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.

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:

Norwich 2-1 Blackburn alternative commentary #ncfc #rovers pic.twitter.com/kuKUBlf4u4

— Fin Stevens (@fin131) April 28, 2019

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.

Nope, Still Suck

I am underwhelmed

USA FC, if nothing else, is good for business. I absolutely eviscerated this team after they lost to Trinidad & Tobago and were knocked out of the World Cup. The U.S. Mens National Team were co-winners, with those chokin’ dirty birds the Atlanta Falcons, of the coveted 2017 Lose of The Year award, and with good reason.

Seeking to put the past behind them, USA FC moved to name Columbus Crew chief Gregg Berhalter in Dec. 2017, just two months after Bruce Arena resigned in disgrace …

Oh, wait, that’s not right.

Berhalter was, in fact, named head coach in Dec. 2018, some 14 months after the debacle in the Caribbean. During that 14-month interlude, the team was coached by, well, no one really. (Although someone probably should have told that to interim coach Dave Sarachan, who sure did coach a lot of the time like he thought he might get the job, basically ignoring large swaths of his young roster during a series of completely meaningless friendlies.)

Yes, it took U.S. Soccer 14 months to hire a head coach, and their super-duper-über wide search produced a guy they could have hired a year ago, which makes the whole thing seem farcical and a waste of time.

Which, frankly, it was. Sigh. Excuse me here for a moment:

Damn you, U.S. Soccer, my liver hates you!

Now, to be fair here, I have no idea how Berhalter will do as the head coach. I don’t watch that much MLS – Sounders games mostly, a few others here and there – but I can’t honestly say that his Columbus Crew teams were even the least bit distinctive or memorable to me, save for the one which blew the MLS Cup final a few years ago against the Portland Timbers. (And as a Sounders fan, I believe that losing to Portland in the MLS Cup final should be Strike One, Strike Two, Strikes Three, Four, and Five against this hire, since Portland are scum. But I digress.) He has a so-so record coaching a so-so team in a so-so league. It is said that his teams will be organized and have an identity, which is the exact same two footballing clichés used to describe every single new hire in every single position. He may turn out to be just what they need. He may be great at the job. I hope that he is. I truly have no idea.

But the process with which Berhalter came to be the head coach of USA FC is so utterly ridiculous that I cannot help but be skeptical. He’s definitely a safe choice, at best. It’s a bland and beige hire. And taking 14 months to make a bland and beige hire who they could have hired a year ago speaks to the state of confusion and dysfunctionality in the organization. I can assure you there were plenty of people out there, some of them really good, who interested in the job. (It pays really well, for starters.) This feels akin to scrolling on your phone through Yelp reviews of 200 really good restaurants and then deciding to eat the grey and grumpy leftovers in the back of the fridge. It doesn’t taste good, and it doesn’t look very appealing.

Now, I can understand why there were some delays in the process. First off, the federation rightly blew itself up in the aftermath of the T&T debacle and needed a new boss. The USSF election was ultimately won by Carlos Cordeiro, who somehow managed to position himself as a champion of reform while being the organization’s Vice President – a skillful act of political positioning that’s usually reserved for Absurdistans and Banana Republics, but one which usually winds up with an authoritarian who is worse than the original. Cordeiro wound up winning the vote when enough of the self-interested people in this most insular of organizations decided that it was in their own self-interest to vote for him. Cordeiro’s first act upon taking over the USSF was to appoint Earnie Stewart as “General Manager” of the Men’s national team. (Probably to the dismay of a few of the “Players Council” members who voted for Cordeiro in the first place, some of whom are now football management types.) A nice guy, Stewart, a smart guy and a decorated American player. But from the moment he took over this position, Stewart’s never exuded any sense that he actually knows what it is that he’s supposed to be doing. He’s not alone in that, mind you. None of us know what it is that he’s supposed to be doing.

And it’s certainly wise, during a World Cup year, to wait until after the tournament is over to make this sort of hires. There is always a great deal of turnover in coaching staffs after a World Cup, coaching USA FC is certainly an appealing job, and so waiting until the French had finished running all over the Croatians in the final would allow Stewart to cast a wide net. So I was down with this, I understood the rationale of waiting until mid-July to make a big hire.

And the obvious candidate, in the aftermath of the World Cup, was Juan-Carlos Osorio, who stepped down from El Tri. Osorio is a Colombian but his roots in the game actually run deep in the U.S. He has coached at a high level all over the world, he knows the region, he knows the dynamics of American footballing culture, and he’s known as a tinkerer who is willing to experiment, which would be ideal for dealing with a young and uncertain talent pool. This was the guy that seemed to make sense, and he was certain to be available after El Tri once again failed to advance past the Round of 16 in Russia – an annoyance to the Mexican fan base, which had never fully forgiven Osorio to begin with for El Tri losing 0:7 to Chile in Santa Clara at the Copa América Centenario in 2016. (And understandably so. I was at that game. El Tri were a disgrace.) And, if you saw El Tri run the Germans off the pitch in the World Cup – and basically provide a blueprint for beating the Germans that every team thereafter copied – it’s clear the guy has some chops.

So Osorio just seemed like the most bloody obvious candidate ever for the U.S. job, and then he left El Tri and I figured it was only a matter of time before he was hired to coach the Stars & Stripes, and then he took the job … in Paraguay. Wait, what? I mean, I know that he’s a South American, and there are good jobs in South America – demanding jobs, but good jobs – but coaching Paraguay ain’t one of them. This is a step-down, which would indicate that, for one reason or another, U.S. Soccer wasn’t interested. Or, more to the point, U.S. Soccer had not even really bothered to start looking at all at the time Osorio was available. As Cordeiro said himself about the Berhalter hire during the introductory press conference: “We anticipated way back in August when the search began that with Gregg being a likely contender ...”

What the actual fuck? What are we doing here? Apparently we are doing nothing, at least not for the entire first half of 2018.

So Osorio rides off to Asuncíon and the American position stays open throughout the summer, and my best guess, at this point, is that the reason the job isn’t being filled is because U.S. Soccer wants an MLS guy to coach the national team, and is waiting to make a hire until after the season is over. An idea which is, quite frankly, stupid.

