Four Thoughts, Plus Stoppage Time

Yes, this was a penalty

LONG-TIME readers of The Lose will recall that I covered, extensively, the 2014 World Cup with my daily ‘Four Thoughts’ columns. The 2018 event is just around the corner, and obviously I need to be getting back into game shape. This compelling set of UEFA Champions League quarterfinals – all of which I’ve now finally gotten to watch, including that drab goalless draw in Munich – seemed like a perfect opportunity to do so. This was some pretty gripping stuff that we saw in the past couple of days, much of it worthy of exploration and explication.

• Just because the right call was made at the end of the Real Madrid-Juventus game, it doesn’t mean that we have to like it.
It was the right call. It was a penalty. It was. Benatia ran into the back of Vazquez as the Real player chested the ball down a few yards in front of the goal. By the letter of the law, that’s a penalty.
Now, was it a soft penalty? I would argue that it was. What’s annoying to me is not awarding a soft penalty, but the fact that a referee is willing to award a soft penalty when, throughout the course of every single football match, there are about 5-6 fouls in the box which are way, way more egregious that don’t get called. Seriously, watch a set piece closely some time. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Guys get clutched, grabbed, kicked, and basically mugged on pretty much every corner and free kick. This is common knowledge throughout the game, in fact, and yet somehow the referee always turns a blind eye to it.
One of the great frustrations of the game of soccer is the fact that different positions on the field are officiated differently. If an attacker as much as blows on a defender and the defender goes down, it’s a foul. Any contact by a defender on an attacker, meanwhile, is subject to this complex and nuanced interpretation. The reason for this difference is obvious, of course: referees are loath to award penalties, which are game-changing moments in a match, because doing so makes the hardest thing in the game – scoring a goal – into something that’s relatively easy to do. This response from referees is entirely understandable, as referees don’t want to overly influence games – the problem being, of course, that not awarding penalties can be just as influential on a match as awarding them.
And this particular penalty call in Madrid on Wednesday night gets into something of a gray area when it comes to officiating a match – officiating having as much to do with keeping the game moving as it does interpreting the rules. We are okay with allowing wrestling matches to take place on set pieces because, in the bigger picture, no one is all that interested in seeing 5-6 penalties awarded every game. Along those lines, an argument could be made that referee Michael Oliver should have “swallowed his whistle” late in the match, rather than award what turned out to be a 98th minute penalty to Real Madrid which they needed to advance from the two-legged tie. But the problem with that, in my view, is that a foul should be a foul, be it in the 1st minute or the 90th. As a case in point, it annoys the hell out of me that NHL referees swallow their whistles in the playoffs. They are simply unwilling to call penalties in the third period of games, wanting the players to decide the game – which basically gives the defenders free rein to do all sorts of awful stuff they otherwise shouldn’t be allowed to do, and that makes the game, as a whole, worse.
Having said all of that, seeing a soccer game end on a 98th minute penalty – no matter how justified the call was – just feels cheap. It felt especially cheap in this match, a stunner of a game in which Juve were up 3-0 in Madrid and had leveled the 2-game series on aggregate at 3-3 after having completely bungled the opening leg in Turin. Juventus were absolutely brilliant in this game, playing daring football throughout and pressing the attack while relying on Gigi Buffon, the modern game’s greatest goalkeeper, to somehow keep the ball out of his net. Real was actually pretty good going forward, only to be stymied by Gigi and the Juve defense.
Real did literally no other phase of the game well, however. Navas could be blamed in goal when he fumbled away a routine cross at the foot of Matuidi for Juve’s third goal, but the Real goalkeeper also had little help, as Madrid’s defense was atrocious. Visions of Belo Horizonte danced through my head watching Marcelo get roasted routinely – all three goals started on Real’s left flank – and no one in a white shirt seemed terribly interested in marking Mandžukić, who scored twice and who, if anything, didn’t get the ball enough, in part because Real had so many leaks in the dyke that there was space everywhere for everyone in a yellow Juventus shirt to roam. This was the annoying sort of game Real has mastered in the Champions League over the past few years, one in which they find a way to advance in spite of the fact that they don’t play worth a damn. It’s another game where Cristiano Ronaldo basically does nothing the whole game, and then gets to strut and preen and pose without his shirt in the dying moments.
Juventus were understandably incensed by a stoppage time penalty being awarded to Real Madrid, and Gigi Buffon was understandably sent off for bumping Michael Oliver, who probably just officiated the last enormous match of his career on account of this last-minute controversy – the reason being, of course, that instead of talking about what was a terrific and compelling game of football, the only thing anyone wants to talk about in the aftermath is a 98th minute penalty and the sending off of Juve’s goalkeeper and captain, two decisions which Oliver actually got right. I’m not sure why anyone would ever want to be an official in any sport, much less the game of soccer, where not even being right is good enough.
Juve feels hard done by, of course, and the conspiracy theorists among their faithful no doubt believe that such a call would never had been made had it not been a game against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu – a curious argument, since among the cynical Serie A followers that I know, almost all of them, to a man, believe that Juve get all the calls and all the breaks and are always the beneficiary of curious late game penalty decisions which go their way. Juve was one of several big European clubs for whom these quarterfinals proved to be a case of turnabout being fair play.

