Wednesday, January 8, 2020

DAMN YOU WEEMS!




In honor of the Jeopardy Greatest of All Time tournament, which is taking place this week on ABC, I thought that I would recall the story of how The Official Spouse of In Play Lose appeared on that show. She was selected for the show during a casting in San Francisco on Nov. 4 2010 – coincidentally, the same day that the San Francisco Giants were holding their World Series parade. We drove down to L.A. in Jan. 2011 for the taping, with the show airing later that year. I took down these notes at our hotel room in Culver City after the taping was over. I asked her permission before publishing this. She and I both are known to swear at the TV when Jeopardy comes on. Nah, we are not bitter or anything like that ...

---

FUCK you Parson Weems. Seriously. Weems? What the fuck? Parson Fucking Weems? Are you fucking kidding me? Parson Fucking Weems? Get bent.

He is the original biographer of George Washington, the guy who spread that bullshit story about George Washington and the cherry tree. “i cannot tell a lie ...” blah blah blah. He was also one of America’s first literary agents, which means he must truly be scum.

Well, Parson Fucking Weems was the answer of the Final Jeopardy Question for all the marbles, and my girlfriend didn’t know it. Neither did anyone else. It was probably the hardest Final Jeopardy Question I can remember from the past few months, if not years, that we have been watching the show. It was just fucking brutal. No one knows who Parson Fucking Weems is. And with good reason: he is an asshat.

We all – that would be me, Doug, Sponge, and her parents – had to sit through three other tapings before she finally got to play. I was nervous as fuck. You know how they pan to the moms and the wives during football games, who are all nervous as hell, and some yokel in the broadcast booth says, “aw, yeah, lemme tell ya some-m, it’s all a lot harder on them than the folks on the field?” Yep, that’s pretty much true. I was nervous as fuck all day. I was nervous when hanging out with the associated other spouses in the hotel back in Century City, having seen our loved ones head out for battle at SONY studios. They were all, like, saying to me, “is it always so nice in L.A. in January?” and I said, “yes, in fact, it is.” Then I said, “my girlfriend is gonna kick your girlfriend’s ass.”

No, I didn’t say that. And it was a really nice day, like 71° or something. The hotel is filled with rhythmic gymnasts. Everyone speaks Russian. The Russians speak Russian, the Germans speak Russian, the Canadians and Americans speak Russian because their coaches speak Russian. There is apparently some big international meet going on at the Culver City Civic Auditorium. All of these prim and proper ballerinas are waging war with clubs and ribbons and hoopy things, whereas our significant others are going to war with SMARTS!

She was up vs. a film archivist who had won $30000 the game before and seemed unbeatable, and also some irrelevant guy from NYC, but she was not gun shy or intimidated. She played really well. She was faster on the buzzer consistently than those other two guys. She did, however, miss some questions she should’ve gotten, and there was one disputed answer where they determined she got the woman’s name wrong (which was, in my totally unbiased opinion, a sack of horseshit), but she also answered some questions that seemed to come out of nowhere – stuff like the Cable TV category. We don’t even have cable! Rizzoli and Isles? Where the fuck did that come from?

She came from behind to grab the lead after the 2nd Daily Double fell her way in the 2nd round, was OH SO CLOSE to clinching outright but got nudzhed out on the buzzer on the final two questions of the round. but she had the lead:

Sweetheart $11,200
NYC whoever $9,400
Film Guy $8,500

Game theory here dictates that she bets $7601 in Final Jeopardy. That way, a correct response on her part wins no matter what the others do. That is precisely what she bet.

But the category was Biographers, and the question was written to be extremely, deliberately vague. a badly-written question, in my opinion. A bad question about a bad person. I had NO IDEA what the answer was.

And neither did she. I just watched her go still up there at the podium. She didn’t write anything. Come on sweetheart, write something. Write something. I don’t know what the fuck to write, but surely you do.

She didn’t know Parson Fucking Weems. None of them did:

Film Guy $8,500 - $1,500 = $7,000
Sweetheart $11,200 - $7,601 = $3,599
NYC whoever $9,400 - $8,100 = $1,300

So she finished 2nd. She gets $2000 for that, which is great. She did great and I am so proud of her. She did everything correct there at the end, and then she got a bad luck-o’-the-draw Final Jeopardy question. It was the Jeopardy equivalent of the Q-stick.

“I never get to do this again,” she lamented afterwards, “and I go home from the show because I didn’t know Parson Fucking Weems.”

It’s hard for me not to think that my bad luck rubbed off on her, since that bad luck is inherent in my existence. I am the human cooler. I mean, there are plenty of those Final Jeopardy questions that are fucking goddamn layup-level EASY. If she gets a pitch to hit there, she has $19,000 and we get to come back again in a couple of weeks. instead, she gets Parson Fucking Weems.

I guess it wasn’t meant to be. It kind of sucks.

It is important that I remind her what we were saying all along about how just getting to this point was what mattered. And we are going to get out now, go to a nice Italian place and enjoy Santa Monica with her folks and with Sponge and Doug, who both came up from San Diego for the taping. All of them were as aghast by the Final Jeopardy question as I was. And with good reason, because it was a stupid question about a stupid person.

It’s all good, in the end, but i am still disappointed. Not in her. Not at all in her. She did great and I am so proud. I’m disappointed in how it finished.

Parsley Worms. Parsnip Weenie. Parson Fucking Weems, I curse you today, you puffpiece writing ratfink, you lying piece of sack of shit, you dirtbag trashcan asschapel. Piss on you.
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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The Lose of the Year



IT was appropriate that, in the last NFL game of 2019, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks, the penultimate play of the game was a blatant pass interference that went uncalled. And it was blatant. And good on the 49ers guy for doing it, mind you. If you’re going to get beat in the end zone, grab the guy, take the penalty and play the next play, since not doing so means giving up a TD and losing. But no flag was thrown and seemingly no review made. Oh, well, after the fact, the NFL offered up a horseshit explanation that they’d reviewed and seen nothing, which makes you think whomever may have been doing the reviewing was blind as a bat. That explanation from the league was horseshit. And the reason why I say that is because the officials blatantly ignoring a pass interference penalty is pretty much what they’ve been doing the whole season in response to the new rule instituted which allows teams to challenge pass interference non-calls:


The NFL instituted that challenge as a knee-jerk reaction to the NFC Championship game between the Saints and the Rams. In the closing minutes of a tie game, with the Saints on third down and driving, the officials managed to cock this one up:


Given down and distance, time and score, and what was at stake, this was nothing short of the worst call in NFL history. The penalty would have given the Saints 1st-and-goal, after which they would have taken a knee three times, run the clock to nearly zero, and kicked a winning FG. The Saints would be about 99% to win at that point. Instead, after kicking a FG, the Rams had time to scramble down the field and tie the score, then won the game in OT and proceeded to partake in the worst Super Bowl of all time:


Make no mistake here: that is a terrible call. That is the worst call in NFL history. It is absolutely atrocious. And spare me the whole line about how the Saints had plenty of chances to win the game before that. The Saints were about 99% to win the game if the rule is applied correctly. It is truly abominable.

But what is worse, in the end, is how the league reacted to it, which is to institute a challenge on pass interference penalties, which was always going to be murky because it is a judgment call, and the NFL officials have basically blown it off all season in response, and NFL head coaches are wasting time (and a timeout) bothering to challenge the play. This came about because the Saints, and their fans, and most football fans for their matter, were apoplectic about this when it happened, and it pretty much cost the Saints a trip to the Super Bowl.

But let's be honest here: officials get stuff wrong. In the case of this particular play, the explanation put forth after the game was that the officials thought the pass had been tipped, which would negate any pass interference. It clearly was not tipped. It was a terrible call. But you know what? It happens. It sucks, and it can be infuriating, but it happens.

It happened too much this year, in fact. 2019 will go down as the Year of Bad Officiating. Literally every sport that I watch or follow has been marred by terrible officiating. Pick a sport! The officials were awful. It has been a long time since I have seen a strike zone as bad as in Game 5 of the World Series. We had an entire playoff game in the NBA between the Warriors and Houston Rockets marred by referees refusing to call fouls against the Warriors when they defended James Harden shooting threes. (We will get to the Rockets in a bit.) The St. Louis Blues scored a pivotal goal against Boston in the Stanley Cup finals when the officials missed an obvious penalty and the Blues scored in the ensuing sequence. And then there is VAR in soccer ... oh jesus, where do we begin with that? There were five goals chalked off just this past weekend alone in the Premier League for minute-level offsides infractions, which did nothing other than prove that 21st century technology shouldn't be used to adjudicate 19th century rules of the game. Officiating seems to be getting worse.

