan the scorelines at the end of any weekend in the EPL and you’re likely to see 2-3 goals listed as ‘og’ in the boxes. There have been five own goals during the Women’s World Cup already, including Angie Ponce of Ecuador doing it twice in the same game. She also scored on a penalty in that match, thus converting one of the most unique hat tricks in history, but not the uniquest by any stretch: Belgium’s Stan van den Buys has her beat, and Sunderland once managed to score on itself three times in seven minutes. Point is, own goals happen all the time in soccer. It’s part of the game.

But no own goal in history was ever quite like what we saw on Wednesday in Edmonton, during the Women’s World Cup semifinal between Japan and England, when Lioness’ defender Laura Bassett steered one into her own net deep into stoppage time with the score level at 1-1, mere seconds from the end of regulation, thus sending the Lionesses out of the tournament with a 2:1 defeat in probably the most shocking, heartbreaking fashion I could ever imagine.

Which, for England, is saying something, since they’ve turned the act of crushing defeat into something of an art form. England have lost more penalty shootouts – six – than any other footballing nation on earth. It’s become something of a national joke. There have even been scientific studies commissioned about it, just because it seems so implausible that, in a format which seems something of a lottery or a dice roll, England somehow always turn up snake eyes. And even when they don’t get knocked out of the World Cup on penalties, England finds a way to make their exits memorable – be it the Hand of God in 1986, David Seaman forgetting to jump in 2002, or the fact that they won 3, drew 2, lost none, had a goal difference of +5 and still managed to be eliminated in 1982. (I’m serious.) But this latest in a long line of English footballing failures – this time on the women’s side – did something that may have seemed unthinkable. It even knocked the snark out of the Fleet St. press.

The stage for England’s 1998 exit from the World Cup was set when, mere seconds after the second half had begun in a 2-2 game with Argentina, David Beckham got baited and lashed out at an Argentine and got himself thrown out of the game. England had to play with 10 men from there and wound up losing on penalties. Now, never mind that it was a marginal call, if not a terrible one. Personally, I think it’s crap, but I also think Beckham was stupid. And never mind also that England played pretty well with 10 men for 60+ minutes, actually had a goal disallowed and then shanked two penalties in the shootout. In the eyes of the British press (and the public, who easily form these opinions), England’s loss was due entirely to the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl losing his head. They even burned him in effigy. It was a ridiculous sort of overreaction, but when you carry the badge of being the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl, the verdict has already been made for you. I have no doubt that, had that been John Terry blootering an attempted clearance into his own goal at 92’ of a World Cup semifinal instead of Laura Bassett, he would have been absolutely crucified in the press and online.

But as I say, the Lionesses toil in anonymity. This tournament has their best performance ever on a larger stage, and they play with great tenacity and organization and combative spirit – traits which will always ingratiate you to the British footballing fans (or fans anywhere, for that matter). That they seem to have the same trait for colossal disaster at the end of World Cup knockout matches as their male counterparts is, well, problematic, but they’ve earned a lot of cred. This is a likable lot of gals who the Brits have come to be fond of, they’ve spurred legitimate interest in the women’s game back home, and them managing to lose in the most awful way conceivable hasn’t undone the good cred they’ve built up. (Of course, when they inevitably lose on penalties to the Germans in 2019, well, all bets are off.)

England were not the favourites against Japan, although people who were saying they were not the favourites were apparently not paying much attention to what was happening on the pitch during the tournament, since the Lionesses were going about knocking out the hosts and duking it out with the French (who should’ve tanked, but we’ll get to that some other time), while Japan was sleepwalking their way through about the easiest tourney schedule imaginable, playing one World Cup debutant after another. England were arguably the better team against Japan – their physical play knocked the Japanese out of their usual rhythm, they outshot Japan 15-7, and they hit the woodwork several times. But as we’ve seen time and again, being the better team in football doesn’t necessarily matter. What a stupid game. Why do we put up with this shit?

