The Love of the Irish

On The Ball City!

I’M ALWAYS ripping stuff on this blog, and there are lots of reasons right now to do so. We have the Warriors gagging away an NBA championship and tarnishing a historic season, we have an utterly inept performance by USA FC against Argentina in the Copa América Centenario semifinals, we have a performance by El Tri in the Copa quarterfinals against Chile so heartless and pathetic that it made the Americans look competent, and I should kill Baylor and the whole of the NCAA at some point here soon, and if I ever start writing about the bastion of bombast and largesse and corruption that is the upcoming Rio Olympics, I may never stop. So much lose, so little time. But right now, it’s important that we turn away from hate and skepticism and scorn, instead embracing love after Wednesday’s events at the Euros in France.

When it comes to international football, I generally root for the Dutch. They play brilliant football, and their propensity for losing dramatically, and doing so in memorable, critically-acclaimed fashion, is in keeping with my general life ethos. But the Dutch threw up all over themselves and didn’t even qualify for the Euros. I’m also somewhat naturally inclined to lean towards the Belgians, of course, and the Belgians have a stunning collection of talent this year, but they’re coached extremely badly and can be maddeningly frustrating to watch, so right now Belgium isn’t doing it for me. But there is one team in the competition in France who has held my heart for years, and after Wednesday, it’s necessary for me to re-up and reëstablish my longstanding, albeit intermittent, membership in the Irish football supporters union, a membership which dates back to this time 26 years ago …

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It’s June of 1990, I’m 21 years old and I’m in Dún Laoghaire, a seaside town and seaport south of Dublin whose name you can’t pronounce correctly. I’ve spent a week circling the Emerald Isle, going all the way down to Killarney and up the West Coast, stopping off for some lobsters and some glorious Celtic music in the pubs of the small town of Doolin, a gateway to the Aran Islands and one of the most soulful spots on the earth, then cutting through the center of the country on the way back to Dublin, all the while being chased by the rain, because it’s Ireland and it rains approximately 398 days a year there. But this particular day is perfect, or as close to perfect as you can imagine. It’s got to be 75° on the east coast of Ireland, if not more, the sun is shining and it’s absolutely glorious and I’m not looking forward to what promises to be a particularly boring trip: a 4½ hour ferry ride from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, Wales, followed by an insufferable, 7½ hour overnight train ride to London, followed by a Tube trek across town to Liverpool St. Station, followed by 2 more hours on a train to Norwich. Bo-ring! The novelty of passing through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch wore off when I made the westward part of this trip, when I was still excited for the vacation exploits to come and everything was fascinating. The trip back to Norwich is shaping up to be little more than a dreadfully dull, overnight slog.

So I’m boarding the ferry, making my way up the ramp and generally feeling immersed in my usual, 21-year-old ennui, when I hear the roar behind me. The thunderous roar. I turn to look and I witness the coming storm. I see the mob moving my way, I hear and feel the thunder and the sound.

“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”

Making its way towards the Dún Laoghaire ferry terminal is a mass of humanity dressed in various shades of green. A few of them are dressed in the green and white hoops of Glasgow’s Celtic F.C.,  but the majority of them are wearing jerseys from the Irish national football team, who will be making their debut World Cup appearance in Italy in a few days’  time. The fans are in full voice, and their chants of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” rattle and resonate and shake.

I come to discover that they number 2,000. I’m going to spend the next 4½ hours on a boat with 2,000 Irish football fans who are embarking on the journey of a lifetime: a ferry to Holyhead, a train to London, another train to Dover, a ferry to Calais, and then a train to Paris, and a train to Marseille, and then yet another ferry headed to Sardinia, yes, Sardinia because Ireland’s first match is against England and is taking place in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, because this is still the age of hooliganism, you see, and the Italian World Cup organizers’ plan for coping with the possibility of English hooligans was to pen the mass of English supporters on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean for the duration of the first round of the tourney. It’s something like a 31-hour journey for these 2,000 faithful supporters, who’ve bought this travel package from the Irish F.A. because 31 hours of train and boat travel is still cheaper than 4-5 hours on an aeroplane. These are working people, blue-collar people who don’t have a whole lot of money and they’ve been scrounging, saving up and putting away their Irish pounds from the moment that the Irish officially qualified for the tourney.

I appear to be on a booze cruise for the next 4½ hours. Welcome to the mess.

Now, consider the situation here. It’s a perfect day in Dún Laoghaire. It’s absolutely perfect. I’ve spent the afternoon hiking with my sister to some waterfalls at a lavish country estate, enjoying the bright sunshine. It is truly a perfect day that could get no better. And if you're a young Irishman, and it’s the first day of your dream vacation, and it’s a perfect, 75° day in a pleasant seaside town, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to a restaurant or a bar or a café and DRINK BEER! Duh! All of these guys are smashed.

So not only am I now being approached by a mob of 2,000 strong, but these guys all have clearly been drinking since about noon. And I do mean “guys.” It’s probably 85% males, with a few interminably patient wives and girlfriends interspersed. Young people, mostly: early to late 20s, early 30s, most of them pasty pale and insanely excited for spending several weeks on the beaches of the Italian isles, as their other two matches are taking place in Palermo on the island of Sicily. You can feel the testosterone dripping as they board the ship and begin filtering into the deck where I’ve selected a seat. It verges on overwhelming. This ship of fools desperately needs some girls.

Enter 300 catholic school girls.

This is a natural wonder of the world to my 21-year-old eyes. The scenery just dramatically improved, and this trip is getting better and better.

Not only do we have 2,000 Irish football fans headed to Italy on this booze cruise, but we also have 300 recently graduated catholic high school girls, all of them wearing their cute catholic high school uniforms and short catholic high school girl skirts, who are heading off to Berlin on a graduation trip, and who are loud in their distinctly 18-year-old girl sorts of ways, so between them and the 2,000 fans chanting “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” in 5-minute intervals, the decibel level on board is verging on ear piercing.