Except in college football, where it is as bad as ever:


No biggie, what's a 57-yard difference in starting field position?

And we laugh about this stuff, but the consequences can be enormous. Ohio State lost to Clemson by six points in the national semifinal the other night in a game where a fumble returned for a TD by the Buckeyes was, in my mind, incorrectly overturned. Missing out on the championship game costs Ohio State untold millions. One of those insufferable VAR decisions from last weekend that I mentioned came at the expense of my beloved Norwich City in their 2:2 draw with Tottenham. Norwich are struggling to avoid relegation, and that blown call – a disallowed Norwich goal – probably cost them two points in the table. The EPL saying "we'll do better" is of little consolation if you're going to wind up playing in Div 2 a year from now.

Officiating is harder than ever. Players are bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic and skilled than ever before. The refs have always been, in comparison, old, slow and fat, but now they just seem older, slower, and fatter. We've invented replay systems to help them out, but replay seems more often than not to prove what Voltaire once said: "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Replay is supposed to be objective, but that's pretty much impossible in an activity which is entirely subjective in the first place. Other than tennis, it sucks in pretty much every sport. About all that replay ever seems to prove is that rules are really vague and often quite badly written. No one knows what a catch is in football, no one knows what offsides is in the other type of football, and games get refereed differently in the last two minutes of each half of an NBA game than they do in the other 44. There ultimately is very little black-and-white here, it's all shades of grey, and to be honest, I would rather live in the grey area.

And literally all that winds up getting talked about now seems to be the officiating. Everyone in the media says "I don't like talking about officiating" as a prelude to doing just that, because there is so much noise and chatter. While there were a lot of really awful calls in sports in 2019, I don't necessarily think that officiating is necessary worse so much as that, with so much emphasis on that aspect of games, and with replay's foibles and failing, it simply stands out even more than before.

I hate replay. I hate it in every sport except tennis. I would rather live with the bad calls. And yeah, that means my team gets screwed sometimes. Norwich got screwed last Saturday by a garbage VAR call. The Seahawks got screwed on Sunday night, got screwed in the Super Bowl against the Steelers, and the reason replay exists in the NFL at all is them getting screwed by the officials and by Vinny fucking Testaverde and the Jets in 1998, which cost the Seahawks a playoff berth. The Sonics got screwed when Phoenix shot 64 free throws in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals in 1993, which is the only time I have ever believed that a sporting event I just watched was fixed.

But hey, guess what? We all get screwed eventually. All of us. Get over it. I actually banned complaining about the officiating from the NBA forum I administrate, because it had become insufferable. And soccer fans are the worst about this, by the way, as they hold on to literally every grudge and grievance seemingly for decades. Jesus Christ, during the Women's World Cup this past summer, I had to listen to Canadian fans who are still mad about a game their team lost to the U.S. women in the 2012 Olympics. Congratulations Canada, you got jobbed! And so did the U.S. men in 2002 against the Germans in Korea, and so did the Germans in the 1966 final against England, and so did England by Diego Maradona and the Hand of God in 1986, and on and on and on. We all get jobbed by the refs in the end. If that hasn't happened to you and your team, consider yourself blessed.

I hate replay, but I also hate the pitch framing catchers and the James Hardens and swan-diving center forwards of the world, all of whom spend so much time trying to trick officials. It's become impossible to watch a sport these days and not notice the zeebs and what they are, and are not, calling. In fact, they are necessarily at the center of attention because, more than ever, teams try to jostle and manipulate and sway the arbiters of the game for their own benefit.

Now, of course, leagues can do better. I mentioned Game 5 of the World Series this year. The umpire behind the plate for that game, Lance Barksdale, had been ranked as 16th best in the league in terms of getting balls and strike calls correct – which begs the question of why is the 16th best umpire calling a World Series game? Umpiring the World Series doesn't have to do with merit, as it turns out. Barksdale is regarded as a good umpire, mind you, but in 2018, they had Angel Hernandez out there in the World Series, whom everyone in baseball thinks sucks, and who had three calls at first base overturned in one game. First and foremost, they have to do better. They have to get stuff right. Too much stuff has been wrong in 2019.

But we all get mad when replay doesn't come to the rescue. The more we try to make it perfect, the less perfect it becomes. We have tried to apply more objective criteria, but doing so just reminds us that it's all subjective, in the end, and not finding objective answers just makes us all even angrier than we would have been if we were just mad at the ref for blowing it in the first place.

That needed to be said. And with that, it's onto the Lose of the Year ...

Not something you see every day, or any day for that matter ...

Great Moments in Failure
Here at In Play Lose, we tend not to overreact to one game. (Unless it is the Falcons choking the Super Bowl away.) We tend to reward those who sustain incompetence over longer periods of time rather than place too much emphasis on one performance. That said, there were some remarkably bad one-off performances in 2019 worthy of mention:

• Washington State losing 67:63 to UCLA is no big deal, since the Cougars have been losing to UCLA in basketball forever now ... except that was a football game, where WSU's QB threw 9 TD passes and they still lost, and where they led 49:17 midway through the 3rd Quarter and contrived to give up 50 points in 15 minutes. Even in the annals of WSU failure, this one is legendary.
• Leading by a run over the Dodgers on July 2, with two out in the bottom of the 9th, the Arizona Diamondbacks lost by promptly walking five straight batters. There is always a dumb new way to lose in baseball just waiting to be discovered.
• Mainstays here at In Play Lose, the always humorous New York Mets blew a 6-run lead in the 9th on Sep. 4 against the Washington Nationals, after those wacky Mazins had scored five in the top of the 9th, no less.
• In a year where the NFL officials blew off pass interference most of the time, leave it to the league's most creative chokers, the Chargers, to commit an egregious pass interference penalty with :03 left in the game (skip to 9:20 of that video for the gory details) to set up a dramatic loss to the Denver Broncos.
• We have seen two 30-point comebacks/choke jobs in the NBA this year, the first being Golden State blowing a 31-point lead against the Clippers in Game 2 of their first round playoff series, and then the Dallas Mavericks gagging away a 30-point advantage against Toronto just recently. Barf.
• The New Orleans Pelicans did this:


• Those wacky funsters, the Washington Bullets Wizards Buzzards, scored 158 points in a regulation NBA game and lost.
• Now, granted, this one was set up by a bad call, but still ... leading 3-0 in the third period in Game 7 of their first round playoff series with San Jose, the Vegas Golden Knights were incorrectly assessed a 5-minute major penalty, one for which the NHL would ultimately issue an official apology. The reason for the apology being, of course, that Vegas managed to then go on and lose, as during those five minutes a man down, Vegas basically forgot how to kill a penalty and allowed the Sharks to score four goals. (The lunacy begins at 2:05 in that video.) I've been watching hockey since the early 1980s and I've never seen a team score four goals on a power play. Sure it was a bad call, but play some damn defense for godsakes. Vegas rallied to tie but lost in OT and their season was over.
• Barcelona in the Champions League. Again. Jesus.
• N.C. State played the worst game of college basketball ever, scoring 24 points and shooting 9-for-54 from the floor. Their opponent that day, Virginia Tech, played maybe the second worst game ever, but at least they scored 47:


Our Special Fun Bad Award
It doesn't have to suck to suck. If your team is going to suck, at least have fun doing so. No team has better embraced the concept of being fun bad in 2019 more than those pewter pirates, those tangerine dreamers, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

Form tackle

Bucs QB Jameis Winston put up maybe the weirdest stat line I have ever seen, throwing for over 5,000 yards (one of the 10 best totals ever) while becoming the first QB ever to throw 30 TD passes and 30 interceptions in the same season. Included in those 30 picks were seven Pick-Sixes, an NFL record, the last of which came on the last play of the season:


Quite the mic drop, right there.

