Monday, June 25, 2018

VAR-iance

Photo of the tournament

DESPERATION soccer is the best. There comes a point where you have to try to get a result and all tactics and defensive rigidity and whatnot go flying out the window, the game gets stretched and it becomes this madcap, end-to-end scramble. When that happens in a soccer game, it becomes the best sporting spectacle there is. And when, in the World Cup, it’s going on in two games simultaneously, it makes for the most wildly entertaining of viewing.

Monday was looney tunes. I had two windows open on Telemundo simultaneously, watching both the Morocco-Spain and Portugal-Iran games at the same time. And both the games were absolutely nuts: goal scoring chances galore, tackles flying in, wild controversies that VAR couldn’t sort out – or, should I say, that referees on the field were unwilling to sort out, but we’ll get to that in a minute – controversies and mood swings and wild twists and turns. It was an absolute roller coaster. It was thrilling entertainment, even though both games wound up in draws.

It was madness, and it was thrilling – and all of it was awash in controversy. Spain gets an equalizer in a 2:2 draw with Morocco thanks to VAR – a goal incorrectly ruled out for offsides that was correctly overturned – but then VAR gives a nitwitted penalty to the Iranians in stoppage time which allows them to level at 1:1 with Portugal and, all of a sudden, Iran has a lifeline and bomb forward in the final 3 minutes and nearly get the winner which would have won them the group and kicked Portugal out. Portugal had a right to bitch about that call – but Portugal didn’t have a right to bitch about the fact that Ronaldo probably should have been sent off at 81’ for his elbow on an Iranian defender. By the letter of the law, it should have been a red. It was mitigated because the Iranian flopped like a fish, but there was this amazing two-minute period where the referee was checking the replay and I was thinking to myself, “holy shit, Ronaldo’s going to get sent off,” and Ronaldo has this frightened look on his face as he was waiting for his fate …

But Ronaldo only got a yellow card, and over in the other game going on simultaneously, Gerard Pique somehow was allowed to remain on the pitch despite a two-footed challenge straight out of prison rules football. The problem with replay in situations such as this is that human beings need to make the calls, and human beings are still reticent to do things like throw a superstar like Ronaldo or Pique out of a game. NBA fans bitch all the time about how superstars get the calls – while, of course, also lamenting that they don’t have a star of their own on their team to get those calls for themselves – but superstars getting the calls is sort of human nature. The former baseball umpire Ron Luciano spoke to this human nature in his autobiography: if a Hall of Fame batter like Rod Carew gets to a 3-2 count, fouls off eight straight pitches and then takes a close pitch on the edge of the zone, you’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s earned it over the course of his career. Referees want the best players to decide the game and don’t want to overly influence the games themselves – a noble idea with the problem being, of course, that not making calls influences the games too much as well.

The problem with VAR is that we all keep winding up talking about it, whether or not it worked the way it was supposed to. VAR overturning a call and getting it right reminds you of just how much stuff actually gets called wrong during the course of a game, the sort of bullshit like disallowed goals for offsides which nearly happened to Spain in the dying moments. VAR still getting a call wrong makes you wonder what the point is. There were four penalties awarded on Monday, and all of them were varying degrees of weak. Attempting to wade into the grey areas of the game just make the waters even murkier than before. Maybe Morocco’s Nordin Amrabat was right when he said that VAR is bullshit, but now that we’ve introduced this technology, we can’t exactly go back and stuff the djinni in a bottle:


The swings in these games were crazy. As I’m watching this Paraguayan referee thinking about what to do with Ronaldo, Morocco’s up 2-1 and running all over Spain, who can’t stop anybody at the moment, and the very real possibility arises that Morocco can get a third and Iran could play 15 or so minutes against a 10-man Portugal, and if Iran can find two goals and Morocco gets a third then Spain would be out! And then Spain scores to blow that up, but Iran is gifted a penalty and Portugal is nervy and Iran miss a god honest chance to win the game and win the group, but it goes for naught. It was all over the place. It was crazy and brilliant and I loved every minute of it. This is the kind of drama that we want to partake in. It might yet get crazier further still in the coming days.

Some random thoughts here from the weekend, which I didn’t get to write about. Last week, I went into lamenting how the defenses were being resolute and the offenses lacked an edge, and then there were 34 goals in nine games, which undoubtedly ruined more than a few journos’ articles, in the process:


It was, in fact, a triumph of the proactive over the pragmatic. At some point, you need to go forward and take some risks and try to win the bloody game. Two teams came from a goal down to win 2:1 in stoppage time. Nigeria did nothing against Iceland in the first half, failing to get a shot off, and then produced 16 in the second half and deservedly notched a 2:0 win. We’ve still not had a 0:0 draw and all of the sudden, the goals are coming from everywhere.


Super Eagles

• As a fan, what I want, above all else, is meaningful games. Dead rubbers are a drag. No one cared about the Egypt-Saudi Arabia game today – which is only worth mentioning because Egypt started a 45-year-old goalkeeper, who actually stopped a penalty and struck a blow for old guys everywhere. But otherwise, no one cares. We want to care. We want all the games to matter, and what took place during the weekend ensured there would be only two dead rubbers among the 16 games of Match Day 3. It’s good for the fans and it’s how we want it.
And I say that as someone who was hoping Iceland would beat Nigeria and as much as eliminate the Argentines, because they have been complete garbage, and who was hoping the Swedes wouldn’t screw up against the Germans, since the Germans were as good as dead with any result other than a win. But now we’ve got great games in store involving those two teams, and many others, over the next three days and it’s all to play for. And in the bigger picture, that’s better.
There are all sorts of outlandish scenarios still in play along the same lines of what we saw in Group B today. South Korea is still alive – wait, what, really? They can’t beat Germany, can they? … then again, have you seen the Germans defend anyone lately? (If so, let us know, because I certainly haven’t.) Australia is still alive, it’s a mess in Group H, the various tiebreakers in Groups D and F could send your head spinning. This is great! I love this! Welcome to the chaos. I want this to get as weird as possible. I want to see frenetic, end-to-end action in the 97th minute as some team is chasing some necessary 3-goal win. Let it all be a glorious mess.