MLS is fine. It’s fine. I enjoy MLS. There are some good coaches in MLS, to be sure. But we’re looking for a guy here who is capable of preparing an international side to take on the Brazils and the Englands and the Colombias and the Italys of the world. (Which Sarachan wasn’t doing all that well, mind you, since the U.S. got blasted by all four of those nations in friendlies this fall.) As we’ve seen before, there is this annoying and, frankly, disturbing propensity among U.S. soccer types to think far too highly of MLS and its players and think far too little of the American guys playing overseas – guys who are far better players but also whose lives are complicated by the fact that they’re being rather handsomely paid by European clubs and are understandably reticent to want to play in some ridiculous USA FC friendly and risk injuring themselves, since doing so seriously will likely ruin their careers. But there is also the fact that U.S. Soccer is beholden to MLS and SUM, its marketing arm, to bankroll its budget. It’s an organization which has always known which side of the bread is buttered, and constantly winds up kowtowing to MLS even though far too many MLS clubs can’t be bothered to put young American players on the field – which is shouldn’t feel beholden to do, mind you, since those clubs have to look out for themselves, but it speaks to the silly nature of this dynamic. In Berhalter’s introductory press conference, Cordeiro spoke of how USA FC will be “uniquely and fiercely American.” What the hell does that mean? Given that MLS has spent much of its existence patting itself on the back while being a glorified retirement league, one can only guess that this “uniquely and fiercely American” side will puff out its chest and gloat when it manages to scrape out a goalless draw with Honduras.

But, as I say, there are actually some really good coaches in MLS who were capable of taking over this position – but if you’d asked me to name them, I can’t say that the steady eddie skipper of the Columbus Crew would have been one of them. Two come immediately to mind, in fact: Oscar Pereja, who not only coached like hell in Dallas but also produced a lot of the sorts of nice young talented players that USA FC needs, and Tata Martino, an Argentine with an extensive résumé who has now built Atlanta United into a dynamo and one of the most exciting teams the league has ever seen in a matter of a couple of years. Pereja apparently got a final interview but what passed over for Berhalter, and has now taken his talents to Liga MX. Martino, meanwhile, was apparently passed over because of his lack of proficiency in English – which is also dumb. It’s a global game. Talent travels all over the world and it figures out how to communicate. Hell, the Belgians have a Spaniard coaching Flemings and Francophones, and most likely doing so in English. Guys figure it out and get through it. The language of football is universal.

But more to the point, waiting to hire an MLS coach as the head of USA FC means waiting forever, because the season drags out into December. Where is the sense of urgency in all of this? While U.S. Soccer dragged its feet on filling the position, the team was out there playing 10 friendlies in 2018, looking not particularly good in any of them, and looking not the least bit coherent in all of them. Some of this was to be expected, of course, since the player pool was primarily made up of youngsters. Talented youngsters, mind you. There is definitely some talent there, assuming they know where on the field they’re even supposed to be. Young players screw up, they make all sorts of mistakes, but they’re the right kind of mistakes that you want them to make and learn from. But some of that incoherence on the pitch is attributable to the post-Trinidad malaise which has engulfed everyone involved with the program. There is confusion, there is upheaval, no one knows what the hell is going on and, with a lame duck coach whose strategic plan doesn’t matter, the on-field product is a mess. It’s a waste of time, it’s a wasted opportunity to actually start assembling the kind of squad that U.S. soccer wants, and very much needs. It’s no wonder that the players are fed up with the whole process:

That’s a quote from Michael Parkhurst, who plays for Atlanta United and has 25 caps for the national team. That is a really damning statement about the current state of the program.

And of course, there are the obligatory flag wavers out there whose response to this is full of patriotic jingoism about how you should be proud to put on the red, white and blue and to represent your country and all that bullshit. Hey, guess what? We ran a whole lot of our MLS retreads out there last fall and left our European pros back in their posh European homes, and we got our asses kicked by fuckin’ Trinidad & Tobago. The bigger issue here is that if you are a legit, high-calibre player – even if you’re in MLS, mind you, and have visions of doing better things in your career – why do you want to put up with this mess on your off-time? Why go out there and be put in positions to fail?

If I sound skeptical, it’s because I don’t trust anyone involved in U.S. Soccer to make a smart decision. We’ve reached a point, as it pertains to this organization, where all of the trust and the good faith engendered over the past 30 years has been thrown out the window. You’re going to have to prove me that you know what you’re doing.

And there’s another aspect of this hire of Gregg Berhalter as the coach of the national team which just cannot be overlooked, as much as U.S. Soccer would like us to do so: his brother, Jay Berhalter, is the CCO of the organization. Nepotism, anyone? And that’s not fair to Gregg, of course. It’s not fair at all. U.S. Soccer made a point of outlining (albeit in rather vague generalities) how Earnie Stewart assembled a list of 33 really good candidates for the position, whittled it down to 11, then five, and settled on two final interviews of Berhalter and Pereja. Okay, fine, you can tell us all of that, but it’s also been reported that the brother of the guy who wound up getting the job was one of the people who helped originally assemble the list of criteria necessary for getting the job, even though he is a business and finance guy who has nothing to do with the technical side. That whole thing just reeks of nepotism and conflict of interest. And again, that’s unfair – but it’s also unavoidable. Every time the U.S. loses, people are going to say that Gregg Berhalter sucks as a coach and only got the job because his brother is one of the bigwigs at the top of the food chain. That’s going to rear it’s ugly head every single goddamn time this team doesn’t get a victory, and even if it does win, that belief will never fully go away unless this team wins a damn World Cup, which ain’t gonna happen any time soon. Why would you willingly subject yourself to that scrutiny?

Sigh, I need another drink.

Look, the optics of all of this are bad. They are terrible. Taking 14 months to hire the brother of an exec, who you could have hired a year ago, to be the head coach ultimately looks like a dumb and lazy hire. What the point of any of that? What was the point? And that’s not fair to Gregg Berhalter, and it’s not fair to anyone involved on the actual field. But U.S. Soccer has always been an insular and incestuous sort of organization in its days on the margins, in keeping with the premise of Sayre’s Law that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. They were all small-time players who were fighting over scraps.