Lest you think dunderheaded commentary is confined to America

Give These Fans a Hug:
I'm fairly certain, at this point, that no fan base can truly be quite as miserable as that of the Detroit Lions, who have won one playoff game in 60 years and who literally cannot have anything go right for them. In the odd chance they find a potentially transcendent talent (Billy Sims, Barry Sanders, Calvin Johnson), his career will invariably wind up being truncated for one reason or another. Detroit is where head coaches' careers go to die. The Lions coach poorly, they draft poorly, and even when they seem like they might be getting it right for a brief moment in time, they'll wind up on the losing end of the most poorly officiated game of the season. But the Lions are used to that by now:


It doesn't matter what the Lions do. They seem to be sitting at a blackjack table and finding every single possible way to have the cards add up to 22, even when they are being run well – which they aren't right now. The Lions last great disaster came when they fired head coach Jim Caldwell two seasons ago after consecutive 9-7 seasons and turned the keys over to Matt Patricia, the former defensive coordinator of the Pats, on the heels of said defense being shredded and scored upon eight times by the Eagles in the Super Bowl. Like so many former Pats assistants, Patricia has showed up acting like a smug know-it-all and proceeded to run the team straight into the ground. Pair him with offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, who called the dumbest play in Super Bowl history and whose bland offense trivialized Russell Wilson's talents in Seattle for years, and you have quite a pair steering this ship straight into the iceberg. The Lions were 3-12-1 this season, blew eight 4th Quarter leads, annoyed their veteran players, failed to protect their franchise QB Matt Stafford, and are still a hopeless mess.

• Every time I watch the Dallas Mavericks play and see Luka Dončić do something spectacular, I am reminded of the fact that there were actually teams who thought a generational talent and 19-year-old MVP of the second best pro league in the world was somehow worth passing on in the draft in favor of centers, at a time when centers have never been less important in the NBA. But that sort of organizational cluelessness is how both the Phoenix Suns and Sacramento Kings roll. It isn't as if the Suns weren't looking for a GOAT:

That nugget there was in a story on the Suns from ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz, who also wrote an amazing piece this year about a Kings executive who stole $13 million from his employer, which could theoretically happen anywhere but, of course, had to happen to the Kings, the NBA's Detroit Lions equivalent where even when they don't do anything wrong, something goes wrong.
But trust me, the Kings do plenty wrong of their own volition. The Kings even copied from the Lions' playbook of firing the coach from their most encouraging team in years for no particularly good reason, dumping Dave Joerger for the recently fired Luke Walton, who was lousy in L.A., even though he had no help from the front office, and who has taken a fun and fast young team and turned it into a slow, plodding mess – aided, in part, by Vlade wasting millions in cap space on redundant free agents who don't move the needle one iota.
After a promising start, meanwhile, the Suns are back to being their usually suck-laden selves, having just lost nine in a row including a come-from-ahead loss to the G-League team posing as the Warriors. No one who leaves Phoenix ever has anything good to say about it:
“The Suns are the worst organization I've ever played for and they can quote me. It was a big brothel on wheels and to this day I think it hasn't changed because some people working there should never manage this team.” — Marcin Gortat

• “We were an awful team. We didn’t intend to be that bad. Honestly, we were terrible, especially after the first 15 games of the season.”
– Jerry Dipoto, GM of the Seattle Mariners.


Nope, no argument here. That "reimagining" of the roster is going just super.
But tankamania is all the rage in the American League right now. As bad as the 68-94 Mariners were, there were actually four teams in the AL that were worse: the 95-loss Blue Jays, 103-loss Royals, the 108-loss Orioles and the 114-loss Detroit Tigers, who even made the Mariners look good on occasion:


These teams are so bad that they are actually perversely skewing the statistics of the league. The Mariners went 1-18 against the Astros last season, the Tigers were 1-18 against the Indians (the sole reason Cleveland was even in the playoff race), while the Orioles went 2-17 against the Yankees, giving up 151 runs and 61 homers in the process. All of these teams varying degrees of hopeless, and selling hope for the future in lieu of fielding anything remotely worth watching in the present.
Here is a little hint though: being bad for purposes of one day being good almost never works, particularly in baseball where long-term talent development is everything. Hell, the Dodgers have had low draft picks for more than a decade, and yet they seem to grow great players on trees. If you don't have that apparatus in place, it doesn't matter if your broken clock of a front office happens to be right twice a day when it comes to the draft. You're more likely to wind up like another long suffering franchise, the San Diego Padres, who have all those supposedly great young players show up at the major league level with raw skills while looking like they don't actually know how to play baseball. If there is hope for any of the teams I've mentioned in this passage, I sure as hell don't see it.

• I'm hard pressed to recall a coach as overmatched as Freddie Kitchens of the Cleveland Browns, who was gifted a great assortment of skill players and used none of them well while putting out an incoherent and undisciplined team which committed 20 penalties in their first game of the season and often looked as if they'd met for the first time five minutes before the game. Meanwhile, their best defensive player got suspended for the season for a fight with Pittsburgh's nth-string QB. This is what happens when you have hope, Browns fans. No nice things for you.

If you're a fan of any of the teams I just mentioned, you deserve a hug. And you probably also need therapy.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Your U.S. Soccer Update
Even in a year when the U.S. women win another World Cup, U.S. Soccer can't do anything right. The federation is in a protracted pay dispute with the gals, which is completely needless and idiotic. Pay the gals!
And let's be clear about something else here, this is not just about issues of equal pay. As their primary employer, U.S. Soccer can also dictate where the gals can play professionally, funneling them into the NWSL, a league of great talent which has been otherwise very poorly run on many fronts. This is important going forward, because it's not going to be long before a big European soccer club is going to decide it's worth it to start splashing more cash. And it is gonna happen, because like everything else in soccer, it will make good business sense to do so. All it took for the overall quality of play in the Women's World Cup to vastly improve in four years' time was a few really big clubs in Europe – Barca, PSG, Juventus, Man City, Arsenal – to up their investment in the women's professional game. It will not be long before one of these clubs decides it's in their interests to truly up the ante. If you're not going to pay the players accordingly, U.S. Soccer – players who are the best in the world – then don't also be cutting off potential for future earnings by dictating that they play in a poorly-run league and then go on dog-and-pony exhibition tours where you show off how great they are and make all the profit from it.
Stop this legal maneuvering and just pay the gals already. Enough. They're the stars. Treat them like the stars. U.S. Soccer has spent untold millions in legal fees to fight this case, all of which they should have just given to the gals in the first place and been done with it. It's not complicated. It really isn't.
Meanwhile, over on the men's side, we still have the same cast of characters, the same mediocre MLS drek, getting schooled by El Tri and, in a new twist, nearly losing to Curaçao in the Gold Cup and getting their asses handed to them by the Canadians in Toronto. But buoyed by the fact that his brother is the COO of the federation, Gregg Berhalter will continue being given every opportunity to show he cannot coach and is free to make all of the poor personnel decisions he wants. Far too many good young players eligible to play for USA FC continue to be ignored, but hey, they can go and play on one of the 12 U.S. national youth teams that don't presently have a coach. So, yeah, things are just ducky.
Seriously, fire all of these people – and unlike after the debacle of 2017, maybe replace them with people who know what they are doing.

A moment of Zen ... 
Brian Flores deserves to be coach of the year for getting to 5-11 with a Miami Dolphins designed to be terrible. Here is a fabulous sequence of tweets from ESPN's Bill Barnwell about the absurdist theatre troupe posing as an NFL team at the start of the season. And for those of you who'd like a good sense of what it's like to be covering one of the migraine-inducing clubs on a regular basis, I would highly recommend you follow, on Twitter, Stephen Noh of The Athletic Chicago, who covers the hapless Chicago Bulls and posts some of the best Lose material imaginable:


... So we have some good nominees here for Lose of the Year, but before we go any further and announce our winner, we should point out a couple of teams who absolutely, positively do not suck, who are in fact great and have great players doing great things, but who happened to come up on the short of it in 2019 and, along the way, behaved deplorably. Curiously enough, they both reside in the same city ...