• When did F.C. Barcelona stop being fun?
Oh, sure, they’re running away with the title in La Liga, where they lead by 11 points and haven’t lost in 31 matches this season. And they still have Messi, of course, who still does something jaw-dropping and spectacular on a regular basis. But the fun is gone in Barcelona, gone along with the clever, creative, dynamic sort of play which made any soccer fan outside the city of Madrid want to fall in love with this team all over again.
Instead, what we have now is a resilient, resourceful, tenacious sort of side which can hunker down and grind out results. Seemingly lost alongside the departure of Neymar to Paris St. Germain is that systematic sort of brilliance, that 1-to-11 sense that everyone on the pitch is capable of producing something spectacular. Barca games have been a delight in the recent past as much for all of the little things their players would do on the field as the grandiose strikes at goal. It could be just simple things here and there, like the way they move the ball out of traffic in the back, the way their players bring the ball down and control it on a turn to pick out a teammate, the way they could make these short, incisive little one touch passes here and there and thread them through a narrow window in the defense. It’s within those small sorts of details where Barca’s brilliance was always on display, small details which ultimately made their deliberate, short passing game so devastating. Any simple movement could suddenly become devastating to the opposition, as Messi & Co. would be charging ahead on a stampede before you even knew what had happened.
But we don’t get that sort of play much more from Barca. Instead, Barca has become a team wholly dependent upon one player to be great – which, in truth, Messi is most of the time. But if he happens to be having an off-night, there really is no Plan B.
Plan B for Barca on Tuesday night, as it turns out, was to get their asses kicked in Rome, because A.S. Roma were all over them from the get-go.
Barca were such enormous favorites going into the second leg that some bookies weren’t even willing to take wagers on the game. What was the point of taking bets on such a long shot? Having said that, the 4:1 scoreline in the first leg at the Camp Nou didn’t match the eye test. That result flattered Barca, as Roma had the better of the play for much of the game, only to stupidly score on themselves twice in the first half and dig themselves a hole. But Roma weren’t scared of Barca. They knew that they could play with them. They believed that they could win.
Reputation and legacy often translate into a huge advantage. The bulk of Barca’s opponents play scared. They bunker down and park the bus – which, in fact, is pretty much the last thing you want to do against them, since letting a better team keep the ball the entire game gives them plenty of time to figure out how to beat you. A lot of the time, when playing an aggressive attacking team, you are better off going on the attack yourself and trying to put them under pressure, at which point you may come to discover that they don’t defend very well. I’ve said this for years about Brazil in the context of the World Cup. I would argue that in the 1994 and 2002 World Cups, Brazil won in part because of reputations, since so few opponents had the courage to try and take the game to them. Funnily enough, the two teams who have historically given the Seleção the most trouble in the World Cup are the Dutch and the French, two teams who flat-out don’t care about Brazil’s legacy and are going to take the game to them regardless.
And A.S. Roma flat out didn’t care that they were playing Barcelona. They were not afraid, they felt like they could beat them, and they came up with a plan to do so – three in the back, a big striker pairing up front to try and win the aerial game, play the high press, high energy, play the body when needed, and then get the ball forward to Edin Džeko, who is huge, and who completely bossed the Barca back line. Roma were quicker, were more determined, and their midfield three pushed Barca around and controlled the center of the park.
Barcelona, meanwhile, were terrible. Messi wasn’t at his best, but we also got none of what’s good from Suárez and a lot of what’s bad. Suárez did doing nothing save for rolling around on the floor and flopping like a fish. Once it got to 2-0, the third Roma goal started to feel inevitable, while at no point did Barcelona ever seem like it was likely to score at all. They were simply waiting to be saved by another Messi miracle which never came.
The 3:0 scoreline is a shocker, but in the bigger picture, this was the sort of result for Barca that we probably should have seen coming. It’s easy to give a pass simply because of the name on the front of the shirt, assuming the legacy club is going to somehow muddle through it. But Barcelona was outplayed by Chelsea in the Round of 16 for long stretches, saved by some Messi genius sprinkled in with comedic individual errors in the Chelsea defense. But they did not play well, and Chelsea missed the chance to pull the upset. In the end, Barca ground out a result against Chelsea – but Barca isn’t supposed to be about grinding out results. They’re supposed to have flair and style and creativity. They’re supposed to be the vanguards of the modern and beautiful game.
This step backwards is what happens when you lose a player like Neymar, who is one of the 3-5 best players in the world and whose remarkable interplay with Messi and Suárez up front was integral to making Barca seem nearly invincible at times. Guys of that ilk are impossible to replace, and the problem with selling a guy for €260 million is that everyone knows you have €260 million to spend, so not only are you unlikely to be able to buy a player to replace someone of that calibre, but anyone you do buy is also likely to be insanely overpriced. Dembélé and Coutinho are both very good players, but their former clubs – Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, respectively – were ultimately quite happy to cash Barca’s cheques, and neither club seems particularly bothered by the departure of those two players, both of whom had to engage in some tactical acts of petulance in order to get their way.
Meanwhile, Iniesta and the rest of that Spanish core of theirs isn’t getting any younger, and the club’s infatuation with spending heavily on bright and shiny objects has come as the price of the club’s academy, an apparatus Barca used to great advantage which doesn’t seem to be churning out any good players at the moment.
Not that anyone is going to feel sorry for F.C. Barcelona, of course. Oh, you had a superstar talent walk away from you? Boo hoo. Congratulations, Barca, you’re now just like every other club that you ever bought a player from. That they’ve had such an outstanding season in La Liga is a testament to experience, savvy and pragmatism, but no one is watching Barca to see pragmatic soccer. They’ve built their legacy over the decades as the people’s team by flipping two fingers at convention, Johan Cruijff style, and charging ahead. It’s not enough to be tenacious and resourceful. This is the bar they’ve set for themselves.