But this isn’t some marginal sport anymore. We’re talking about a $1b business here. Hell, this organization is still full of clownshoes, and we’re supposed to host a damn World Cup in 2026. (And thank god for that, otherwise we might not be able to qualify.) I truly have no idea whether this is a good hire or not, but my spidy senses tell me that my distrust in U.S. Soccer is not misguided. They’ve done nothing of late to earn my trust. We’ll see where all of this goes in 2019, but until further notice, U.S. Soccer still sucks. Prove me wrong.

And One More Thing ...

How appropriate

THE LOSE didn’t have the chance to write about the World Cup Final the other day, owing to having some work obligations. Apologies for that, and thanks to the many people who’ve made it a point to visit this space over the course of the past month. I always enjoy writing about the World Cup, finding it to be the single-most compelling sporting event on the planet, one whose meanings and metaphors often transcend the game of soccer itself.

But, of course, the final game itself is often bad. It’s usually bad, in fact. It’s tense, it’s tight, players are nervous, the tactics are cagy, the pace ponderously slow. There hasn’t been a truly good final in more than 30 years before this past Sunday, when France defeated Croatia 4:2 in a game which embodied the entire tournament. There were set piece goals, a goal from a penalty kick, a VAR controversy, another tally for vaunted striker Own Goal, the play was generally progressive and attack-minded, the game was competitive but generally disciplined, the underdogs took no shit and played like hell, and there were goals galore. It’s about all that you could ever want in a final.

Was it ‘great’ in terms of play? Well, yes and no. There were mistakes galore, some of them of the jaw-dropping variety – what are you doing, Hugo Lloris? – but I ultimately judge matches by how exciting and entertaining they are, and this year’s final (and the tournament as a whole) left me wildly entertained. Frankly, playing well is overrated a lot of the times in the game of soccer. It’s a game, more than any other, where playing really well will frequently not make a damn bit of difference.

And Croatia were great. They were great in that first half and the first 15 minutes after break. Quite honestly, if the Belgians had approached the semi final in the manor that the Croatians approached the final, Belgium probably would have wound up beating France and winning the damn World Cup. I’m still annoyed about that, even though my winning Las Vegas ticket will cushion the blow:

Viva Las Vegas, baby

And early on in the game, The Official Spouse of In Play Lose actually asked me, “which side are you rooting for,” since I was applauding the Croatians for their efforts. More than anything, I wanted a good game. I didn’t want to sit through another 90 minutes in a dentist’s chair that was France playing pragmatic soccer.

But where was I? Oh, right, the Croatians were great. Their spacing was terrific, they used the full width of the pitch to great effect, they pressed the French high and were committed full-bore to attacking. It was one helluva risk to do that, of course, but it was also the right strategy. It’s what Croatia does best. They have a whole stableful of fantastic players going forward. It’d be stupid to be cautious and minimize those talents. So the Croatians pushed high and pressed the French and really controlled the game. The French defense looked pretty shaky at times, and more than a few lethal Croatian passes fizzed through the box and came perilously close to their desired target. Croatia were all over them for the first 60 minutes.

And they were losing, 2-1, because soccer is a stupid fucking game sometimes.

And to blame both of the goals entirely on the officiating is, well, simplistic. The first goal was an own goal from Mandžukič as he defended a set piece given for a foul on Griezmann that was clearly a flop. It was a flop. It was a bad call, but guess what, bad calls happen all of the time. There are plenty of free kicks given out for bad calls that don’t result in a goal. So play the next play! Defend the set piece! And for godsakes, don’t score on yourselves in the process! The second goal, coming at 1-1 after a spectacular volley by Perisič to equalize, came from a penalty that was, well, by letter of the law probably the right call, but one which would have bothered no one if it hadn’t been given. That sucks. That’s just a tough break, and those happen from time to time. What’s lost in the discussion of whether or not it was a penalty is the fact that the penalty stemmed from a French corner, which stemmed from Vida aimlessly, sloppily shanking a ball over the end line. One play always leads to another, and Vida’s bumbled clearance is what started this whole mess. So yeah, the officials played a part in these two goals, but Croatia also contributed to its own demise, which is what usually happens.

And mistakes happen all the time, of course, but the point here is that, as the underdogs, the Croatians had such a small margin of error when it came to winning this game. France had barely got a kick in during the first 15 minutes, then they get one opportunity and boom, the  Croatians are down a goal. All of their excellent work, their precise passing, their adherence to a solid strategy and game plan, came undone in just a couple of moments here and there, both of which went against the run of play. This is why soccer is a stupid game sometimes. Moments change matches, for better and, often, for worse.

But we should love the Croatians for going for it, for not trying to sit back and play it safe. It’s the World Cup final, damn it. You’re the underdogs! Take some risks! And Croatia doubled down and went hell-bent for leather in the second half. It was breathtaking to watch, with the action going end-to-end at a frenzied pace.

At which point the French said, “oh, you want to run with us? How cute,” and then did this and this. Game over.

And that’s just mean. That’s just nasty. That’s the killer instinct, the next gear. That’s Tom Brady throwing two TD’s on consecutive possessions sandwiched around a three-and-out. That’s the Warriors going on a 22-2 run to start the third quarter. That’s “we’re better than you, and we’re going to kill you, and we don’t care who you are.” It’s that sort of display of talent we all want to see, but dread when it happens. I’ve been annoyed with the French during this tourney because we don’t see it enough. They get down a goal against Argentina and score three in 20 minutes. They have the Croatians running at them and taking it to them and then they go scorched earth and end it all. It seemingly takes being legitimately threatened in order for that switch to be flipped and that talent to be unleashed.

I thought the Croatians were terrific in this game. They played with class and they were worthy adversaries to a team which were, in the end, a worthy champion. And France had to win this game. Remember, they lost two years ago on home soil in the finals of the Euros. Lose two straight finals, and some hack with a blog about failure is likely to brand you a bunch of choking dogs. There was legit pressure on this team, and not winning this game would have been seen as nothing other than an enormous failure.