But you cannot help but feel a bit uplifted amid all of this enthusiasm, as its contagious and whatever nonsense neurosis it is that is getting you down starts ebbing away. And if it grows too loud, there is always sticking in the earphones and slipping a cassette tape into my walkman. (Yeah, I know, I’m dating myself. Deal with it.)

And we’ve not even left Dún Laoghaire, mind you. The boat is rocking and raucous and we’re still moored in the Irish seaport. And since this is an international voyage, as we’re trekking across the Irish Sea tonight, there is a nice duty free store on board, where is where I promptly went upon boarding and picked myself up a bottle of Irish usquebae and a 10-pack of Drum. And you can imagine what any self-respecting Irishman who has been drinking since noon, and who has a 31-hour trip ahead of them, is going to do upon boarding this ship: invade the duty free store. The fans overrun the store and they buy every ounce of liquor in the place – cases and cases of Guinness and Harp, bottle after bottle of Jamesons, and then they even buy up the expensive stuffs, the scotches and the cognacs and the champagnes and the like. The store is completely overwhelmed by the masses, who spend freely and frenzily and they clean the store out. It’s picked so clean that you might need to check it for dental records.  Everyone on board is thus well-prepared for the long journey ahead.

But then we embark, at which point there is an announcement over the loud speaker for those going on the “football train” once we reach Holyhead, the special train that the Irish F.A. has chartered: there will be no alcohol permitted on the train. This is met with considerable consternation from the masses, as well as a not insignificant amount of profanity. But the Irish are a pragmatic and resourceful people at heart, and when life gives you lemons, you’d better make some lemonade. So what do you do in this situation? It’s an ingenious, 2-part solution:

1. Drink as much as you can before you reach the British shore.
2. Give the rest of it away.

And again, let me reiterate: there are 2,000 Irish football fans on this boat, all of whom are drunk, all of whom now have too much alcohol on their person, a good number of whom are hell-bent on drinking themselves to the point that they’ll be passed out for the entirety of their train ride to London, and a good number more who come to the realization very quickly that drinking all of the alcohol they’ve just purchased over the next 4½ hours is likely to result in them being dead. There is more available alcohol on the premises than I have ever seen, and the Irish football fans are giving it away! It’s not more than two minutes after we’ve embarked for Holyhead that a guy wanders up to me where I’m sitting, which is near to the front of this particular deck of the ship, and he pulls out a can of Guinness from the flat he’s carrying.

“Want a beer?”

Is there a more precious, cherished phrase in the English language to a 21-year-old college student?

And this is happening everywhere. Guys are going around the deck and offering alcohol to everyone. They are offering it to the rank-and-file passengers, most of whom accept with a modest shrug and a toast. They offer it to the collection of 300 catholic school girls as well, most of whom are somewhat pensive, at first, and also somewhat giggly, but most of whom are willing to oblige, only to be discouraged the first time around by their stern and stony-faced chaperones. I take him up on this offer, and I toast with the guy, grateful for the free beer.

“You’re not Irish,” he states in a thick brogue after hearing me speak.
“American.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Come and meet me mates,” he suggests, gesturing with a tip of his head. “We’re in the corridor.”
“Should I bring the whiskey and the Drum?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”

Well, what the hell?

And this boat is filled to capacity, mind you. Every seat would be taken if people were actually bothering to take a seat – but no one is taking a seat, because everyone who has a case or two of beer they need to get rid of before Holyhead is sitting on the floor. The floorspace on the decks and in the corridors is packed so tight with people that you’re stepping over them if you want to get to the washrooms.

So I take up some floor space with a group from Cork and hold court, because I’m the American kid from Los Angeles and everyone knows of Los Angeles and Hollywood and California, and they want to know more about it, and even though I’ve had generally a miserable time living in Los Angeles, I can’t help but speak fondly of the place, so fondly that I actually start to think that it’s pretty good. And I’m hanging out with a cross-section of the Cork working class – there are farmhands and lorry drivers and dock workers and ‘students,’ the term being a catch-all to describe intellectually driven young people who don’t have a job and don’t have a clue what they’re going to do with their lives. And every 10 minutes or so we have to break into another rendition of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” And I’m learning Irish football songs in English, and learning songs in Gaelic, and mangling songs in Gaelic, as I am popping open another Guinness and passing around my bottle of whiskey while repeatedly dipping into my packs of Drum, because at this point in my British educational experience I can hand roll a cigarette in seconds flat.

And we talk football, of course. One of Ireland’s best players, Andy Townsend, plies his trade for Norwich City, so my sworn allegiance to the Canaries scores me points with the locals. The coach is an Englishman, and virtually all of the Irish players have, in fact, grown up in Britain and simply possess lineage qualifying them for Irish passports. No matter. They have sworn their allegiance and donned the green shirt, and thus they may as well have been born in Donegal. The fans are alternately brash and realistic about their side’s chances, chirping of how they’re going to smash the English at one minute and then, a minute later, hoping they can sneak their way out of the group and into the knockout phase. The Irish national team are tough, tenacious, clever and resourceful, much like the island nation that they represent even though almost all of them have grown up playing the English game. They’re “our lads,” just as I am rapidly becoming one of “our lads” even though I have an American passport.

And it’s not long after I’ve sat down with my new friends that a few of the school girls start filtering in from the corridor, eluding the watchful eyes of the chaperones, and then a few more of them start filtering in, and a few more, and a few more after that. They sit down and join in the fun and they’re immediately the life of the party, of course, because they’re impossibly charming and delightful and gorgeous and you cannot help but fall in love with them immediately. Eventually, some of the chaperones pass through the corridor, stumbling through the area and stepping over all of us, but they don’t bother to scold or admonish the girls, because the girls are in good hands. They’re safe. Nothing is going to happen to them. It’s a mass of humanity they’ve become engulfed in, but it’s respectful and it’s protective. The Berlin-bound girls have been indoctrinated into the footballing faithful now. They’re part of “us.” And since there is no cause for concern, some of the chaperones feel free enough to pull up some floor space here in the corridor and accept the offer of a free can of Guinness or two. Or three. Or four …

And when I rise and move about the ship, I simply venture over to another party, another group of football fans from Tipperary or Sligo or Limerick, and settle in and have a drink and roll a few more smokes and sing a few more football songs. Periodically, you have to get up and dance around the ferry and shout “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” because of course you have to do that.