• Jürgen Klopp gives zero fucks about Pep Guardiola, and gives even fewer fucks about whom he has to face next in the Champions League, and all of us who love the game are better for it.
The Lose loves me some Liverpool. Footballing fandom is complicated, of course, and while my true football love are the Canaries of Norwich City F.C., the fact of the matter is that Norwich City F.C. are presently garbage, so I need another side to follow in order to keep my interest up. Among the biggest clubs, I’ve always been partial to Liverpool, who were great when I lived in Britain and won their last First Division title the year that I was there.
And I’ve always loved the way that Klopp’s teams play. It’s heavy metal football, it’s full throttle, it’s frenzy and chaos and madness in motion. And I love the fact that Klopp is going to play that way come hell or high water. People rightly point out that Klopp’s Liverpool side can’t defend, but the fact that they can’t defend just makes the games all the more fun. Give up a goal? Who cares? Just go and score two or three.
But Klopp isn’t a case of style over substance. Remember, this was the last guy to beat Bayern Munich and win a Bundesliga title at Borussia Dortmund, and even reached a Champions League final during his tenure. He was a perfect hire at Liverpool, a club which, much like Borussia, is relatively enormous by global standards and a blueblood by legacy, but one which has had to begrudgingly accept its 2nd-fiddle status amid the modern economic realities of the game and embrace the role of being the underdog.
In a 2-leg cup tie, a team like Liverpool, who plays with fearlessness and frenzy in a style like no one else, makes for one of the worst possible sorts of matchups. English clubs have sort of grown used to it, having had to deal with Klopp’s side twice a season for a couple of years now, but it makes them a terrible opponent in something like the Champions League. But I only say sort of used to it when speaking of the EPL sides, because Manchester City certainly haven’t gotten used to it.
City got absolutely blown away in the first leg of their quarterfinal tie, conceding three goals in the first 30 minutes, at which point the tie was essentially over. Liverpool cut them to ribbons. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that, over the course of Guardiola’s managerial career, Klopp has had more success against him than just about anyone else. Guardiola plays one way – fast, fluid, on the front foot. Klopp counters that by simply playing even faster. In about half of their matchups, Klopp has topped Pep by beating him at a psycho version of Pep’s own game.
The second leg wound up being something of a mess due to some lousy officiating. Man City’s second goal was incorrectly ruled out for offside, but it could be argued their first should never have happened, at the goal scoring sequence stemmed from a marginal non-call that went City’s way. Even so, City lost their cool and Pep lost the plot, getting into it with the official and winding up being sent to the stands and watching as his team was done in by some shambolic 2nd half defending.
And it’s been strange to see the luster fade on this Man City team as the season progressed. Having rampaged their way through the EPL, rendering the regular season moot by Christmastime, they naturally set their sights on what they thought was a bigger prize, and quite possibly would have landed that prize had they not been drawn against an opponent ideally built to thwart what they do.
When it comes to a club like Man City, who’ve now spent a whopping £500 million to assemble this team, it’s hard not to grade on a curve, grade harshly and grade them down. But this is what happens your club becomes a petrostate plaything. Much like Paris St. Germain, Man City has a limited history of success, but being blessed with seemingly bottomless pockets inevitably comes with the curse of seemingly endless expectations.