But the French are worthy winners, and we should just get used to them winning all the things from now on, because they were one of the youngest teams in the tournament and still have room to improve. With Varane and Umtiti, they found their center back pairing for the next two World Cups. Pogba played, and behaved, like the future captain of this team that everyone knows he can be. Mbappé, meanwhile, is only 19 years old, he’s humble and well-spoken and exceptionally generous, and he’s one of those unique talents who has literally no limit to what he is capable of doing. He embodies pretty much everything that’s good about the game. He can win everything, as far as I’m concerned. Ballon d’Ors, World Cups, you name it. Go ahead and win all of it. Soccer is moving away from the world of Messi and Ronaldo and into the world of Mbappé. In that regards, the game is obviously in excellent hands.

Not only is this French team ridiculously young for a championship side, but there is room to grow. Deschamps, whom I figured would be fired by now, did a marvelous job coaching this team, all of whom bought into his plan. But they can get better. Deschamps knows it, the players know it. They can be more dynamic, more decisive, and they struck me as a group that is not all that interested in resting on their laurels. They want to get better. This could get really terrifying in the future.

The main reason to be excited about the French is that not only are they barely scratching the surface of their abilities on the pitch, but they are only beginning to wade into their pool of talent. They have more young players in the pipeline, as Paris is the richest talent pool on earth right now. The French are producing enough good players to field entire national teams for other countries: we’ve seen multiple African nations now throw out World Cup sides made up predominantly of members of the diaspora who’ve grown up in the French system (a fact whose long-term impact on CAF football is yet to be determined, but will likely be substantial). There will be more. Lots more. Success is never a guarantee, of course, but the French are well-positioned to dominate international soccer for the next decade.

Not only is France going to keep producing players, but their national team is likely to keep looking like this one does – and this is important to remember, in this age of xenophobia and intolerance. France’s players had their pick of nations for which to play, and they chose to play for France. Pogba could have played for Guinea; Kante could have played for Mali; Mbappé has parents from Cameroon and Algeria, etc., etc. Even a white kid like Griezmann is a child of immigrants. Football runs so deep because, in some way or another, it reflects the true nature of a society – whether or not you want to admit it. It was French striker Karim Benzema who said, “when I score goals, I’m French, and when I don’t, I’m an Arab.” France’s national football team is half-Muslim, more than half-black, and all of those guys were out there shouting, “Vive la France! Vive la republique!” once the World Cup match was over. They are proud to be French, and France should be proud to have them, and have those who are like them.

The World Cup was once the undisputed pinnacle of the game. This has changed, over time, mostly due to the fact that the entire world has integrated. Talent moves from nation to nation, coaching ideas travel across the globe. When I first started watching the World Cup, back in 1982, this rarely happened, so there was a sense of mystery and intrigue about the proceedings. One of the fascinations of that 1982 tourney was that the 19-year-old wünderkind, Diego Maradona, was set to join F.C. Barcelona after the event was over – and a South American venturing to play in Europe was scarce at that time. There was a mystery and an intrigue, an element of the unknown to the proceedings. You knew a side of domestic Brazilians would be good, but you didn’t know just how good they would be.

That uncertainty has been lost, of course, in this day and age. Every great player is plying his trade in Europe somewhere. There are no secrets or golden nuggets waiting for the World Cup to be unearthed. And with integration has come a homogenization of tactics and of techniques. Most everyone plays in a relatively similar way, with only minor tactical variance. It’s really a question now of just how organized you can be. It’s no surprise so many goals in this tourney were scored on set pieces, since set pieces are about all a national team has time to practice for these days.

But I challenge someone to find something better. And no, the Champions League is not better. Some cup tourney where the 3rd-best team in Spain is playing the 4th-best team in England in the final is not the pinnacle of the game. Seriously, go back and watch the Real-Bayern semis from this year’s Champions League, in which two teams with hundreds of millions of euros of talent produced 180 minutes of the most comically awful football imaginable. I don’t know where you’re going to find the ‘best’ of the game, as best is this nebulous concept which lacks definition. Club football rules the calendar year, but I’ll take the World Cup any time. I’ll take the passion and the drama, the resourcefulness among its coaches, the pride and the desire. Give me that any day.

This was nothing short of the best World Cup I’ve ever seen, in terms of day-in, day-out drama and competitiveness. The minnows gave zero fucks and felt like they could punch the big guys in the mouth and challenge them to a street fight. We had tension, we had high drama, we had the throwing of caution to the wind time and again. For consistently fun and energetic and exciting play, this was as good as I can remember. In most of the confederations there have been efforts to try to maintain interest in the international game (including the UEFA Nations League debuting this fall, which sounds ridiculous, but who knows?), but I think the World Cup showed that the international game is alive and well. Not even the largesse and bombast and arrogance of FIFA has managed to kill it quite yet. In time, they still might – that time being this nonsense in 2022 if it actually comes to pass – but if anything, what this event in Russia showed is that those who grossly mismanage the game can, and often are, saved both by those who decide to play it.

It’s Going Home

Croatia need to wear the checkers tomorrow, which is one of the coolest looks in sports

THE CONSOLATION game of the World Cup is always enjoyable to watch – far more enjoyable than the final, in fact. The final has all of the tension and the drama, of course, but the consolation game usually has far better actual play, and there is usually plenty of goals. Belgium’s 2:0 win over England was, in fact, the lowest-scoring consolation game since 1974. Even so, it was a pretty spirited encounter and both teams took it seriously – doing so in part, I suspect, because they all know each other so well. It was basically a Premier League all-star game out there, with quite a lot of club teammates on either side. Guys like to beat their enemies, of course, but they love to beat their friends.

It’s always a relaxed game and, in the moment, an enjoyable one – albeit one that almost no one cares about. Seriously, no one cares whether you finish third or fourth in the World Cup. Don’t believe me? Okay, quick trivia question here: there are 11 countries whose best finish in the World Cup is either third or fourth. Name them. Go. (No looking it up.) You can’t do it. Probably a lot of people don’t even remember that the Netherlands beat Brazil 3:0 to finish third four years ago. It doesn’t really matter. No one cares. But it’s a chance to have some fun, play without any pressure, and whichever team can muster up enough motivation amid their bitter disappointment at being there can have the tournament end on something of a high note.