Eventually, I’m completely hammered and doing a conga line throughout the deck of the ferry singing “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” with my hands on the hips of one of those catholic school girls – all of whom were forgoing alcohol at first but who are now fully engaging in the practice – and this act of corrupting a young person doesn’t bother me at all, because behind me in the conga line is one of the chaperones of the Berlin trip, some charming 40-something year old mum from Dublin who is shouting and screaming and getting on her gigue and declaring that her boring 40-something husband back in Dublin can get stuffed. We’re all drunk, we’re all nuts, we’re losing our minds and we’re all Irish. We’re Irish, everyone of us, and the lads in green are going off to Italy and they’re going to conquer the world!

But are they really going to conquer the world? The Irish have a tough group after all. England have their best team in years, the Dutch are the current European champions, the Egyptians are the best team in Africa. And the competition isn’t simply contained to La Favorita in Palermo and Stadio Sant’Elia in Cagliari, but might very well extend into the streets. English hooliganism is notorious; the Dutch fans are in a strange phase where they seem to want to throw explosives on the field periodically and generally be a pain in the ass; the Egyptian fans have a reputation for being volatile. And all of these people are trapping on fucking islands, for christsake! Whoever came up with that stupid idea? How do the Irish plan to deal with being in close quarters with these cranky collections of opposition supporters? How will they coexist?

“We’ll be fine. We’ll just charm them,” a lorry driver from Waterford assures me. “We’re charming, we’re clever, and we’re also good looking.”

And all of this time is precious, of course. It’s precious but you might not realize it at the time. I’m on a booze cruise with 2,000 new friends, all of whom share a common love of football and a joy and delight that’s contagious and infectious and you cannot help catching the bug. The football fans on board are joining in, and the non football fans are joining in. It’s a party spanning the length of the ship. The crew members are letting people have their fun, because this motley crew are, all things considered, decidedly well-behaved. There is no ill will nor malice, there are no petty disputes. This is the trip of the lifetime, for the Irish have never qualified for a World Cup before. For all concerned, it’s a long Italian summer vacation they’d never thought they would ever have, and they are damn sure going to enjoy every minute and bring unsuspecting sops like me along for the ride.

Eventually, I somehow stumble upon the guy who first offered me a Guinness, and we’re both piss drunk and out of our minds, and I pause long enough from playfully flirting with catholic school girls to give him a handshake.

“You’re Irish. You’re one of us now,” he insists, and I don’t dare disagree. “Which is a good thing, because your American footballers are shite and the Italians will kick their arses.”

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Actually, the U.S. only lost 0:1 to the Italians in Rome, but yeah, our football team was more or less shite, finishing last in Group A.

The 1990 World Cup goes down in history as one of the lousiest World Cups that’s ever been played. On the pitch, the quality of play was so dire and uncreative that FIFA almost immediately instituted new rules which banned the back pass into the hands of the goalkeeper and awarded 3 points for the win in order to encourage teams to stop being so defensive. There were constant concerns about possible trouble off the pitch from supporters, there were teams from Eastern Bloc nations becoming factionalized after the fall of the Berlin Wall and beginning to split apart. The football was terrible, the hair was terrible, the jerseys were terrible. It was a big, ugly mess.

But everyone involved agreed that the bright spot were the Irish, who made it all the way to the quarterfinals in their debut World Cup appearance and who brought along their throng of vocal, joyful, fun-loving supporters wherever they went. And for more than 20 years now, the Irish have carried that reputation wherever they go. They come to your town, they charm and embrace and enjoy, they lure you in and bring you over to their side, they diffuse tensions and conflicts with their good humor and love of the moment. Football isn’t worth fighting over. It’s worth celebrating.

You can’t outsmart the Irish, as they are much to clever for you: this summer, during the Euros in France, some Swedish fans began to chant at the Irish, “go home to your ugly wives,” to which the Irish responded, “go home to your sexy blonde wives,” at which point the Swedes knew they had been trumped, so everyone started laughing and throwing beer on each other and mucking it up. The Irish party hard but they also respect their hosts: there are videos of the Irish football fans from this summer’s Euros singing as they go about cleaning up the town square after a night of celebrating, picking up trash and beautifying the place. They bring the party, they bring the fun, they bring the love, they bring modest expectations and celebrate any and all success.

And let’s be honest here, there isn’t a whole lot of success. Part of why I rarely trumpet my Irish allegiance is that fact that, well, they’re generally not very good. The Irish play hard and play like hell, but they don’t win too often. The tournament expanding to 24 teams this year afforded the Irish a chance to qualify, which they claimed by winning a home-and-home playoff with Bosnians. Even so, advancing to the knockouts of the tournament seemed unlikely, as they found themselves drawn into a tough group with Italy, Belgium, and Sweden. They were expected to finish last, and hadn’t won a game in the Euros since 1988, but for their forever patient and forgiving supporters, who were certain to turn up in droves, finishing last was nonetheless certain to be a trip of a lifetime.

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And that boat ride of a lifetime ended rather nonchalantly, as the Irish football supporters were segregated out at customs and bordered their own chartered train, while the rest of us passengers all stumbled our way to a separate train and promptly passed out. I woke up somewhere in Central England and didn’t know where the hell I was. It was a strange train in that there were no station announcements and no conductors seeming to ever pass through the aisleways. It was all eerily, uncomfortably quiet. The whole experience seemed surreal. It seemed as if it didn’t actually happen.

And to this day, I have no idea what those people’s names where. I think the redheaded girl I was conga dancing with was named Claire, but I cannot say for sure. They were all people who simply passed through life, people you shared a moment and a connection with who then simply disappeared and you don’t have any idea what happened to them.