Houston Rockets


I find that observation quite fascinating. I would, in fact, suggest that the media who cover a team tend to take on many of that team's characteristics. I'm not so sure that I would call the media surrounding the Golden State Warriors media "elitist" per se, but the entire operation has had a sense of smugness about it for the past five years, so I can see where some of that attitude can rub off. So sure, I can see how you might think along these lines. In fact, that tweet above is more proof this phenomena exists, whereby media members take on characteristics of the club they follow, because that guy is part of the broadcast team for the Houston Rockets, and he comes off in that tweet as being every bit as much of a whiny brat as the team chock-full of whiny brats that he covers.
I was positively dreading a Warriors-Rockets playoff series. The Warriors carnival/circus became so unenjoyable last year that even had they won the title, it wouldn't have felt terribly satisfying. And then here come the Rockets for a second round series, a rematch of the West finals the season before, and you have the two most irritating teams in the NBA as it pertains to how they bitch and moan and petty politic the officials on every play. It became absolutely exhausting in short order. I just knew it would get miserable in a hurry, and it took all of one game for that to happen.
Because, of course, one team didn't get the calls, that being the Rockets. And they were bad calls. In the first half, James Harden was fouled multiple times shooting threes, and they weren't called. They should have been. They were totally wrong. But it was also obvious why those calls weren't given, which was made perfectly clear on the deciding play of the game, with the Rockets down three, when Harden went up for a three and then FLOPPED. James Harden does that. He flops. He flops and he flails, and he has made every single referee look like an idiot in the process on national television, and rightly or wrongly – wrongly in my opinion – the officials in Game 1 of that series were not going to give him that call. And for a team who had basically banked on James Harden's ability to draw phony fouls on threes as a cheap source of points for several years, them complaining about it afterwards had a definite element of The Boy Who Cried Wolf about it.
And boy, did they complain. Game 1 of that series sent the Rockets into hysterics. Daryl Morey and the front office then produce a report saying they'd done a detailed audit of the West finals the previous season and concluded that, over the course of those seven games, the officiating had cost them 93 points. Never mind the fact that this conveniently overlooks just how many bogus points they accrued from Harden and Chris Paul flopping and drawing phantom fouls, which I'm sure Houston thought was all a-ok. This team missed 27 3-pointers in a row in Game 7 of that series, and then they wanted to go back, a season later, and blame the officials for why they lost. Seriously? Are you serious about this? Hey here is a tip: don't miss 27 threes in a row!
And I say that as a fan of Morey, who is one of the best GMs in the game, and also as a fan of Harden, who is one of the greatest scorers I have ever seen. It is truly impressive that he has mastered the ability to draw fouls, that he has perfected the is-it-or-isn't-it-a-travel stepback move into a three. It's finding an edge and then perfecting your craft to where you can take advantage. It's admirable.
But just because I admire it, it doesn't mean that I like it and doesn't mean that I want to watch it. There is usually one move in every game of Houston's where Harden is trying to draw a foul, the ref doesn't take the bait, and he winds up looking foolish. I hate watching the Rockets, I hate the way they play, and I hate the way they bitch when things don't go their way.
And, of course, for the second year in a row, the Rockets gagged when it really mattered, losing on their home floor in Game 6 to the Durant-less Warriors, who've now beaten them four times in the playoffs in five seasons and appear to have rented office space in the Rockets' collective heads. Well, the Warriors suck this year, so if/when the Rockets blow another playoff series, they will have to find something else to complain about. And I'm sure they will.

Houston Astros
First off, this story is pretty disgusting. In the aftermath of winning the AL pennant, Houston Astros assistant GM decided to gloat and taunt a female reporter – one who has covered domestic violence cases, and who taken the Astros to task for their trading for 2018 trade to acquire Roberto Osuna, who was in the middle of serving a 75-game MLB suspension for alleged domestic violence against the mother of his child.
"Thank God we got Osuna! I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna!"
What sort of piece of human garbage would do something like this?
Of course, there is an old adage in journalism, "never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel," and suffice to say, a whole lot of ink got spilt over this. The Astros, of course, immediately tried to deny it and lie about it, which didn't really fly, since multiple reporters corroborated the account of the events. They then misspoke, misstated, and mis-everythinged, creating a P.R. dumpster fire for themselves, Taubman wound up being fired, and only when the heat got too much and the pressure failed to subside did the owner of the club begrudgingly apologize.
But we shouldn't be surprised by this, nor should we be surprised by the fact that this same organization violated MLB's rules and barred a Detroit reporter from the clubhouse because Justin Verlander had a beef with him from years past. Frankly, we shouldn't also be surprised that the Astros are in the middle of an alleged cheating scandal involving the stealing of signs, a belief so wide-spread in the game beforehand that the Washington Nationals actually changed the way they relay the signs during the World Series in order to prevent any funny stuff. None of this should be a surprise, because the Astros are an organization that have been deliberately opaque, showing contempt and disdain for anyone who may question them, and acting as if the rules are an annoyance which needn't apply. It's the same sort of shitty attitude which the Patriots exude, which (combined with some healthy envy, of course) is why so many people in the NFL are sick of that team.
The Astros are a great team. They've got some cool players, they're fun to watch ... and I hope they lose every game, just like they were doing back when I first started this blog. Seriously, try acting like decent human beings. Other people do it, and they can also be remarkably successful as well. It's not hard.

Since I am speaking of franchises with deplorable ways, shout out as well to another loser, the Jacksonville Jaguars, whom the NFL Players Association are now actively discouraging their members from signing with, seeing as how 25% of all grievances the union has to file are with the Jaguars, who have taken to levying ridiculous fines and forcing players to show for 'voluntary' workouts. Is it any wonder why the Jaguars are terrible? This is a workplace, first and foremost, and who wants to deal with that on a daily basis? And don't even get me started on the football team in Washington named for a potato ...

But there is really only one choice for The Lose Of The Year. There could only be one, because 2019 was the year of the greatest free agency bonanza in NBA history, an event so big that people basically became obsessed with the gossip and paparazzi and rosterbation of it all and pretty much forgot to watch the actual basketball taking place. And amid all of the bluster and bombast of NBA free agency armageddon, one bastion of delusional thinking rose to new heights and deserve to have their jersey retired:


New York Knicks
In Europe, the most lucrative sports entities have, for the most part, reached that level through a long track record of success. There are some exceptions – namely Manchester City and Paris St. Germain, clubs who have become petrostate playthings and promptly rocketed up the table with all of that cash sloshing about – but the biggest clubs in Europe are all dominant forces in the game who have been winning for decades: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, etc. You can resent them for winning so much, but their track records are undeniable. Over the course of a century of playing soccer, they have reached that position of power and status, and incredible valuation, by winning all the time.
Compare that to North America, where there is no relegation, no grave penalty for losing – in fact, there are perverse incentives to be bad – and, as such, how valuable an entity is has very little to do with what it has achieved, and oftentimes has far more to do with where it is located. Run down the list of some of the most valuable franchises in North American sports. The most valuable franchise in the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs, haven't won a title in over 50 years. Two of the biggest commodities in the NFL – the Cowboys and the aforementioned Redskin Potatoes – haven't been relevant on the field in over 20 years. The Yankees and Dodgers are incredibly rich, but also impeccably run, and they have legacies of success, but then you also have two of the biggest brands in the sport, the Cubs and the Red Sox, who built up much of that value over time by reveling in just how unsuccessful they had been. Come to Wrigley! Losing is cool! Cheap beer! Nowhere is the absurdity of this more on display, however, than at Madison Square Garden, the home of the $5 billion New York Knicks.
Let us let a New York resident tell it ...


The Knicks are one of the most hopeless franchises in all of sports, a team whose entire cachet is based entirely on their zip code. They've won two titles in their 73-year history, the last one coming in 1973. They're not a particularly good franchise, nor have they really ever been save for a stretch in the early 1970s. But they own the most coveted piece of real estate in the NBA in Madison Square Garden – or, at least, they would like to tell you that's the case. I get tired of Lakers exceptionalism, because that franchise was a joke for much of the past seven years, but at least the Lakers have won stuff. What have the Knicks done? Not much.
But 2019, of course, was the summer where it was all going to change, because Free Agency Armageddon was here, and, of course, they would want to play for the Knicks, they would want to ply their trade at the Garden and restore the glory to the franchise. Rumors about Durant to the Knicks started in the summer of 2018 and ran rampant. Hell, the Knicks even started putting pictures of Durant on their marketing and promo materials, even though he was on another team. But the Knicks wanted even more. They wanted another star to go with Durant. Oh, wait, Kyrie Irving is unhappy in Boston. Hmm ...
But the Knicks needed more space, more cap space, so they swung a deal to trade their best player, the disgruntled and oft-injured Kristaps Porziņģis, to the Dallas Mavericks for three first round picks and a bunch of stuff. They also moved a bad contract of Tim Hardaway Jr. in that deal, freeing up $74m in cap space for the summer of 2019, enough to sign two max players. Oh, and hey, the Knicks are now so bad, in the spring of 2019, that they may just land the top overall pick in the draft as well and, oh, dare to dream ...