And in the abstract, of course, both the Belgians and the English accomplished a lot. If you’d told them six months ago they’d wind up reaching the semifinals of the World Cup, they’d have thought about that and said it sounded like a success. The problem, of course, is in the immediate: having only reached the semifinal means that you didn’t win it. Obviously, in the moment, it feels like a failure.

And given how the tournament shook out, it’s easy to say that both of these teams will rue the final outcome and consider it an opportunity lost. The usual powerhouses all fell by the wayside. (Or, in the case of Italy and the Dutch, didn’t even make it to the tournament.) The Germans were garbage. When have the Germans ever been garbage? The Argentines were a hot mess. Spain was disjointed, knee-deep in distractions. Brazil underachieved and never found another gear. If neither Belgium nor England could win this World Cup, when both were, in my opinion, good enough to do so, then when are they ever going to win it?

• And yeah, I know England’s won before, 1966 and blah blah, I’m aware of this fact. I was made very well aware of this with all of the “football’s coming home” nonsense. English fans are very good when it comes to talking about ancient history, given that so much of the recent past has been rubbish. Well, guess what? It isn’t coming home.
And I’m not trying to mock the Three Lions faithful here, because I’m a fan as well, and have been for a long time. I enjoyed seeing them do well in this tournament. A good England side makes the world game better. It’s just that the expectations are always so out of whack that, until this year anyway, you never get the sense that anyone playing for England is all that happy to be doing it. Playing for England has all of the appeal of going to a Thanksgiving dinner with the relatives you don’t like who all bring casseroles – it’s a trying affair and it never tastes good.
But England was fun this year, a young team who, unfortunately, showed their youth and inexperience at the wrong time. After getting the lead early on against Croatia, their front line let them down and they couldn’t get that second goal. Hell, they could barely get a shot on goal, for goodness sakes. This was a recurring theme for England in this tournament. Before Saturday’s consolation game, through 600 minutes of game time, England had as many shots on goal in open play – six – as Saudi Arabia had in 270 minutes. Almost all of their goals were the result of set pieces which, while you want to do them well, wasn’t in keeping with the way they wanted to play. Teams like Iceland live and die with set pieces because they’re always bunkering down. If you want to play an expansive, attacking style, you’ve got to be capable of creating chances in open play.
But England couldn’t really do that, because they lack the sorts of passers that a team like, say, Croatia have, and even though they were down a goal, the Croatian midfield started to boss the game. England’s response was to try and play over the top and avoid the midfield entirely, hoofing it long repeatedly but to no effect. Once Croatia got a foothold, you could sense that the equalizing goal was coming, and that they would then figure out a way to win the game after that.
And people haven’t given Croatia enough credit. That is one savvy side, and that team is tough as hell. They came from down a goal in three straight knockout matches to win, playing 120 minutes in all of them, which speaks to some incredible resiliency. Even so, at 70’ up a goal, England has got to win that game. Keep the shape, manage the clock, use your speed and your youthful legs to see the game out. But instead, it was England who were looking fatigued at the end, having been forced to chase while Croatia maintained control of the game and the flow.
And can people stop it already with the narrative about what a small country Croatia is? You don’t need 50,000,000 players. You need 11 guys who know what they’re doing. It can be argued, in fact, that it’s easier to produce good players in a smaller country, because it’s easier to implement a comprehensive development system in a smaller space – but even that doesn’t really work in the case of Croatia, whose second-best player, Rakitić, actually grew up in Switzerland. Sometimes, there’s no real logic to it. This is why reproducing results, over time, can seem impossible. When it comes to player development, there is never any guarantee of success.
England’s got a bright future for themselves, as they have a young team that can learn from this experience, and they have even more young players in the pipeline, as England are currently the world champions at both the U-17 and U-20 levels. The problem is, though, that a lot of that good young talent is likely to be squandered in the Premier League. I’ve heard the argument before that England’s not any good because not enough Englishmen play in the Premier League, which both is and isn’t true. It’s not the job of the clubs in the Premier League to develop young players for England. They have more money to spend than they know what to do with, and they’re going to spend it worldwide. The biggest clubs in England are already redundant at most positions. They don’t have room on the roster for most kids, nor do they have the time.
So what do you do if you’re a young player stuck on the reserve side for one of England’s big clubs? Go find a game. You need to play, you need to compete, you need to learn through getting your head bashed in by the big stars and growing from the experience. There is so much talent in the EPL, both on the pitch and on the sidelines, from which to learn and grow and improve. Can’t get in the side at Man City or Arsenal? Go to Bournemouth, go to Southampton, go to Newcastle or Leicester or Huddersfield or some such, just get out there and play and learn. Those bigger opportunities will ultimately come.
And I think there are going to be more opportunities for The Three Lions as well, but now it is a question of whether or not patience can prevail, or if the expectations of more success will become too great.

• Before we go any further here, there is a podcast which I want to point you to, one which should constitute required listening for all disciples of The Lose and budding connoisseurs of failure.
I’d been meaning to listen to the WYNC Studios production, American Fiasco, and finally got around to doing so in the past week. I cannot recommend it highly enough. American Fiasco, hosted by Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers fame, is the story of the U.S. World Cup campaign of 1998, which resulted in the U.S. finishing dead last in the tournament in France. And as bad as not qualifying in 2018 may have been, the 1998 team was, in many ways, worse. This was a team, mind you, that devolved from being Argentina 3:0 in the 1995 Copa América in Uruguay into a disjointed, disorganized side which couldn’t beat Iran at the World Cup three years later. The series features about two dozen interviews and everyone looks bad: a lot of the players come off as brats, the accidental head coach was a lightweight who was way out of his depth, the administrators come off as pompous and pigheaded and thinking the game is all about them. So, in other words, it’s all a lot like now. It’s been just long enough since that disgrace occurred that the lessons learned from it have been forgotten. Everyone in U.S. Soccer would do well to go back and learn from those mistakes, and while American Fiasco is a cautionary tale, it should also be pointed out that four years later, in 2002, the U.S. was in the quarterfinals in Korea. Things can turn around in a hurry.