Except I did know what happened to them, because I turned on the television for the World Cup games in Italy, and each Ireland game was inevitably prefaced with a live spot where an overdressed reporter found themselves embedded in a wave of Irish supporters, trying to deliver their report as the green-clad fans jumped around and went crazy in front of the camera. And immediately, I knew their faces. I knew all of their faces. I’d been sitting with them in the dark, cramped crannies of an Irish ferry headed for Holyhead, passing them hand rolled cigarettes as they passed me a bottle of Jamesons or a beer. I’d like to think that, 26 years onward, they might remember the American kid from Los Angeles that they met on the ferry. You’d like to think you made that sort of impression, since the collective of them made that impression upon me. And while I cannot be certain, I could have sworn that, among those swarms of Irish football fans on the TV during those Italia 1990 telecasts, interspersed among the football diehards were one or two of those school girls who had somehow slipped onto the wrong train.

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The Celtic folk of the British Isles – the Irish, Welsh, and the Scots – have always done well playing for Norwich City over the years, and this year, two of Ireland’s better players – Wes Hoolahan and Robbie Brady – wore the yellow and green of the Canaries. Hoolahan is the Irish playmaker and he was brilliant in one of their pivotal qualifiers, a stunning 1:0 upset of Germany in Dublin which put them in position to reach the playoff with the Bosnians. Brady, meanwhile, takes many of the free kicks and corners and mans the left back position most of the time, but will occasionally play in the midfield. Brady scored the goal in Ireland’s 1:0 playoff win over the Bosnians in Zenica, a game played in a fog so thick that you couldn’t actually see, on the telecast, that Brady had scored. You just had to take the announcer’s word for it.

And it was Hoolahan who brought joy to the Irish throngs in their first game of Euro 2016 with a gorgeous volley early in the second half to give them a 1-0 lead over Sweden – a team whose second best player, defender Marin Olsson, happens to also be a Norwich City player and whose best player, striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, happens to be TERRIFYING. Even though Ireland had the lead, Olsson ran rampant up and down the left flank, pouring crosses into Zlatan in the box which the Irish turned away somehow, but eventually Zlatan maneuvered his way around the Irish defense and looped one off the head of an Irish defender and in for an own goal, an equalizer which likely doomed Ireland’s chances of advancing. Following the 1:1 draw with Sweden, the Irish got pasted 3:0 by Belgium to find themselves in last place, needing a win in their final group match against Italy to advance. But the Irish caught a break – Italy had already clinched first place in the group, and chose to rest their starters in the final game – and so the Irish took the game to the Italians, chasing the win they desperately needed.

It was a tight and tense game, scoreless well into the second half. Hoolahan flubbed a fairly easy scoring opportunity late on, and it appeared the Irish would not get the result they needed. But then Hoolahan got the ball at his feet a moment later, and he picked out his on-rushing Norwich City teammate Brady in the center of the box with a peach of a pass, an absolutely perfect ball right onto his head and Brady hammered it past the Italian keeper. Ireland had their breakthrough. Ireland had their 1:0 win and a place in the knockouts, which brought tears of joy to the players, coaches, and their loving fans.

There has been quite a bit of criticism in Europe for expanding the field to 24 teams, theoretically diluting the quality of play, but what it’s also done is made it possible for some of Europe’s minnows to take their place and swim the big fish and get in some bites here and there. Funnily enough, when you give Wales and Albania and Northern Ireland and Iceland a chance to compete, they tend to do okay, and the energy of their supporters is refreshing. You remember why it is that you love the game in the first place when you see, and hear, the sort of elation that it can bring.

And that’s what it should be about. Joy and love, camaraderie, togetherness. It shouldn’t be about hoodlums throwing chairs at each other in the streets of Marseille or setting off bombs on the pitch. It’s easy to be cynical and forget that sometimes.

So it is on to the 16s for the first time ever, and a date with the French, the hosts and the tournament favorites. Ireland’s last trip to France didn’t end particularly well, so the Irish have a point to prove and a score to settle  … aaaand we’ll probably get our asses kicked, but fuck it! Go for it! We’re playing with found money here, a lucky penny we found at the end of the rainbow. The Irish will turn out in force, will be in good spirits, in full voice, and win or lose, they’ll have a hell of a good time. And I’ll be sure to go rummaging through the closet and pull out my finest green clothing for the occasion, because I am one of them once more.

“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”

Blow Stuff Up

WE’RE GOING to blow some stuff up today here at In Play Lose, since there has been quite a lot of good lose going on here of late, and it’s hard for me to keep up with all of this failure. Some of this fluid, and I need to write some of this stuff down before situations change.
For example, I was fully intending to blow up USA FC, since I travelled down to Santa Clara last Friday for their Copa America Centenario opener against Colombia at The Pants, a game they lost 0:2 which was typical of the sort of play we’ve come to expect from the U.S. of late: sluggish, disjointed, defensively leaky, and generally low IQ football. We had to fight the Friday rush hour traffic to get down to Santa Clara in time for the 6:30 p.m. kickoff, but we didn’t quite make it and by the time that we’d reached our seats, Colombia had already scored a goal and started packing into their compact shape – setting a high directly in front of me, about 35 yards from the goal, and forming two banks of four in the back – daring the U.S. to figure out what to do and knowing they wouldn’t do it, and the game was essentially over.
So I was ready to kill that team after putting up such a limp performance before myself and 69,000 of my closest friends there at The Pants, but then the U.S. went out on Tuesday night and absolutely hammered Costa Rica 4:0 in Chicago, which was probably the best game they’ve played in the past two years, so I have to hold off on further scathing critique for the moment. 
This speaks to a dilemma that The Lose often encounters – so much lose, so little time, and jobs paying me actual money tend to get in the way. Of course, loyal Lose readers could always contribute to the cause by clicking on the handy gadgets on the side of this page and purchase some books … OK, shameless plug over …
Anyway, there is still lots of hot garbage out there worth scowing out to sea. And this is going to be a long blog entry, even by my own standards, since I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, so fix yourself a sandwich and pour yourself a lovely cocktail and settle on in. It’s time to blow some stuff up, and I have a lot of extremely worthy targets.
To the buzzard points!