• Sevilla didn’t have much of a shot of beating Bayern Munich, losing the first leg 1:2 at home and then slogging through a goalless draw in the return leg. It was notable that Sevilla even got this far at all, seeing as they haven’t played worth a damn for most of this season. Sevilla sit 7th in La Liga at the moment, some 18 points out of a Champions League place, and this goalless draw in Munich came on the heels of being thrashed over the weekend, losing 0:4 at Celta Vigo.
Sevilla are a proud and much-respected club, one which has won three Europa Leagues in recent years – no small feat, given the amount of games required, and also the amount of effort a coach has to go to in order to convince his players to care about a second-rate competition. They always do more with less, and while they can struggle, at times, to keep up with Barca and Real and Atletico Madrid, Sevilla are always up for the fight.
Sevilla’s inclusion in the final eight came at the expense of Manchester United, whom they defeated 2:1 over two legs and whom has a wage bill more than twice the size. It was a disastrous result for United, who played tepidly against an opponent that was short on talent but long on desire. And it was after the second leg that the usual string of apologists in and around Old Trafford wanted to make all kinds of excuses for the pitiful performance, excuses along the lines of that Jose Mourinho needs to spend more during the upcoming transfer windows in order to compete with Europe’s best – a laughable assertion, given that they’ve spent upwards of £300 million already. It’s gotten really pretty annoying, in fact, listening regularly to the likes of Man United and Chelsea going on complaining endlessly about how Pep’s been basically given a blank cheque to go and buy whomever he wants at Man City. Sure, that’s true, but what’s also true is that under Guardiola’s tutelage, you can see that a whole lot of City’s players have – wait for it – actually improved. Hey Jose, hey Antonio Conte, here’s a good idea for you, given that you’re a coach: why don’t you actually try coaching!

But instead we can look forward to a whole summer of ludicrous transfer rumors about Manchester United – if every United transfer rumour were to come true, they’d need a start in something like a 0-2-8 formation in order to fit all of the attackers in – and United will likely go out and buy a bunch of guys they probably don’t need, all of them talented and all of whose talents will wind up being wasted when Jose decides to park the bus against Liverpool and Man City next fall. A team laden with this many talented players shouldn’t verge on being unwatchable.
Perhaps the best thing that could have happened for United last weekend was to fall behind two goals against their crosstown rivals – who were looking to clinch the EPL title plenty early – because at that point United had to actually try to play some football for a change, and they promptly stormed back against Man City in the second half and scored three goals. Oh, hey, holy shit, this Pogba guy is awesome! This Alexis Sanchez guy is really good! Wow, Chris Smalling still exists! There are a whole host of good players on this Man U roster whose careers are basically rotting on the vine as they get played sporadically, get played out of position, and wind up subjected to a style of play which doesn’t suit them. It’s no wonder the whole never equals the sum of the parts. And as much as Man United is a marquee name in this game, at this point in time, why would a quality player, in this day, want to subject themselves to playing boring football at the whims of someone as petulant as Mourinho?

If Sevilla represents a lot of what is good about the game, Manchester United embodies even more of what is not. A club like Sevilla does more with less and maximizes the talent available. A club like Man United, meanwhile, can’t cease squandering it.