‘Bassett 92 og’

I saw that in the scoreline and thought to myself, “oh, dear god, what have you done?” And then I saw the replay and couldn’t believe what I just saw. It’s the defenders’ worst nightmare, of course – you’re turned towards goal, scrambling to cover space, you have to make a play and the ball caroms crazily. Own goals are usually either the product of defenders actively trying to do the right thing and make a play on the ball, or by getting in the way of a shot or a cross and having it ricochet off them. They’re not trying to do that. (Unless you’re in Madagascar, of course. And now I’ve moved one step closer to mentioning all 209 FIFA members on earth in the context of this blog.) I still remember, from my last year of playing organized soccer, our team losing a game 1:0 on an own goal at around the 85’ mark. I dove left to make a save on a fairly harmless shot, our defender lunged to his right to make a block, the ball pinballed off his shin and went exactly where I’d been standing a second earlier. Now, as the captain of this bunch, I had to put on the proper air of authority after the match – we lose as a team, we lost because we didn’t score, blah blah blah. But of course, I was also thinking, “god damn it Kyle, why did you do that?” We managed to score on ourselves thrice that season, including our central defender doing it twice, one of which being a rocket from 20 yards into the top left corner that was maybe the best shot on goal we had all year. Too bad it was the wrong goal. (We made him a center forward after that, pointing him in the opposite direction.)

And you have to laugh about it, in the end. It’s all that you can do. Own goals are, by nature, ridiculous. They’re about as far away from the desired effect as you can possibly get in the game. If you’re going to play football, and you’re going to play defense, it’s probably going to happen to you at some point or another:

This was not Vincent Kompany’s finest hour

Oh, Liverpool, what are you doing?

Go online and you can find all sorts of gifs and videos like these. They are acts of high comedy, of impressive and well-meaning incompetence, and they happen more often than you might think throughout the course of a footballing season. But ‘Bassett 92 og’ didn’t occur in some Sunday club match. No, it happened on the game’s biggest stage, at the biggest moment in the history of the English players’ careers. Other players, past and present, were quick to offer words of encouragement. “Don’t let this one play define your career.” But of course it’s going to define your career. How could it not? Moments do, in fact, change matches. I mentioned before how my clubbers gave up three own goals. All three cost us results – two of those matches wound up draws, and the third was a 1:0 loss. In a sports where, on average, fewer than three goals are scored in a game, giving up any sort of a goal is potentially disastrous, much less doing it to yourself.

And, of course, you cannot talk about own goals without talking about the World Cup of 1994. Like most everything in soccer, it’s only funny until it isn’t. One of the greatest wins in U.S. history, 2:1 over Colombia, was due in part to an own goal by Andrés Escobar, who paid the ultimate price for this mistake when he was murdered in Medellin after the Colombians – thought to be a favourite to win the tourney – had been ousted early from the event. It’s one of the saddest moments in the game’s history. What should have been one of the greatest moments in American soccer – a huge upset by a young team which helped springboard American soccer success – feels forever tarnished. And blaming Escobar for the loss was nonsense, of course. The own goal came at 35’ and made it only 1-0, so the Colombians had plenty of time to equalize, but they got flat-out outplayed, as the U.S. made it 2-0 and had a third goal disallowed. The Americans were simply the better team that day, but Escobar – their captain and their leader – made for a convenient scapegoat.

Players from both sides have said they’re haunted by the memories 20+ years on. It took the Colombians 20 years to recover from that moment –  the game more or less fell apart on all levels in the country, and they did not return to the World Cup until Brazil in 2014. Like everything else in Colombia at the time, control of the game had fallen into the hands of the drug cartels. (The Two Escobars is a terrific documentary on the subject.) Soccer wasn’t safe, it wasn’t an escape. But it never is, in the end. We like to think of sports as an escape from real life, but part of why the game of soccer is so impossible to ignore is that the cruelty and unfairness inherent to the game mirrors real life, and sometimes comes to symbolize it.

Fortunately, common sense and an appreciation of absurdity prevail in the case of the game from Wednesday in Edmonton. It was a fluke and it was weird and it was nuts, and anyone who has ever played the game can empathize. Laura Bassett was understandably inconsolable after the match, but it wasn’t the only mistake of the match. It was simply the last mistake, the one from which there was no return. Consolation matches in World Cups are always dreadful for the players – your hopes and dreams have been crushed into dust, and yet you have to go out there and play another match amid the disappointment – but it’s also an opportunity for a side to go out on a positive note. The game doesn’t have to suck. Given the way they’ve played, I imagine the Lionesses will put in a good effort against the Germans. My hope is that the Lionesses prevail and Laura Bassett scores one in the process. For her own side this time. The footballing gods owe her one.