• For my recent nth birthday, the Official Spouse of In Play Lose took me to Phone Co. Park to see the Giants game, and for some inexplicable reason, we have this propensity for going to games where the Giants inevitably blow the lead in the 9th inning. I think this particular game was something like the third time in a row, and fourth game in five, where the game wound up going extra frames after the Giants bullpen blew the lead, but the Giants offense came through this time, scoring in the bottom of the 10th for a 4:3 win to sweep a 3-game series with the San Diego Padres – which is already the third time this year that they’ve done that. The Padres are 0-9 against San Francisco this year, and given how they played during that series at Phone Co. Park, I’m surprised they aren’t 0-for against everyone else. The Padres win a few here and there simply because they can pitch, but otherwise they are a mess. Some teams are better than their record indicates, but the Padres are worse than their 25-35 record suggests. Much worse.
Against the Giants in this particular series, they didn’t hit worth a damn and when they did hit, they had runners repeatedly thrown out on the bases. Every ball hit into the air was a misadventure, as they dropped two pop flies – one of which allowed the winning run to score in the series opener – and turned fairly routine balls in the air into extra base hits by taking weird routes and kicking the ball all over the place. They played some of the weirdest defensive alignments I’ve ever seen, most of which the Giants hitters routinely beat and one of which involved playing with no center fielder, which led to a fairly harmless outfield knock rolling away for a double. At no point in any of those games, not even when the Giants bullpen was gagging away the lead in the third and final game, did you think for a second that the Padres would win.
The Padres followed up this folly in San Francisco by playing what is easily the most ridiculous 4-game series we’ve seen in baseball season, a home-and-home interleague set with their hated rivals, the Seattle Mariners. (The Pads and M’s are designated “rivals” by MLB, which is news to everyone involved). The Padres lost 3 of 4 games despite scoring 38 runs in the series, since they allowed 43. They lost a game 16:4 in Seattle in which their backup catcher came into pitch and was ultimately relieved by their shortstop (nice 53 mph change up, if you want to call it that). Two days later at Dog Food Park in San Diego, the Padres became the first team in the bigs to blow a 10-run lead without going to extra innings in 25 years, including giving up nine runs in an inning after two outs.
It was at this point that the Padres’ owner, Ron Fowler, decided to pop off and say a bunch of dumb stuff on talk radio, forgetting the #1 rule of being an owner, which is to shut up and write the cheques:

“It’s about as frustrating as it can get. In a normal environment, if you had performed as well as we have over the last three years, you’d probably be unemployed. But it’s baseball, with guaranteed contracts. We’ve got to get through it.”
– Ron Fowler

I hate to break this to you, Ron, but this ain’t a normal environment. But one thing which is, in fact, true across all businesses, which you are giving credence to with your comments, is the fact that most bad businesses are bad because they have bad owners, and your stewardship of this franchise slots you in that realm.
After the best-became-the-worst offseason in baseball history before the 2015 season, the Padres are now rapidly deconstructing, but trading James Shields to Chicago White Sox only netted them a couple of lesser prospects, and the Padres are still responsible for picking up $28 million of the $58 million that Shields is still owed – and this leaves the Padres in a strange position of rooting from afar for Shields to succeed with the Pale Hose, since he has an opt-out clause in his contract after this season and pitching well in Chicago might lead to him doing so in search of bigger dollars, giving the Padres some much needed relief. Or, Shields could stink in Chicago, much like he did in San Diego, and not opt out of his deal and leave the Padres on the hook for $28 mil – which seems far more likely to be the case, given that the Padres seem condemned to suffer in perpetuity.
Is there a perpetually less relevant team in professional sports than the San Diego Padres? The Padres are usually not as as bad as they’ve been this year, but they’re never very good, either. They have never won a World Series, and naturally ran into buzz saws for opposition the two times they got far – the 1984 Detroit Tigers and 1998 New York Yankees. No Padres pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter in the franchise’s history, meaning that this franchise is so dull that they don’t even offer up those occasional magical moments to remind their fans how special the game can be. While Tony Gwynn is indisputably the face of the franchise and the greatest player in team history, the 2nd-greatest player is probably Dave Winfield, who’s far better known for leaving San Diego for the Yankees on what was, at the time, the biggest free agent contract in baseball history than for anything he did while he was there. Oh yeah, and they used to dress like they worked at Taco Bell.
The Padres have a lovely downtown ballpark, albeit one that, like most West Coast ballparks, tends to be hard on the hitters, which can certainly make it a tough sell for free agents (as if the fact that the franchise has never done anything of note in 40+ wasn’t a big enough red flag). And the atmosphere in that ballpark is entirely dependent upon how many of the visiting fans are in attendance. Dog Food Park has become something of a de facto home away from home for the Giants, who usually bring about 15,000 fans with them, and the Mets and Cubs and Cardinals fans always turn up en masse to enjoy a weekend getaway, while the Pads fans sit in embarrassed silence. And can you blame them? What the hell is there to be happy about? What is there to be hopeful about?