• Being an American, I tend to use a lot of basketball metaphors when I’m talking about soccer. But other than the fact that in one game you score 100 and in the other you score 1, I do find a lot of similarities between them in terms of the geometry of the game, the need for spacing and the abilities to manœuver and operate in tight space. And I’m going to use another one here to make a point about the French, who remind me of one of those college basketball factories – something like Kentucky or Louisville or, even a better example from the recent past, all of the UCLA teams when Ben Howland was the coach.
The reason why I make that comparison is that the university basketball programs I just mentioned are overloaded with talent. Great talent, guys who will play in the NBA one day. But what you get, when you watch them play, is far too many basketball games where the score is something like 60-55. It’s slow, it’s boring, and wholly lacking in imagination. And needlessly so, in my opinion – all of a sudden, bang, there comes a game which is open and fast and up and down, it’s 100-98 or some such thing and all of that talent takes over, you see the skills on display and you wonder why it is that they don’t play that way all of the time. The reason the games aren’t always 100-98, of course, has to do with the fact that the head coach is paranoid. Letting talent run free means ceding control, so college basketball coaches overly emphasize defense and running sets and being ludicrously attentive to detail. Now, in a 60-55 game, better talent still usually prevails, of course, but it’s also a whole lot less enjoyable to watch.
This is France to me in a nutshell. Oh jeez, Argentina is attacking and scoring goals. Well, I guess we’d better score more. The talent on that team is absolutely ridiculous. With the attacking talent on hand, they can run any team into the ground.
But instead, what we got in France’s 1:0 win over Belgium in the semifinals was a case of cold, hard pragmatism. It had all the excitement of watching some Man United game in which Mourinho takes £250m worth of talent and uses it to park the bus. The French set out to do little more than frustrate the Belgians. That was basically the entire point of the operation. They were really struggling at first, since the Belgians were shifting shapes from defense to offense and confusing the French, but once they figured out what Belgium was up to, they adjusted the defense and turned the entire affair into a claustrophobic slog.
And fair play to them for that. The whole point is to win the damn game, and the French did so. But it certainly wasn’t fun to watch, and it wasn’t the type of game between the two teams that anyone was hoping for.
It would’ve helped if Roberto Martinez, whom I was quick to praise in my last post, hadn’t blindly continued to ride a hot hand. His insertion of Fellaini and Chadli into the Japan game as substitutes had saved them. He left both in the starting lineup against Brazil, and Fellaini had a terrific game. But neither was of any use against a French team intent upon gumming up the works. Fellaini got beat for the goal on a set piece, and if he’s not any good in the air, then what good is he on the pitch? Chadli, meanwhile, was so poor on the right flank that the French just left him alone after a while, sloping their defense the other way to deal with Hazard on the left. It was such a bog in the middle of the pitch for the Belgians, with Witsel and Dembele and Fellaini all getting in each other’s way, that finally they stuck Fellaini on the left wing, which is an even more useless place for him. Martinez got it all right against Brazil, but got it all wrong in this game. Belgium could have played for six hours and they weren’t going to score.
I do think the Belgians go home with more regrets than the English. England’s case for being good enough to win this tournament stemmed from the how the draw and the bracket shook out – get yourself into a 1-game, winner-take-all situation, and there’s no reason to think you couldn’t win. But on talent, the Belgians were good enough to win this tournament, they were good enough to beat literally any and everyone and they failed to do so. They could have, and maybe even should have won this tournament – which is the kind of thing that you can’t say very often. And it’s a big ask to expect this group to come back four years from now, which would be the third World Cup. You saw just how old and slow the 3-timers from Germany and Spain looked in this event. These guys play so many games every year and eventually it takes its toll. There are some good young players in the pipeline in Belgium, to be sure, but how good is a question. They have élite talent right now, they have game changers like Hazard and De Bruyne who can turn a game on a dime. You just don’t know where and when you’re going to have even one of those types of players, let alone more than one. I can see them giving it a go two years from now in the Euros, however. Winning that tournament should be the goal – the main problem being, of course, that the French are likely going to be in their way.
And in general, I’m down with the French, I’m cool with the French and I still have a ticket here for France at 11/2 which, I suspect, is going to pay off tomorrow. (Though I would have liked my Belgium at 9/1 paying off even more.) But I find pragmatic soccer to be incredibly tiresome, and I didn’t much care for seeing Deschamps’ risk-averse, conservative tactics wind up being rewarded. I understand pragmatic soccer when you don’t have any good players. Then it makes a lot of sense. But seeing the French do this just seems like a waste of talent.

I’m hoping that the game tomorrow is a little more open and expansive. It’s probably not going to be a very good game, because World Cup finals rarely are. I’ve been watching the World Cup for 36 years now, and the only final that I would say was actually good was Argentina 3:2 West Germany in 1986. My hope is that Croatia will have all of their moxie and street smarts on display. I think they’ll get beat, and it may not ultimately be that close, but I hope instead that they fight like hell and we get a really exciting game, one worthy of capping off a really exciting tournament. That, and I want to see me some checkers. Let’s get the red and white checkerboard design out tomorrow, which is one of the coolest looks in sports. They may go down to defeat, but I want the Croatians to look good while doing so.

Down to Four

Pow!

WELCOME to the semifinals that we all would have liked to see at the Euros two years ago, instead of the dross match-ups we wound up getting. On balance, I would say that the four best teams in the tournament have managed to reach the semifinals. Neither Belgium nor Croatia has lost a game, while the only blemishes on the records of France and England have come in games that didn’t really matter. Oftentimes, this isn’t the case, of course. Instead, you’ll often have some team reach this point in the competition who were sort of feeling their along in the dark before finally getting it together, or perhaps you’ll have a team that rides their luck and doesn’t necessarily seem like they deserve to be there. This is not the case this year. We have four really good teams capable of playing really exciting, attacking football. I’m hoping these four sides will throw caution to the wind in the next couple of days and really try to play their preferred styles and to their strengths.