Or, in their case to sign four power forwards, which is what wound up happening.
And, of course, they wound up with the #3 pick instead of #1 in the lottery, the top pick falling to the New Orleans Pelicans, who drafted Zion, and who then used this new-found position of strength from which to make a more favorable deal with the L.A. Lakers when it came time to make an Anthony Davis trade.
KD and Kyrie both came to New York, alright, signing with the Brooklyn Nets, who'd gone about creating two max slots of their own, and done so without all of the active, open, blatant near-tampering that the Knicks were doing, what with the promo materials and the owner, Jim Dolan, going on radio and bragging about how they were gonna get two max guys in the summer. KD and Kyrie both wanted to be in New York, as it turned out, they just didn't want to play for the Knicks.
And why would they? I remind you of one of your most fundamental principles here at In Play Lose, that which was christened "Edmonton Disease" by an NHL writer several years ago: in a salary cap league, where contract lengths and values are dictated by the CBA, the offers for free agents from various clubs will basically be about the same, and if dollars are equal, then other factors will come into play in a free agent's decision. This was coined in an effort to explain why the Edmonton Oilers, and other small market teams, would always struggle to keep top players. Dollars being equal, why be in Edmonton when you could be in, say, New York? But the same principle applies to all of those in the bidding, regardless of your address. If your organization is a shit show, then why would someone want to play for you?
And the Knicks are a shitshow. They've been that way for years. They have the worst owner in the NBA, a guy so thin-skinned that he bans fans who dare suggest he sell the team. They've had endless numbers of coaches and GMs and team presidents, some of them big names who don't know what they're doing, and some of them guys who do but who've been undermined by a meddlesome boss. They don't draft particularly well, their team president feuded in the media with their best player for years, there is constant tumult and turnover, and they never stick to a plan for more than about 10 minutes. The atmosphere around the whole organization is toxic and the franchise is a joke, but it's also one ultimately operated by a bunch of delusional weirdos who seem to think they're somehow exceptional. For what reason? What have they done?
Needless to say, all of that pie-in-the-sky thinking amounted to nothing. The Knicks got no max guys in free agency, but having all that space is not a bad thing at all. You can use it to make deals from a position of strength, to solve other team's problems for them, to acquire more draft assets and capital. Yeah, you whiffed, but that happens sometimes. It's time to go to Plan B. It doesn't have to be the end.
Nope, it's the end. This season, the Knicks are paying $63m of that $74m in previous cap space to four guys they signed in a panic who all play the same position. So much for Plan B. B as in bizarre or bonkers. They've already fired their coach, David Fizdale, after a dreadful start to the season that was shocking in how not shocking it was. As terrifyingly bad as this team has been, what is even more terrifying is how predictable it has been.
And it's amusing to think that it was the Nets who undid all of their plans for the summer of 2019, the same Nets who found themselves in NBA purgatory after seemingly trading away their entire future to the Celtics. The Nets built it all up the right way: good drafts; good under-the-radar signings; create space to create leverage; occasionally throw a wacky contract at an RFA that another team felt forced to match, thus hindering the opposition; establish a culture of accountability, but also fun on the court regardless of the results. The Knicks should be doing all of that. But doing so would only be possible if they first acknowledge that they aren't, in fact, exceptional. There is nothing about them that is, and nothing has been for quite some time.
And Knicks fans deserve better than this. Those are good fans, patient fans. They've put up with a lot of bullshit. The only thing they are gonna win any time soon is The Lose Of The Year Award for 2019.

- - -

I needed to write this. I've barely written all year, having sunk into a deep depression and abyss which has carried all throughout 2019. I basically couldn't concentrate for months, so writing anything seemed impossible. Thank you for permitting me this opportunity to scribble away and laugh a bit, which is the whole point of this exercise. Failure is funny, and laughter is life's best medicine. Feel free not to take anything I've just written seriously, because I certainly haven't, and it's better that way.

The mistakes are all mine. We regret the errors.

Let's close with some music. This is my favorite find in music in 2019. This is a Dutch band who play Turkish folk songs reimagined as 1970s psychedelic rock, with equal parts funk and fuzz in their sound. I saw them perform and they were brilliant. Pretty much my favorite record I heard this year. I'll leave you with this and, hopefully, I'll be around this corner of cyberspace once more in 2020.

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Monday, May 13, 2019

Failing Beautifully

WATCHING Brighton & Hove Albion attempt to defeat Manchester City on Sunday gave me, as a fan of a newly-promoted Premier League side, some hope for next season, because if a team as bad as Brighton can manage to avoid being relegated, then surely we can as well. That team is awful. They somehow took 36 points this season. I’ve watched them a half-dozen times and wondered how it was they took even 20.

Brighton were hosting Man City on the final day of a Premier League season which turned out to be a remarkable 9+ month race to the title between two of the best clubs that England has ever seen, with City going into the day on 95 points, a point ahead of Liverpool in the table. Whomever lost out, and came second, wound amass a point total ranking ahead of all but two clubs in EPL history – one of those being Man City’s 100 pt. season from a year ago, and the second being whomever claimed the title today. Liverpool went into their final game having won 10 of their past 12 matches, having drawn the other two, only to have lost ground in the table, as Man City had won 13 straight. They had run-up a gap of 24 points – eight wins – over their closest foes, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, who’ve done nothing all season other than oh, you know, reach European finals. (More on Spurs in a minute.) It seems somewhat cruel that one of these two élite teams would come up short. They were essentially separated, going into the final day of the season, by 11.7 mm – the amount of the ball which didn’t cross the goal line on a Liverpool shot in the Reds’ 2:1 loss at the Etihad back in January, a shot cleared off the line which, in the end, was verging on saving Man City’s season:

Saving the Season (photo by Shaun Botterill)

And I’ll admit this right up front: I have no real rooting interest here. As a general rule, I’m more inclined towards Liverpool than most other large clubs, and also as a general rule, I’m disinclined to think much of clubs that are p.r. shills for authoritarian petrostates, but I really don’t have a dog in this hunt. But Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp earned Friend of The Lose status for life this past Monday, during his press conference in the run-up to Liverpool’s return match against F.C. Barcelona in the Champions League semifinals. Down 0:3 after the first leg, and seemingly needing a miracle, Klopp said that he wasn’t sure how they would prevail, but that he hoped that, if they didn’t win, they would “fail beautifully.”

And given the cruel turn of events, you can see where he was coming from. Liverpool had lost by three goals at the Nou Camp against Barca, putting the Champions League final seemingly out of reach. They were going to play the return leg against Barca without Mo Salah, their talisman, who’d been concussed over the weekend in a 3:2 win at Newcastle which had kept their Premier League title hopes alive. Then come Monday, Liverpool are watching Man City being played to a scoreless draw for 70’ by Leicester City – a result which would mean two points dropped for City – and their hopes for an EPL title are sky high, only to be dashed by a thunderbolt from Vincent Kompany, of all people. A glorious season, an incredible season, was all about to go out the window. No EPL title, no Champions League final – and no one cares who finishes second.

But Klopp called upon the Liverpool faithful to gather for the Barca rematch at Anfield on Tuesday night and, if nothing else, for the game to be a celebration of the season. Sure, they were likely to fail on Tuesday night, but they were going to do it on their terms. They were going down swinging, playing with passion and joy and love. They were going to fail beautifully.

– – –

 
FAILING beautifully has been an art form in the Netherlands ever since the Oranje forgot to score the second goal in the 1974 World Cup Final. The Dutch lose more stylishly than anyone, and it’s almost a matter of pride, at this point. No country has had a greater influence on the way that the game is played while, in terms of results, had so little to show for it.

And I mean that with the highest sense of admiration. Soccer is still a game where how you play actually matters. No one cared last year that José Mourinho got Manchester United to finish 2nd in the EPL, because none of us want to watch United lining up ten behind the ball and playing on the break. The “pragmatic” sides that care about results come hell or high water are ultimately looked at somewhat skeptically (by everyone other than their fans, of course, and sometimes even then), and there is still a lot of room for the quixotic types that will joust windmills and flip the bird to The Man along the way. We’re mired in the analytic and statistical era in sports here in America, this dull infatuation with ruthless efficiency which leads to garbage like Three True Outcomes baseball and the insufferable Houston Rockets in the NBA which, while damningly effective, also leaves the viewer feeling somewhat unsatisfied, since so much of the variability and unpredictability of the game – traits which make the games appealing in the first place – seem to have been snuffed out of it. There is still room in soccer for those who dare to dream.