• I was somewhat casually observing, from afar, when the Mariners recently played three games in Cincinnati against the Reds. And there was no point, in any of those 27 innings, that I ever thought for a second that the Mariners would lose. Whatever lead the Reds managed to cobble up was certain to be given away by the arson squad bullpen we spoke about previously. 2-run lead? 3-run lead? It didn’t matter. Sure enough, the kerosene kids came in from the pen and whatever hope the Reds had for winning swiftly became bombs bursting in air. 
The bullpen has been historically awful in Cincinnati, but it isn’t like the rest of the squad is any great shakes. Indeed, their 22-36 record may actually be better than they deserve, seeing as how their lineup, starting rotation, and bullpen have all been performing below replacement level for most of the season. Were it not for the historically inept offensive output of the Barves, the Reds would be the worst team in baseball.
And what’s shocking about this is just how fast this came about. It was only four seasons ago, in October of 2012, that the Cincinnati Reds headed home from San Francisco with a 2-0 lead in their best-of-5 playoff series, having hammered the Giants twice at Phone Co. Park. The Reds had a terrific team that season, an NL Central winning team which, had they mustered one more win at home, would likely have been favorites against the Cardinals in the NLDS, and favorites against the Tigers in the World Series after that.
But then the Rids literally kicked away Game 3 of that series with Giants, losing 2-1 on a Scott Rolen error and letting the Giants off the hook. San Francisco then came out and clobbered the Reds in Game 4 to even the series. They then put two on the board and loaded the bases early in Game 5 against Mat Latos, at which point Buster Posey ripped the soul straight out of the franchise:

The Reds have been sinking ever since. And as the losses mount and the misery deepens, those sorts of moments resonate and sting even more.
Because make no mistake about it, the Reds were a better team than the Giants that season. They were the better team and they threw it away. This is why I always speak of making the most of your opportunities when they come. They don’t come often, and the fall from the top can be swift and steep. It can take far longer to scale that summit than it does to fall, and right now, the Reds can’t even look towards a summit. It’s more like they’ve sunk into the Marianas trench.

• There is no team I want to kill more than the Oklahoma City Thunder. I hate that team. I truly, truly hate that team. And I have very good reasons for doing so, of course:

I hate everything about that team. I think that the team I used to be a season ticket holder for was stolen. I think their owner is a sleazebag, I think the money for the purchase came from a crook (and obviously, I wasn’t alone in thinking that), and I think the whole thing was aided by Little Napoleon himself, David Stern, who got his little snot nose bent out of joint because some politicos in the state of Washington had the audacity to tell him they didn’t want taxpayer money to keep propping up his voodoo economics – voodoo economics he as much as kowtowed to when he locked out the players for the umpteenth time. I think the Oklahoma City Thunder embody pretty much all that is wrong with the business of professional sports in North America, and I cannot wait for the day that the two superstars they lucked into having are no longer there to save them and they sink to the depths of the NBA, because no player worth their salt will ever want to play for that shit team in that shittowne.
And now that I’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to attempt to be objective.
And I am not going to engage in any sort of schadenfreude in this, which is hard for me to do, because I really HATE this team, and the opportunity presents itself quite nicely after what happened in the Western Conference Finals when the Thunder first found themselves up 3-1 in the series against the Golden State Warriors, and then later found themselves leading by seven points with 5:00 remaining in Game 6, on their home floor, AND THEY LOST THE SERIES, and I just want to jump up and down and point and laugh at them for being a bunch of choke artists, but this is In Play Lose here, a forum where we try to explore failure with a critical eye. And so this is going to be hard for me here, because there are really very few teams on this planet whose misfortunes I will invariably revel in to the point where it will compromise my judgment.
One of those is the Dodgers. I hate the Dodgers. I’ve hated them for a lifetime. This is how much I hate the Dodgers: the one-and-only time that I played rotisserie baseball, I was participating in a league that was restricted to National League players, and I refused to draft any Dodgers. It probably cost me the league title, in fact, because my team made up of Cardinals and Phillies and Astros wound up finishing second, but Dodgers doing well on baseball fields was an evil which I didn’t wish to profit from. And this sort of thinking is completely irrational and stupid, of course. At the aforementioned Giants game, I was sitting in the right field arcade, where the fans spent most of the game getting on Matt Kemp. Now, admittedly, Kemp was making himself an easy target out there by making a mess of almost any ball that was coming his way, but Giants fans particularly hate Kemp because he is a former Dodger – which is ridiculous, of course. The Dodgers drafted Matt Kemp, after all. It wasn’t like he had any real choice in the matter. We’re getting all over this guy because he was essentially the unwilling property of some other team that we don’t like. If you think about it that way, it’s all kinda stupid.
But Oklahoma City is different. That was MY team. That was a team I had invested my money in back when I lived in Seattle and it’s gone, so I cannot ever like that team and cannot ever want them to be successful. I still remember when OKC made the NBA finals against Miami, and ESPN did one of those silly nationwide polls about “Who do you want to win the NBA Finals?” and 48 of the 50 states were colored OKC blue while two more – Washington and Florida – were emblazoned in that weird reddish hue of the Heat. I briefly broke my vow never to watch the NBA again that season simply for the joy and delight of watching OKC get stepped on by the Heat, after which I stopped watching it again, only to be tempted into coming back to the game once more by the Warriors four seasons ago. And now the Warriors are NBA champions and rank among the greatest teams in the history of the sport, and they play the most beautiful basketball that I have ever seen, and the idea that their run would somehow be cut short by THAT STUPID FUCKING TEAM FROM OKLAHOMA CITY was absolutely revolting to even think about, much less watch unfold over the course of those first six games of that series.
Can you tell that I’m getting this out of my system?