• It could be argued, I suppose, that Croatia has ridden their luck a little bit in the past two games, though in general, I don’t have too many regrets when I feel like the team which is actually the better team winds up advancing on penalties. The reason I say that is not to discredit those who lost that one particular game on penalties – an act which ultimately feels a bit random. But the better team advancing makes for the prospect of the next game to be a better game. I’d rather watch the Croatians come out and try to take the game to England in the semifinals than watch the Russians set 10 or 11 behind the ball.
Though to give them proper due here, Russia were terrific at the end of their match with Croatia in the Quarters. Russia fell behind in extra time by soccer’s equivalent of a ground ball with eyes, a strange ball that found the net and just sort of eluded everyone off the head of Vida (who was once fined £80,000 for drinking beer on the team bus, which should make him a hero to us all). Extra time generally sucks, of course, and for obvious reasons: both teams are absolutely paranoid of making a mistake, so neither team is willing to risk. It’s such a waste of time that some competitions have done away with it entirely, preferring to go straight to penalties – which I happen not to like, since I’d rather see stoppage time turn into a mad dash rather than a slow, cautious slog. But extra time is pretty much useless – unless, of course, someone scores, which Croatia did, and to which the Russians responded by throwing everyone forward in a mad scramble to equalize. And they did so, eventually and deservedly, on a set piece with the Brazilian-turned-Russian Fernandes heading home against an exhausted Croatian defense. The Croatians were sort of fighting on two fronts in this game, battling fatigue and also trying to avoid running afoul of the dumbest rule of the World Cup, since pretty much everyone on the team was on a yellow card and a second would see them suspended for the semi final they’d not even qualified for yet. I hate that rule. It’s a dumb rule.
But the Russians equalized, and they deserved it, and we’ve probably not given them quite enough credit for their performance in this tournament. They maxed their talents and went a whole helluva lot further in this tourney than I certainly thought they would. Their fans were terrific and it was an impressive performance to reach the quarters.
But jesus christ, those penalties. My god. This might be the worst penalty I’ve ever seen:

What the hell was that? Subašić had time to drive, lay down, have a drink, have a sandwich, and then casually paw away a shot which was right at him. It was the easiest block I’ve seen since Steven Adams:

Seriously, what the actual fuck? I could understand Fernandes’ miss later on for the Russians – it had the hallmark of a guy seeing the goalkeeper moving and hastily trying to change his mind – but that first miss was just incomprehensible.
So Croatia advance and I don’t really read that much into the fact that they’ve had to go to penalties twice in a row in the knockouts. It’s really hard sometimes to break down a well organized defense. You can do it right and the ball still won’t go in the damn goal. My hunch is that, after facing two stifling and claustrophobic opponents, the Croatians are looking forward to playing an England side that will – gasp! – actually want to play a little bit. They might actually be able to have some fun.
And this is a strange place for Croatia to be, as stories such as this and this have pointed out. The FA is a mess, the game is under scrutiny in Croatia, and viewed by the public with mistrust and derision. Apparently, there has been a subset of fans over the years who’ve gone to these extreme lengths of bad behavior at matches in order to try and embarrass the FA as much as possible. Thus is the extent to which people are fed up with the corruption and the graft – and not even World Cup success can sweep it under the rug, not when some of the best players in the country are caught up in the mess. With its mass appeal, sport always makes for a natural symbol, and often becomes adopted by the worst sorts of scoundrels. Over time, those symbols become less clear-cut and less well-defined. Overall, my friends of Croatian descent are happy to see their team in the semifinals of the World Cup, but there is still deep skepticism, and deservedly so, and winning two more games isn’t going to paper over all of the cracks.

• My English friends, meanwhile, seem to have abandoned all of their usual skepticism and gone for full on, nutters embracing of “it’s coming home.” The scenes from London and elsewhere of people jumping all over each other and throwing beer on each other and losing their minds is, well, it’s long overdue is what it is.
And maybe I’m wrong here, but I was living in England back in 1990 – the last time The Three Lions reached the semifinal – and I just don’t recall there being so much genuine joy at reaching this stage of the tournament. Perhaps it’s simply a case of absence making the heart grow fonder. There was, I think, a much higher level of expectation back then, and with good reason – England had an outstanding side that year, had been consistently good throughout the 1980s, and reaching the semis was no great shock. The last 28 years for England have run the gamut from being underachieving to overly optimistic, with repeated golden generations proving to be fool’s gold, and with healthy doses of penalty shootout heartbreak and wanton self-destruction added to the mix. People want something to believe in after all that time.
And it’s cool for England and their fans. They’re a really good team, and a fun team, and their 2:0 victory over the Swedes was notable for how decidedly comfortable it was. England had the better team, they knew it from the start and they played like it from the get-go. It helped that Sweden didn’t play very well, although they did force some nice saves from Pickford while still trailing by only a goal. (Pickford being one of the three favorites, along with Subašić and Belgium’s Courtois, to win the Golden Gloves.) But England seemed to know what to do against them all along, with the ball moving well and Sterling running in between the lines and opening up the spaces for everyone else. A Sweden equalizer would have only delayed the inevitable demise.
You can only play who is before you, of course, and England have found themselves being the beneficiary of some astonishingly good fortune in that regard. Their road to the semis includes Tunisia, Panama, the Belgian B team who beat their B team, Colombia without James, and a Sweden side who’d clearly reached their outer limits. This leads me to wonder if everything really is so rosy for the English. They’ve had to be patient, of course, since so many of their opponents have sat deep and let them have the ball, but it is hard to tell just how good they really are. I’m curious as to how they’ll respond to an opponent who dares to attack them.
But England and its fans have earned the right to dream big, because as much as the fans are inclined to get ahead of themselves, the team continues to deliver. I’m worried however, about England winning a World Cup. Were that to happen, who would I take the piss out of?