• Having just said all of that, oh Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, jesus, what were you doing? Given that a draw would have put them in a situation where advancement at Germany’s expense would involve nothing more than a leisurely 0:0 draw of a stroll through the park with the Mexicans on Match Day 3, and given that you’re 1:1 with the Germans and they’re reduced to 10 men, you hold all the cards here. Even if you play to win and can’t score, you pin the Germans deep. You can even just play it out and run out the clock. The Germans are chasing the game and they’re down a man, for godsakes. You can’t mess this up.
Sweden messed it up:


That’s the passing chart after the Germans were reduced to 10 men. The Swedes couldn’t make up their minds what to do, and so they basically did nothing. At one point, they messed up a 5-on-2 break, and later on, in the dying seconds, instead of just killing the game, they took a wimpy shot on goal which led to the German break, which led to the Swedish foul, which led to the Toni Kroos free kick:


Now Sweden’s got it all to do against the Mexicans, and El Tri has to take it seriously as well, because both teams now need a result and both teams know the Germans will almost certainly beat the Koreans even though they’re missing both starting center backs – but, given how bad both have been, and how much the Germans improved once Boateng got sent off, this might not be a bad thing after all. You just can’t be giving stuff away. The Swedes gave a game away. Iceland gave a game away and so did the Serbs. Some eccentric goalkeeping in their 2:2 draw might cost either Japan or Senegal a spot in the Round of 16. Mexico giving up a 95th minute goal to South Korea might come back to haunt them – although, granted, the strike by Son was pretty sweet:

 
Oh, and one other thing about Germany v. Sweden. The player who committed the foul, Jimmy Durmaz, is of Syrian descent and was subjected to some rather nasty abuse online along the lines of that he isn’t truly a Swede. This sort of ignorant bullshit really pisses me off, and this sort of abuse led to the Swedish team feeling compelled to make this statement the next day:


Amen. Fuck racism. And fuck all of the twats who gave Durmaz a hard time. Go find something else to do. Soccer doesn’t need you.

• And since we’re sort of moving along in a political direction here, it’s probably not wise of FIFA to step into the quagmire of Balkan politics – seeing as how that has always worked out so well for every other international agency that’s attempted to do so – but they probably felt like they needed to after Switzerland’s Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri decided to give the Serbian fans the bird. Not the one-fingered American variety, mind you, but the symbol of the double eagle that adorns the Albanian flag:


For those of you who don’t know the back story, both Xhaka and Shaqiri are immigrants to Switzerland from Kosovo, both of them ethnic Albanians. (Xhaka’s backstory is here and, obviously, it’s personal.) From reports I’ve heard and read about the game, the Serb fans were giving it to the Kosovans wearing Swiss colors rather extensively during the game, and both of them felt obliged to troll after they each scored in Switzerland’s 2:1 comeback win over the Serbs. Now FIFA is opening an inquest into whether or not this is an inflammatory political gesture, and the Serbs are understandably mad about it, and welcome to the quagmire. When I saw these two teams drawn together, I knew this could turn into a mess, since it seems as if every game that involves a lot of players or teams from that particular region of the world turns into a mess. And you can see why. It was an ugly, awful, horrible series of conflicts that led to the breaking up of Yugoslavia, those memories are still fresh and the wounds too deep. You’d like for sport to be just about sport. Wishful thinking, I know. But politics and soccer have always intertwined, and there are times where sport simply cannot be just about sport, as much as you want it to.

Belgium’s Michy Batshuayi with the worst miss of the tournament

• Every time I saw Panama concede another goal to England, who put six past them and probably could have scored more, I was reminded of the fact that Panama somehow finished above the United States in CONCACAF qualifying, and it made me angry.

• I saw someone online make the point that having a team as bad as Panama in the World Cup was proof that CONCACAF has too many spots in the World Cup. Does that make having a team as bad as Poland in the World Cup proof that UEFA has too many spots? Poland were terrible. Panama is on no points and a difference of -8, but given the garbage that I saw from the Poles, had they had to play England and Belgium, I’m not sure they would have fared much better. I was skeptical of them to begin with, thinking that top seed and top 8 FIFA ranking was smoke and mirrors, but they were awful on Sunday against Colombia. Poland are in the same boat as a few other teams in this tournament in that they have one legit top-class player, Lewandowski, who happens to be a forward, and forwards still need someone to get them the ball, which proved a challenge for Poland and also for the likes to Mo Salah’s Egypt and Son’s South Korea, while a one-horse team like Denmark whose star, Christian Eriksen, is a playmaker can influence the game in other ways.

This pass serves as a reminder that James is really good at football

• For the spectator, this has been the best World Cup that I can ever remember. It’s been wildly entertaining, compelling, dramatic and tense, and it could get even crazier in the next three days. Good. Let’s have that happen. The crazier, the better.
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