Awww, c’mon Russ, you’re being a little bit hard on yourself

So I want to laugh and chortle and guffaw at just how stupid and incompetent the Oklahoma City Thunder were down the stretch of Game 6, and brand them as nothing more than a bunch of chokers who will never win anything, but I can’t do that. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
For starters, saying that Oklahoma City “choked” takes away from what their opponents accomplished. 28 of the 29 other teams aren’t coming back in that series. The Golden State Warriors won that series because their stars – first Klay Thompson in Game 6, and then Steph Curry in Game 7 – took over the games with shot making skills that no one else possesses, or has ever possessed, in the history of the sport. At its base, everything that the Warriors do is based upon the fact that Steph and Klay take, and make, the hardest shots in the NBA. They take shots which are bad shots for everyone else in the league and they make them – and because they make them, you have to account for them and guard them and plan for them and scheme for them, at which point the rest of the Warriors are free to run roughshod over you. It’s a tightrope and high wire act at Golden State. They have radically altered the geometry and the mathematics of the game, but when Steph and Klay can’t make those shots, the most invincible force in the NBA can suddenly seem mortal and ordinary.
Klay’s 11 treys and 41 points in OKC saved the Warriors’ season, and then Steph finished the job in Game 7. Prior to that, it appeared that they had met their match. I kept wondering at what point in the series the Warriors would find themselves again, as they looked all out of sorts and their offense wasn’t working and the Thunder were all over them. But it’s nuts just to think about it – I’m watching these games and hoping for the Dubs to go back to being otherworldly, to go back to doing things no one else can do in the game, or have ever done in the game, for that matter. With their success, the expectations have become absurdly high, and that they managed to reach those heights in the clutch simply adds to the lore and the legend.
And as for Oklahoma City, they were great. They were absolutely great in the playoffs. For the last five games of the Spurs series, and for most of the first six games of the Warriors series, they looked like a completely different team. In fact, I would suggest that their loss in Game 6 of the playoffs was less of a choke and more of a regression to the mean. Golden State rose from the dead and returned to being the team we know, and unfortunately, Oklahoma City reverted to being the team we know.
Here’s a video breakdown of OKC’s offense in the 4th Quarter of Game 6. This is bad offense. 12 of the last 13 OKC possessions consist of one pass or less. No ball movement, poor spacing, one-on-one playmaking leading to turnovers and bad shots. Hero ball. That’s not good basketball.
But that’s OKC for you. This is what they do, and they’ve been doing this for years. They have outrageous natural talent on that team, with great athletes all over the floor, yet they run the most simplistic offensive schemes in the NBA. Russ and KD play hero ball while the other three guys on the court are basically furniture. And when you’re checked out on the offensive end of the floor – and why wouldn’t you be, since you’re not going to get the ball – you tend to then check out on the defensive end, as well. It’s hard to call Game 6 a choke by OKC because choking somewhat implies that something out of the ordinary just happened, but nothing out of the ordinary happened here. Oklahoma City does this all the time! The Thunder blew more 4th Quarter leads than any other team this season for a reason. They do stupid stuff!
And indeed, what got them to within 5:00 of the NBA finals was the fact that, in the playoffs, the Thunder had stopped being themselves. They flummoxed first the Spurs and then the Warriors because all of their tendencies had gone out the window. “Wait? What’s going on? This team is passing the basketball! There is ball movement and spacing, everyone is involved and engaged and contributing, and holy shit there is a lot of talent on the floor. Steven Adams is a stud in the post. Where has he been all season? And now Serge Ibaka is making plays too? I had forgotten he was even in the NBA! Hey, suddenly it makes sense to have a defensive specialist on the floor like Roberson who can also slash and hit the offensive glass. And holy shit, when everyone’s engaged, they actually play defense! Stifling defense! Durant is a human pogo stick on defense who can contest any shot anywhere on the floor, Adams can protect the rim and Ibaka can switch onto just about anyone. Wow, this team is terrifying! What do we do?”
But then, when they were up seven points with 5:00 left in the 4th Quarter of Game 6 – statistically, they’re around 93% favorites to win, at that point – midnight struck for cinderella and OKC suddenly turned back into a bunch of pumpkins. As much as I’d been waiting for the Warriors to snap out of it and remember who they are, there was also this faint hope that Oklahoma City would remember who they are, as well, which is exactly what happened. They collapsed in Game 6, and then their offense stalled out in the 3rd Quarter of Game 7, when they only scored 12 points and threw the ball all over the gym and resumed with their usual finger pointing and bickering on the floor. And in the aftermath of this series, it’s easy to suggest that OKC’s playoff performance foretells of greater things next season, but the meltdown in Game 6 wasn’t the aberration. The aberration was the fact that they were in the position at all to go melting down.
So if you’re OKC, now what do you do? Kevin Durant is a free agent, and he has a wealth of options. A lot of NBA experts assume that KD will sign the “1+1” deal because that makes the most financial sense. I would suggest that’s a dangerous assumption, because it implies that OKC is going to be willing to offer that contract in the first place. They may wind up having to do that, in the end, simply because they’ll have no other choice, but it’s a prickly and somewhat stingy organization by nature that doesn’t like yielding that much control. If KD signs a 1+1, and comes back for the 2017 season, OKC has basically one season to try and win a championship, because come the summer of 2017, it turns into salary cap hell.
It’s salary cap hell to some extent already, because the weird quirk in the salary cap which has allowed OKC to skate buy paying both Russ and KD is coming back to bite them. They have no cap space at all to work with this offseason, so they’re hard-pressed to afford to replace anything that they lose. Last season, the Portland Trail Blazers basically trolled the Thunder and fucked with them by throwing $73m at Enis Kanter, an RFA whom the Thunder had the right to match, and the Thunder had to suck it up and bite the bullet and match and essentially pay $73m for a backup center who cannot guard his own shoes because his role on the Thunder was irreplaceable. I would imagine some team will throw $50m at Dion Waiters this offseason, who is also an RFA, and as much of a long, strange trip as the Dion Waiters Experience can be, they don’t really have any other options. They have no draft picks, they’re way over the cap, and making any sort of a deal is coming from a position of weakness. Then the summer of 2017 rolls around and Durant could trigger his option and become a UFA and you’ll have to pay him about $35m a year, and Westbrook becomes a UFA and he’ll cost about $30m a year, and Ibaka’s a UFA as well and he’ll probably be around $20m a year, and at some point you’re also going to have to pay Adams, who is 22 and blossoming into a terrific player, and if Kanter was worth $73m on the RFA market then what will a team with money to spend (which is everybody, at this point) be willing to offer Adams? $100m? $125m? It’s not out of the question. And yeah, I’m throwing around ridiculous figures here, but this is the reality of the modern NBA. So if you add all of that up, and throw in the NBA’s luxury taxes for going over the salary cap, OKC’s payroll would be in excess of $200m for the 2017-2018 season if they tried to keep this team together, and that’s just not going to happen, and the worst-case scenario is that you lose KD, Russ, Ibaka and Adams and are left with $120m sunk into a badly defending center and the Dion Waiters Experience, at which point you’re hoping there are some élite talents available in the 2018 draft, and probably also the 2019 and 2020 drafts as well. So the Thunder need to win now (now being next season), but if KD signs a 1+1 and comes back for another year, he’s going to be swimming in the biggest fish bowl in sports. If he got annoyed with every reporter asking him about his future this season, that unwanted attention will be magnified by the prospect of the whole team breaking apart.
And you can look at the glass as half-full if you’re the Thunder after this past off-season: “we were so close to winning a title this year. We were so close and just need to take that last step.” Or, you can also look at it half-empty, wherein the Thunder really can’t play any better than they did in this year’s playoffs and it still wasn’t good enough to get them a championship. OKC maximized their potential for a couple of rounds of the playoffs, but expecting that team to finally toss away all of their self-destructive tendencies and play that way for an entire season just might be too much to ask.
As much as I hate that franchise and everything about it, I do have to begrudgingly give them some props. The Warriors were pushed like no team has pushed them in the past two years. For that fact alone, OKC proved to be worthy adversaries. But that’s all you’re gonna get from me, OKC. Now go away.