For those of us romantics, Ajax Amsterdam captured our attention with their run to the semifinals of this year’s Champions League. Ajax went to Real Madrid in the Round of 16 and beat the living snot out of the defending champions, triumphing 4:1 at the Bernabeu in a game which wasn’t even that close. In the Quarter Finals, they went to Turin and completely dominated Juventus, winning 2:1 in a scoreline that flattered the losers. In those two brilliant road performances, Ajax played spectacularly progressive football: fast paced, attacking, their players elegant on the ball, the unit so well drilled that guys could essentially “pass guys open,” playing balls into spaces where they simply knew that teammates would be. It was gorgeous football and also wicked, because it was apparent, from the attitude of the players dressed in the Ajax colours, that they gave zero fucks about the pedigree of their opponents. Who gives a shit if you’re wearing the Real or the Juventus shirt. You’re soft, you’re lazy, and you’re not any good.

Which, frankly, neither of those teams were.

European soccer is in a weird place at the moment, a place where the enormous financial advantages that a handful of clubs have allow them to be successful without actually being particularly good at the game. If you throw enough high-priced talent on the field, they can probably pip enough results over time, even if they don’t seem to be much of a cohesive team or even seem to like each other very much. Most of the major European leagues are basically won on a trot by a dominant club which not only can afford to pay the high wages and high transfer fees of the élite talent, but can also afford to cripple their greatest domestic rivals simply by going those clubs’ best players and throwing a dump truck full of euros in their driveways, enticing them to come to the Bayerns and the Juves and the Reals and the PSGs of the world and ply their trade.

But over time, a certain amount of laziness sets in. When you’re a star-laden, top-end club, you don’t have to actually play well to be successful. There isn’t a single person whom I know who follows the Italian game who thinks that Juventus have played worth a damn this season, and yet they have cruised to a championship in Serie A this season while barely breaking a sweat. This sort of institutional malaise can be hard for even sheer talent to overcome, over time.

But it still prevails a lot of the time, as much as we hate the fact that it does. Just this past Thursday, I tuned in to watch the Europa League semifinal match between Chelsea and Eintract Frankfurt. Chelsea may have finished third in the EPL this year, but so what? They are awful. The squad is stale, the football is bad, they’re facing a transfer ban, they constantly waste the careers of good young players and their only legitimately watchable player, Eden Hazard, wants a transfer to Real Madrid this summer. There is this collective sense of malaise about all of the proceedings. They’re playing this young and energetic Frankfurt squad which you know is fool’s gold. You think to yourself, “oh, hey, look at all of these really nice players that Frankfurt have. They won’t be playing in Frankfurt a year from now. All of those Serbian kids will have Spanish or English addresses a year from now. They’ll all command a nice price this summer during the transfer windows.” Sure enough, Chelsea won on penalties and advanced to the Europa League final despite being outplayed, which made the entire endeavor feel unsatisfying.

But this is the nature of the stratospheres of European football at the moment. Big clubs come to halfass it and do just enough to advance and cash the big cheques, while up and comers then go into the summer and sell off all of their best assets for big money, filling up their bank accounts but giving no hope to their fans. It is, ultimately, still an unfair game.

But every now and then, one of the minnows turns out to have some teeth. The effect of Leicester City winning the EPL in 2016 cannot be overstated. Leicester caught all of the big guys with their pants down. The big English clubs had grown soft, lazy, and self-satisfied, and then here come these weird outsiders who call them on their bullshit, at which point they had to adapt and change what they were doing. What we’re seeing now, with Man City and Liverpool, was a direct result of that: teams that, yes, have money to spend, but who’ve also employed coaches and staffs who – gasp! – actually try coaching. What a concept!

And Ajax was calling bullshit during this season’s Champions League. They gave no fucks whatsoever about pomp and pedigree. Come on you lazy slugs, get out here on the pitch and let’s ball! They were young, talented, brash and fearless. But this is no surprise coming from Ajax, who have been, for probably 50 years now, one of the greatest talent development operations in the sport. It was interesting, during their Champions League semifinal, to run down a considerable list of guys playing for Spurs, their opponents, who had previously played for Ajax. It’s one of the most important clubs in the history of the game, a place where much of what we consider to be the modern game was originally conceived of and tinkered with, but the club simply cannot consistently compete any longer owing not only to finances, but also to the overly abundant influence among those who control those finances. Every year, we seem to inch closer to some sort of a European Super League, something I suspect won’t be anywhere near as good as people would like to believe. The irony was not lost on people that one of the clubs driving that plan, Juventus, got absolutely hammered in the Champions League by Ajax, who are precisely the type of club that a European Super League would like to exclude.

Ajax are fun as hell, an exciting young team that’s about to be a really, really expensive one. If anything, they’ve been too good. Given the value of their young talents, it’s only a matter of time before bigger European clubs start picking their players off, and Ajax cannot help but open for business, because the values are just too high. This has a feel of 2016-2017 A.S. Monaco, who reached the Champions League semifinals with an exciting young team and then promptly sold everyone, netting well over €300 million but also rendering themselves irrelevant again in the process. This Ajax side was always going to be a one-off side, regardless of the final outcome. Even if they were to somehow win the Champions League, the entire operation would wind up starting over next season.

That they went out the way they did was, in hindsight, somewhat predictable, even if the circumstances – the deciding goal occurring in the 95th minute on basically the last kick of the game – were stunning and shocking and cruel. Wild attacking sides rarely make for great game managers, and all of the things lovable about this team – youth, naïveté, idealism – wound up being their undoing. After winning the first leg 1:0 in London, and jumping to a 2-0 lead in the first half in Amsterdam, they simply needed to see the game out, but then Spurs manufacture a goal – aided by a rather sloppy piece of Ajax defending – and the entire foundation crumbled. They couldn’t defend, they couldn’t stop Spurs, and they completely forgot what to do. Tottenham then quickly got a second, and proceeded to put them under more pressure than they’ve probably ever seen.

If nothing else, what the last two rounds of the Champions League have shown us is that Spurs are the masters of madness. The crazier the game gets – and few games have been crazier than Spurs’ quarter final match up with Man City – the more Spurs seem to thrive. This game at the Cruijff Arena in Amsterdam descended into absolute chaos over the last 30 minutes, with the game stretching end to end, Spurs playing about six forwards, and all tactics having been thrown out the window. Obviously, it was a gutting loss, and yet there was something almost poetic about the fact that Ajax went down swinging, still bombing forward late in the game against their own good sense. They did it on their own terms. They failed about as beautifully as you possibly can.

_ _ _

photo by Paul Ellis/AFP


MEANWHILE, back at Anfield, needing to make up a huge deficit after a 0:3 loss at the Camp Nou, Jürgen Klopp’s stated hope was that the return leg with Barcelona would be a celebration of a great season regardless of the final outcome, as it seemed pretty apparent they were got to wind up with nothing to show for a truly amazing campaign.

But then a funny thing happened: Liverpool 4:0 Barcelona.

And while it was, of course, a shocking result in the moment, the overwhelming sense that I was left with, having watched both of these games, is that the real shock result wasn’t in the second match, but actually occurred in the first one.

That 3:0 scoreline at the Camp Nou flattered to deceive. In between the first two Barca goals, it was one-way traffic for almost an hour, with Liverpool enduring one of those nights which reminds you what a stupid fucking game this can be. They were all over Barca, but the goddamn ball wouldn’t go in the goddamn goal. Then Barca cooks up a second goal against the run of play, and then Messi does Messi things, and it winds up looking like a completely lopsided result. But the fact of the matter is that outside of Messi, Barca weren’t very good.

Which is a recurring theme with Barca these days. They basically win because they have the best player on the planet. That fact alone was enough for Barca to cruise to a La Liga title in a year where their two Madrid rivals ran the gamut from stale to dysfunctional. The skill level is still there, of course, but it’s now an older club of seasoned vets who know how to think their way through games rather than overwhelm an opponent with dynamic attacking play. They basically play fundamentally sound football and wait for Messi to do something brilliant – which, clearly, works most of the time, but their margin for error is far smaller than it used to be.

And blowing a 3-goal cushion on the road in the second leg of a Champions League semifinal would be more shocking if we hadn’t read this script before, but the except same story played out in last year’s quarterfinals against Roma. A year ago, Barca won the first game 4:1 but Roma shot themselves in the foot and scored twice on themselves. Roma then came up with a plan of attack: high-press, lock down the midfield to cut off the supply lines to Messi, get that early goal and dictate the terms, forcing the game to be all about speed and athleticism.