• This year’s Champions League quarterfinals did something this tournament rarely does, which is to provide entertainment. Wipe away the gloss and shut out the bombast, and the truth is that a lot of the time, this tournament isn’t very good. It’s still a Cup competition, after all. It is an event prone to randomness which clubs have to shoehorn and fit into their already busy fixture lists. We want this competition to be the pinnacle of club football, but it rarely works out that way. Quite often, in fact, you see a team ascend the way Real Madrid did a couple of seasons ago, when they won the thing without playing particularly well, which owed mostly to them winding up with a series of favorable draws along the way.
But I was hoping for the Champions League to live up to the hype this year, for once, because all across Europe, the domestic product has been even worse. Other than Serie A, where Juventus and Napoli are duking it out for the title, there is no drama to speak of, nor has there been for much of the season. Barcelona are 11 points clear in La Liga; Man City are 13 points clear in the EPL; Bayern Munich are 20 points clear in the Bundesliga and clinched the title with five games remaining; Paris St. Germain have a 14-point lead in Ligue 1 and have spent the better part of the season showboating and clowning their opposition – and in doing so, developing the sort of lazy bad habits which came back to bite them in the ass when they played Real Madrid in the Champions League’s round of 16. None of these results in the top leagues of Europe could even remotely be considered a surprise.
There is a staleness in European domestic football at the moment, one stemming from a sense that there is no drama at all and nothing much for anyone to play for. Rather than attempting to rise up and compete, a whole lot of European top flight clubs are choosing to write off games against the big guns and put all of their energy into trying not to get relegated. There are a lot of bad teams in these leagues, and I mean really bad.
But you can understand the mindset. However much you might spend in order to buy and pay players, it’s still not going to be enough to compete with the unlimited budgets of a Bayern or a Real Madrid. Hell, you’re not likely to even get out of the bottom half of the table – and literally everyone in the bottom half of the table is a relegation candidate. The consequences of failure far outweigh the benefits of success.
This system no longer works, and the primary apparatus perpetuating a non-working system is, of course, the Champions League, which is basically an ATM machine for Europe’s top clubs. It is an excuse for them to go about printing money, which they can then spend to continue to hammer their domestic opposition into the ground. Teams want to win this 13-game tournament far more because of the payout than the prestige. If Juventus can add, say, €90 million to their budget for finishing second in this tournament – which is what they did when they lost to Barcelona in the 2015 final – they can then turn around and use it to buy up top players, a good many of which will directly come from their closest competitors in Serie A. To no surprise, Juventus now wins the title every season, as does Bayern and one of the enormous Spanish clubs.
The top clubs make big bucks in the Champions League, then use the prize money to beat up the locals and qualify for the Champions League the following season, where they make even more money and further widen the gap. It is a vicious cycle which, over 20+ years, has created such a disparity in revenues and values that it makes some of these clubs seemingly invincible. I watch these games even though, in a broader context, I feel as if I shouldn’t, since I am fundamentally opposed to his sort of artificial inqeuality.
There are threats and sabre rattling from time to time by Europe’s top clubs about one day forming some sort of a European Super League, but as I’ve said before, that idea would be really exciting for all of a season, since someone would have to lose, someone would have to finish last, and none of these clubs’ spoiled rotten ownership and fan bases would stand for it. All of their privilege and status in the game is based upon either steady streams of domestic success or the sudden ability to possibly acquire that success thanks to suddenly endowed by sugar daddies for owners. All of that grandstanding is intended solely for the small handful of clubs at the top to bribe UEFA into giving them an even larger slice of the pie.
What should be on display in the Champions League is the best the game has to offer: the greatest players on the greatest clubs. But what it also ultimately displays, in the broader picture, is the worst of the game’s business practices. Most of the great clubs have humble origins, and ultimately ascended to the top through being great. But that ethos had long since been lost, and you can see why. Where is the drive to be great when you can simply go out and buy it?
And while it is easy to think that a club like Manchester City will simply buy their way to the top of the heap thanks to their sheiks for owners, the fact is that in the EPL – the richest league of all – the big clubs all eventually became full of themselves and wound up getting careless and lazy. They took their eye off the ball. They spent badly, they were managed incompetently, they became soft. And that fact contributed to Leicester City rising up and winning the title two seasons ago, at which point some of the big clubs in England wised up and reëvaluated what they were doing.
The whole of the club game in Europe would do well to suffer such a jolt, as a few of the clubs at the top seem to have grown far too comfortable, while the middle class clubs have seem to have grown despondent. Perhaps a shock Liverpool or A.S. Roma win in the Champions League would shake things up and challenge the establishment. If nothing else, them winning certainly would be a whole lot of fun.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.