• They call Old Trafford the ‘Theatre of Dreams,’ but lately theatergoers have been subjected to a steady diet of Greek tragedy, a ponderous and plodding piece of theatre leading to an ending that was fated all along. And what better way to liven things up on stage at the Theatre of Dreams than by hiring the sport’s biggest drama queen?
They’d barely finished engraving Manchester United’s name on the FA Cup trophy when United pulled the trigger on a move that was the worst-kept secret in all of soccer, sacking manager Louis Van Gaal and replacing him with Jose Mourinho. Winning the FA Cup was all  the silverware Van Gaal had to show for three years on the job, and the on-field look was bad. The football was terrible, a cynical product verging at times on being unwatchable. Rather than win with superior talent, United instead attempted to numb their inferior opponents into a stupor and simply wait for them to screw up. With some £200 million in wage bills and another £300 million more in transfer fees doled out to assemble this squad, you’d think you’d get more bang for your British buck than slow, unathletic build up using side-to-side square passing while clogging up the middle of the pitch. This is not the Man U way. When you’re one of the biggest clubs in the world, not only do you have to win, but you have to look good doing it, and Van Gaal’s United failed on both fronts. For Manchester United Inc.’s international brand, what’s almost as important as being good is continuing to be relevant.
The Van Gaal experiment was always doomed to fail. He signed a 3-year deal, and had made it clear from the beginning that it was his last job and he wasn’t going to sign a new deal after that. There’s fundamentally a very good reason why clubs are wary of letting coaches reach the final year of their deals – if the coach seems as if he’s a lame duck, the players feel free to tune him out, and Van Gaal was a lame duck from the moment he took over. It’s been pretty obvious from the play on the field that few of the guys wearing a red shirt were particularly happy to be there (it’s been reported that several players told management they’d ask for transfer if Van Gaal were retained), and this story of Mou taking over at Old Trafford has been floating around in the British press ever since he got whacked at Chelsea. They’re apparently replacing Greek tragedy with opera buffo at the Theatre of Dreams, because this marriage of media whores and megalomaniacs will likely be a comedy of errors.
Oh, it will start out alright, of course. Mourinho will come in and spend a lot of money. He loves doing that. He’ll spend a lot of money on players that they want, and spend a lot of money on players they don’t need. We already know this is going to happen, since it also seems inevitable that Man U will go out and sign Zlatan Ibrahimovic to play striker for them, who is still a great player and all but a) he’s about 68 years old; and b) their two best players at the moment are 18-year-old Marcus Rashford and 19-year-old Antony Martial, both of whom are strikers, and it would make far more sense to just pencil those two into the lineup for, oh, maybe the next 10 years or so and try to build a team around them. But Mourinho has no patience for talent development and no patience for young players, even though United’s academy turns them out in droves, just like Chelsea’s academy turned them out in droves, but kids were just cash cows to Chelsea so every kid at United may as well start looking forward to a long career in Belgium or the Netherlands while waiting for that opportunity at United which will never, ever come.
And the results will be marginally better next year, as Mourinho’s militant pragmatism will take hold but he’ll whitewash it a different color of paint, and a 1:0 win over West Brom with Mourinho on the bench will somehow seem better to the Man U faithful than a 1:0 win over West Brom with Van Gaal on the bench. And by the second year, he’ll have spent even more ridiculous sums, and they’ll trot out 11 players who can win simply by rolling the ball out and telling them which direction to run, and Man U will likely win all sorts of trophies and Mou can bask in his glow of being “the special one” once more. But as soon as any hint of trouble arises, whatever sort of free-flowing and attractive football the players have concocted on their own will immediately dry up and be replaced by pragmatism and cynicism and oppressively defensive tactics – tactics which are quite easy to replicate with any sort of team or collection of players, and Man U will most certainly be the latter, a collection of players lacking any sort of cohesion or unity who will first turn on each other and then turn on the manager, a guy who is a “masterful man manager” when he’s winning and simply “a pain in the ass” when he’s losing. And they’ll all end up hating each other and hating Mourinho as well, who will then turn on his players and start throwing them under the bus and throwing management under the bus as well.
Wait, I think I’ve seen this play before. That’s because it happens everywhere that Mourinho goes. He’s never a long-term solution. He’s a quick fix. He makes you relevant in a hurry, you speed ahead and then the engine redlines and finally bursts into flames. This marriage of convenience between Manchester United and Mourinho just isn’t going to end well. It’s going to end in a messy divorce and all of it promises to be wildly entertaining. All that you can do is sit back with your beer and your popcorn and your cotton candy and enjoy your ticket to the circus.

We’ll blow some more stuff up later, because I have quite a bit to say about matters far more serious than what I’ve covered here. But for now, let’s peace out and play some music. One of my favorite bands, Dengue Fever, is performing this Friday at The Chapel in San Francisco, I will be in attendance and you should be as well, because this band absolutely shreds:

You Will Always Be The Greatest

NOTHING more needs to be said.