Klopp’s blueprint at Anfield was a carbon copy, although it felt a bit precarious at times in the first half. Barca gifted Liverpool an inexplicably stupid goal 7’ into the game, but then created a number of really good chances themselves, only to have Allison come up the saves. On a night where Barca’s finishing was a bit better, it would have been over at that point. Having withstood what would turn out to be Barca’s best shot, Liverpool just kept ratcheting up the pace and the pressure and the tempo. Then Wijnaldum scores two quick goals early in the second half, and now Liverpool is running riot. Barcelona just literally couldn’t do anything. They’re second to every ball, the back line looks disorganized, the midfield looks old and slow and unathletic. It didn’t feel like a question of whether or not Liverpool would get a fourth goal, but would they possibly even get a fifth or even a sixth?

And this is inexcusable from Barcelona. We saw this film before! Barca were old and slow and unathletic a year ago as well, and the club’s response was … well, what exactly? How did this team get better? It’s bad enough to lose once like that. It’s far worse to do it twice, having failed to learn from your mistakes.

And a trend which appeared time and again throughout the small sample size theatre of this year’s iteration of the Champions League was that the big clubs who covet this title – the Juves and Reals and Bayerns and PSGs – all seemed to approach the competition as being one where they could just flip the switch and everything would be okay. Barca fell into the same trap. They haven’t had a meaningful domestic match in months. They haven’t had to play hard, to be at their best. The teams which, week in and week out, were playing meaningful games in their domestic leagues were much sharper when it came time to contest the Champions League. Literally every game Liverpool has played for the past nine months, in their pursuit of Man City, has been an urgent affair. Ajax were in a title chase in the Eredivisie which went down to the middle of May. Those teams stayed sharp, whereas those pudgy big clubs, who feel like they can just show up and win their domestic league and do some great party tricks along the way, showed up for the Champions League and looked slow, soft, and unfocused.

Perhaps there was no greater example of this than Liverpool’s fourth goal against Barca, a quickly taken corner which caught Barca not paying attention, an appalling lack of focus you’d be unlikely to ever see in a U-12 game, much less at the game’s highest level. It was some quick thinking on the part of Liverpool but, as we often do here at In Play Lose, let me quote Louis Pasteur here and say that luck favors the prepared mind:


In the end, Barcelona got what they deserved. This was not a fluke. They got crushed. The better team won.

Now, suffice to say, this pathetic midweek showing from Barca hasn’t gone over well in Catalonia. Barca’s 99,000-seat stadium was half empty over the weekend for their game with Getafe, and those who did turn up felt free to boo the home side. It was a pretty gutless performance at Anfield, particularly against a Liverpool team that was missing not only its best player in Salah, but one of his strike partners in Roberto Firmino, as well, yet who just plucked some guys off their bench and slotted them into the lineup and looked better than Barcelona in every way. Barca’s been linked to buying several young Ajax players this summer but, given how tired and leggy their lineup has become, given the slow and sloppy performance at Anfield, and given Ajax’s zest and zeal, Barca might be better off at this point just buying the entire Ajax roster.

– – –

LIVERPOOL will have to make do with a chance at winning the Champions League, in the end, since their EPL title quest came up a point short on Sunday. They had hope for all of about 83 seconds, the time between Brighton’s shocking opening goal and Man City’s equalizer, after which City commenced pulverizing their useless opponents into submission. The 4:1 win for City rendered a Liverpool 2:0 win over Wolves at Anfield moot, giving Man City the title by the narrowest of margins. I know how much winning the league would have meant to the club, which hasn’t done so since 1990, but there is still something big to play for. Same can be said for Spurs. Neither club got what they wanted in terms of the Premier League this season, of course – Spurs were pretty damn good themselves for much of the season before a rash of injuries wiped them out. The two clubs are going to play their style of game in Madrid on the 1st of June no matter what. Liverpool is going to attack, Spurs will be look to be expansive and slick. It should be one helluva good match, in part because, over the course of two days last week,  they played like they had nothing to lose in a seemingly no-win situation. Neither feared the possibility of failing beautifully, and both clubs wound up succeeded spectacularly.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

We Are Premier League

Just as we all predicted (photo by Joe Toth)

BACK in 2016, my beloved soccer club, the Canaries of Norwich City F.C., were relegated from the Premier League for the second time in three years. The club chose to take the same approach to their  2016-2017 campaign in the English Championship, aka Division Two, as they done two seasons before: maintain the same basic core of players in hopes of immediately bouncing back up to the EPL.

This strategy does seem good in theory: if you have enough guys who were good enough to compete at the highest level, and win a few games here or there, they should be good enough to compete, and even thrive, against the “lesser” competition of the second division. In practice, however, it’s something of a risky proposition. For starters, if you’re bad enough to be relegated, you’re probably not as good as you thought you were, and if you don’t make it back up to the EPL in the following season, you’re stuck with a whole bunch of fringe players on more-than-fringe wages while lacking the means with which to pay for them.

Norwich had managed to successfully pull off this yo-yo strategy in 2015, defeating Middlesborough 2:0 at Wembley in “the richest game in football” to rise back up to the EPL, only to find themselves back in the dregs once again after a dismal 2015-16 EPL campaign. Only this time, they got it wrong. Despite having the most potent offense in the Championship in 2017, Norwich finished 8th, thanks to a defense that couldn’t stop anyone. This result was a disaster, and was followed by a necessary amount of staff turnover and roster churn.

For the 2017-18 season, new boss Stuart Webber hired Daniel Farke, a Klopp disciple from Borussia Dortmund with a background in player development, to be the manager. Farke’s first season at Carrow Road was, well, not very good: the Canaries finished in 14th place, couldn’t score, and were frustrating as all hell to watch. There was some good young talent there, and there were a few good moments among the many bad quarters of an hour, but the season was pretty dismal. Norwich City were now mired in the middle of the muck that is the Championship, which is a very, very bad place to be.

The Championship is one of the most demanding and difficult leagues on earth. The 46-game schedule is brutal, no one wants to be there, everyone is in a bad mood and has a chip on their shoulder. There is good talent in the Championship, but not necessarily squad depth, so a club’s results can be all over the place during such a long season, and the results are wildly unpredictable. The league is littered with formerly great clubs in search of past glory: the 24 clubs in this season’s Championship have 25 topflight titles between them, and have collectively spent 177 seasons in the Premier League since its inception in 1992. The Championship is a bastion of broken dreams, with many of those aforementioned clubs having run themselves into deep debt, if not near financial ruin, in an attempt to stay relevant. Just this season alone in the Championship, Bolton Wanderers – one of Britain’s oldest clubs – have seen their players go on strike, after not being paid for over a month, and had home matches cancelled or jeopardized due to the club’s inability to pay for basics such as concessions and security, while another club, Birmingham City, were docked nine points in the standings for continuing to amass unacceptable levels of debt. The Championship can be a dark, dark place.

And the outlook for Norwich City after its second season back in Championship football was, shall we say, not promising. All of the Premier League money was now gone. There wasn’t much left over in the budget to buy new players. Whatever money would be available would have to come through sales – and, sure enough, the two best players from a season ago, James Maddison and Josh Murphy, were sold off to EPL clubs in the summer (the former for £22m to Leicester City, where he was immediately slotted into the first XI and reminded all of us Norwich fans weekly just how fucking good he is), while their Man City loanee goalkeeper, Angus Gunn, found himself a permanent home with Southampton in the topflight. The focus, in 2018-19, was going to be on player development and rebuilding, and patience would be required. They were not among the betting favorites at the start of the season and, among the fan base, there were zero expectations.

City’s start to this season was, shall we say, inauspicious? That is a nice way of putting it. The Canaries lost three of their first five games, the third of which being an embarrassing 0:3 home loss to Leeds United. The defense was shipping goals and the offense was disjointed. The whole thing was a mess. If it was possible to underachieve zero expectations, Norwich was achieving it. It was not going well.

Okay, so, now what?

Mario Vrančić: £650,000 worth of genius (photo by Adam Holt Action Images)

Well, clearly, the solution to the offensive woes is to hand the keys to some 21-year-old Argentine kid plucked off a La Liga bench for £1.5 million in the offseason, and have him try to pick out a pass for some journeyman Finnish striker acquired on a free transfer from the Danish league. Ah, yeah, that should work well. And then, in order to fix the defense, how about you stick a 21-year-old at one fullback spot, and then stick a 19-year-old at the other fullback spot, and then take another 21-year-old, who was playing midfield in the third division last season, and convert him into a central defender on the fly. That should work, right?

It was about this point where most of us Norwich faithful were thinking, “so, um, does Daniel Farke know what he’s doing?”

Well, after losing three of their first five games in the Championship, the Canaries have now lost three of their last forty!

Those two young fullbacks, Jamal Lewis and Max Aarons, were named to the Championship’s Team of the Season, with Aarons being named the league’s Young Player of the Year. Also joining them on the Team of the Season is Teemu Pukki, the free agent Finnish striker, who was named the MVP of the league after scoring 28 goals – a good number of which being set up by their Argentine playmaker, Emiliano Buendia, who proved so indispensable that Norwich didn’t win a single game all season that he missed. Meanwhile, that converted center back, Ben Godfrey, has gone in a calendar year from being a Shrewsbury Town loanee to wearing the colors of England’s U-21s, and has started drawing interest from a few of the EPL’s bigger clubs. (You can’t have him.)

So, as we Norwich faithful were saying all along, “this Daniel Farke guy, he’s a genius!”

Quite simply, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Literally no one saw this coming. It came straight out of left field. Not only was the club not expecting this to happen, in some ways they were counting on it not happening. I mean, they halved the budget this season. It’s become a spendthrift operation in an attempt to balance the books. The first XI cost a whopping £5.6m to assemble and includes four free transfers and three products of their academy. The notion of losing six matches the entire season with this squad seems inconceivable:


But this serves as a good reminder, to those of us who root for minnows or lesser sides, that you can, in fact, do more with less. There are good players out there, but you have to go and find them. Lest we forget, Leicester City winning the Premier League was made possible by the club beating the bushes on the backroads of France and discovering two future EPL Players of the Year. Does it always work? Of course not! Nothing works every time! But it can be done, and when you got nothing in the bank account to spend, you have to go this route, and trust in your recruitment and your coaching staff to maximize the potential of the players you’ve got.

After kicking off the month of September with a 1:1 draw against Ipswich Town – who are trash, by the way – the Canaries then start to win. Norwich rattles off six games unbeaten, which makes you think, “yeah, this is okay, they’re playing some good stuff here, this is fun.” Then they run off 12 more unbeaten and, at this point, you cannot help but start to believe.

It’s during this 12-game unbeaten run that some truly weird stuff starts to happen. Against Milwall, they’re up 2-1 after 80’ and then find themselves down 3-2 after 90’ and score two goals in extra time to win 4:3. They beat Bolton on a 93’ goal and then, in one of the most ludicrous games I’ve ever seen, trail Nottingham Forest 3-0 after 74’ and then score three to level it, two in stoppage time and one of those in the 98th minute. They never give up, and they pull one result from the fire after another. It feels a little bit like it is somehow destined. It’s as if they’ve forgotten how to lose.

Not only does Norwich forget how to lose, but the football is fantastic. “We want to be the protagonists,” is how Farke describes his philosophy, in a wonderful turn of phrase. As I said, Farke is a Klopp disciple, and Norwich’s play has decidedly Liverpoolesque qualities to it: high-press, high-tempo, play from the back and use the entirety of the pitch, possess the ball and pass the opposition right off the park. It is liquid football at times, fluid and fast flowing, beautiful to watch. (Some of these goals are terrific, with #11 and #16 being absolute beauties.) The Canaries have also been tireless and tenacious, attacking relentlessly. They attack and attack and attack some more, wearing down the opposition. Norwich have scored more goals after the 70th minute than any team in English football, including eight goals scored in stoppage time.

And, of course, a team that possesses both a flair for the dramatic and seeming senses of both invincibility and inevitability makes for an easy watch and an even easier sell. Norwich already has a fantastic fan base, passionate and devoted, one which will still sell out home games even in the second division, and yet it is also a patient and forgiving fan base. We all know what the club is up against in terms of finances, we’re all realistic, but we still want good football and good entertainment, and this team gives you bang for the buck. The club is young and fun, they play with great passion and imagination, the action is end-to-end and they score a tonne of goals – 2nd most goals in any season in club history. Over the course of the season, the fan base has become as energized as it’s been in decades in response to the Canaries’ continued rise in the Championship table. Not only are the home matches selling out, but as many as 5,000 fans are traveling to away games.

And the wins just kept on coming. The Canaries started off 2019 with another 6-game unbeaten run in the Championship, including hammering Leeds 3:1 away to vault to the top of the table. They then lost at Preston North End on Feb. 13 … and haven’t lost since. The loss to Preston was followed by eight successive victories, they had a firm grasp on first place, and promotion to the Premier League is within sight …

… And then it got weird again, although it got weird in the other direction. Four successive draws followed, featuring an abundance of the maddening circumstances we both love and hate about the game: a 2:2 draw in which Norwich dominates and Reading does absolutely nothing but produces all of two good chances the entire game, one of which in stoppage time, and both of which happen to go in; a 1:1 draw at Wigan in which a ball takes a fluky bounce off a defender and hits his arm, thus conceding a penalty; another 2:2 draw in which Sheffield Wednesday scores a wonder goal from 35 yards out and then scores another when an offside striker knocks the ball in with his arm, and yet somehow the referee doesn’t see it (another game where Norwich leaves it late, equalizing at 97’ on this gorgeous Vrančić free kick); and then yet another 2:2 draw at Stoke, with Norwich conceding the equalizer when the defender slips and falls. At this point, the fan base is getting nervous. “Oh no, they’re going to fuck this up, aren’t they? They’re going to bottle this.”

But that’s football. Weird shit happens in this game. Over the course of the season, you’re going to both take and drop some points you don’t deserve. And recency bias drastically colors your outlook and opinions, of course. If you’d told me, after those dismal first five games of the season, that come Game #45, Norwich would have 88 points and be in first place, I’d have taken it. If you’d told me after 40 games, when Norwich already had 84 points, that come Game #45, Norwich would have 88 points and be in first place, I’d have been annoyed at their inability to finish the job. “88 points? Fuck that! They should have 96 fucking points and be taking victory laps after every match while smoking stogies! Damn this team of chokers vra vra vra!” Big picture, everything was fine.

And then a well-timed collapse by Leeds United helped to ease the way, as Leeds suffered a couple of shock defeats in recent weeks. Going into the penultimate game, Norwich were six points clear of 3rd-place Leeds, needing only a draw against Blackburn Rovers to seal Premier League promotion. I’ll let Fin Stevens, the best and funniest among a wide range of wacky online Norwich City pundits, provide the proper commentary:


Holy smokes, that actually happened. The modest, mid-sized club on a shoestring budget is now, improbably, in the Premier League.

Okay, so, now what? Well, to be honest, next year is probably going to suck. The Premier League is unkind to newcomers. They’ll probably lose, and lose a lot, which is good for my business but bad for my psyche. It’s easy to say “oh, they need to buy some players,” but after three years beating around in Div 2, it’s hard to know who is and isn’t good enough to play on your roster that you currently have. My hope is that they keep playing the kids, who are young and hungry and talented, but occasionally still a bit naïve, particularly when it comes to defending. Play the kids, let them screw up, let them get better. I would rather they do that then trot out a bunch of AAAA minor leaguers. My guess is that they will still be pretty cautious, and let’s be honest here, trying to figure out what to do after being surprisingly promoted to the Premier League is a nice problem to have. But lots of teams get it wrong, and find themselves right back down in the Championship a season later. One of last year’s promoted sides, Fulham, is already toast, and a second, Cardiff City, is likely to sink as well. (Which will make for some fun Welsh derbies for the Swans fan in the household to watch next season.) When you get right down to it, it’s probably not going to go very well.

But you know what? Who cares? This has been the most fun goddamn season of watching this sport that I can ever remember, and doing horrible in the Premier League would never take that away. It’s been so much fun that, for 90 minutes every weekend, I’ve been able to crawl out from under the haze of mental illness which has plagued me for the past few months – the primary reason for me not writing on this blog – and feel joy, one which comes from simply enjoying the game, enjoying the beauty of it, enjoy seeing how a spark is rekindled between a club and its fans. It’s been an incredible ride, and a most unexpected one. I am much the better for permitting myself to go along for the ride.

Oh yeah, and free tacos! I had a season-long wager with my wife, a Swansea fan, and world’s greatest postman Mike “Words with” Frentz, a Stoke fan, on whose team would finish highest in the Championship table. Loser buys the tacos – except that, if one team gets promoted, then both of the others buy. Double tacos for me! I cannot handle all of this success. I may have to write about the San Francisco Giants or some other god awful team after this. I am off my game.
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