• Uruguay were a center forward short against France. They were always going to be up against it without Cavani up front, he being the type of player who can make up for a lot of your deficiencies. With their attack limited – the attack consisting basically of Suárez and some dude I’ve never heard of – Uruguay really had to be flawless against the French defensively, and not make any mistakes, to have a chance to win. And even then, maybe not so much, as I wouldn’t even call the first goal – a skimming Raphaël Varane header off a free kick – a mistake. It was just a really nice play from the French, who are entirely capable of making lots of really nice plays over the course of a game. But once that happened, and once Lloris parried away a header and Godin flubbed a chance to level, it never seemed like Uruguay was going to get back in the game.
With the second French goal, of course, being a horrible mistake:

Sigh

Muslera’s always been something of a flaky and eccentric goalkeeper. He does have a mistake in him. That said, he’s been a rock for La Celeste over the years, his shot-stopping having quite a bit to do with them finishing fourth in South Africa back in 2010. It was an awful mistake, and as a lifetime member of the goalkeepers union, this one absolutely made me cringe. One of my wacky punster friends, who is also a grumpy Liverpool fan, said that Muslera got caught up in the heat of the moment and got kariused away.

No, I didn’t think it was any good either.
But as I’ve said, oftentimes the hardest shots to judge are the ones right at you, and there is just enough english and swerve on Griezmann’s shot to mess him up. Whatever faint hopes Uruguay still held out were pretty much extinguished by Muslera’s gaffe. You could tell that their heart wasn’t in it any longer.
And the French now find themselves in something of a strange position, in that of the four teams remaining in this tournament, they’re probably the most conservative tactically as well as the most defensively-oriented. And this creates some interesting sorts of dilemmas for their next opponent(s). First of all, you don’t want to run with France. Don’t run with France. Bad, bad, bad. The best way teams come up with to deal with France is to just give them the ball and stack the lines and let Les Bleus try to figure out what to do. But none of the remaining teams in this tournament want to do that. All of them want to be on the front foot and going forward. We saw the Belgians trying to park the bus the other day against Brazil in the second half. It didn’t go very well. They were all out of sync and got outshot 17-1 in the second half. So you’re probably better off, if you’re the Belgians, just playing your game and hoping for the best. Which we’d all be better for, to be honest, because if there is one team on the planet who can run with the French and live to tell about it, it’s probably the Belgians.

• I wasn’t at all surprised that the Belgians beat Brazil. This is because I thought, going into this match, that the Belgians had the better team. People in the media were saying, “the Brazilians have all of these great players,” to which my response was, “well, yeah, and so do the Belgians.” “Oh, but look at all of that attacking talent in yellow shirts.” “The red shirts have Hazard, De Bruyne, and Lukaku up front. Do you really want a piece of that?”
When you look at their line-up, 1 through 11, the Belgians have as much talent as any team in the world. Brazil, France, you name it. They can go player for player with all of them. Which is weird to say, and which is hard to believe, but these aren’t the Belgians of yore. For years the Belgians were this plodding and overly defensive side which succeeded through lulling their opponents into a stupor, a dismal mix of numbness and frustration.
Talent hasn’t been an issue for several years now. The Belgians have had tonnes of good players, but none of them ever seemed to know where they were supposed to be on the pitch. After their rather embarrassing exit from the Euros, where the Welsh ran circles around them in the quarterfinals, they finally put us all out of our misery by getting rid of tactical lightweight Marc Wilmots, whose tenure at the helm of the Belgians was tantamount to coaching malpractice. But the hiring of Roberto Martinez was a surprise, to say the least. I’ve always enjoyed him as an analyst and a commentator, and he did a nice job taking lesser sides in England and making them into winners, but he’d just been fired at Everton and his teams have always had an approach to defending resembling that of a toreador. To be honest, the hiring didn’t make much sense.
And, apparently, the joke was on all of us. Not only has Martinez infused his usual positivity into this Belgian side, and employed the aggressive attacking tactics which best suit the talent at his disposal, but he’s also shown that he has some serious chops. All of us who doubted his coaching ability over the years may have to begrudgingly give the man his due.
It was an fun little tactical wrinkle Martinez threw out there against Brazil, playing De Bruyne at false nine and slipping Lukaku over into the space on the right – the space Marcelo, Brazil’s swashbuckling left back, frequently vacates as he ventures forward. And at first, Brazil had to be a bit more cautious on the attack, wary of this threat. Everyone tries to figure out how to take advantage of that empty Marcelo space, be it playing against Brazil or against Real Madrid, and it usually doesn’t work because there aren’t guys around to fully take advantage, but Lukaku is one of the most devastating transition players in the world and he created the second Belgian goal all by himself by rampaging at the Brazilian defense. That goal was another devastating counter from a corner in which Lukaku, playing on the right, went scorched earth on poor Fernandinho and then set up De Bruyne, who unleashed a cannonball into the bottom corner.
Poor Fernandinho. The guy played maybe the single worst game of midfield ever four years ago against the Germans, and here he is, four years later, forced into the lineup to replace the suspended Casemiro, and first he bats a Kompany header into the net for an own goal, and then he winds up BBQ chicken against Lukaku. The guy’s a good player, but the World Cup’s never been kind to him.
And the Brazilians ultimately couldn’t find the second goal – thanks in part to Courtois, who is monstrous and reminded everyone that oh, yeah, the Belgians also have a great goalkeeper to go with their ridiculous Hazard-De Bruyne-Lukaku front three and deep midfield and solid back three. The Brazilians’ fortunes picked up after making a trio of substitutions: Firmino and Douglas Costa and Renato Augusto, terrific players all of them and all of whom, arguably, should have been playing more. But it’s hard to mess with success, and Brazil has been rolling the past couple of years, so you certainly cannot blame them for wanting to roll with the guys who got them that far. But even though they were winning, I kept wanting more from them in this tournament. I wanted better finishing and more incisive play. Neymar didn’t play well and I doubt he was fully fit, Gabriel Jesus didn’t play well. The offense failed to click and the defense, meanwhile, was stingy about conceding goals but seemed periodically shaky while doing so. They could get by for a while, but they finally ran into a team who had no fear of them and who could match their talent on the pitch.
Which, again, is shocking to say. The Belgians? The Belgians?
And Belgium’s rise to this place is instructive when considering the plight of poor old USA FC. It’s a small country, of course, so it’s easier to implement the sorts of structural changes necessary to overhaul a system, but in the middle of the past decade, after sinking into dire levels of malaise, the Belgians basically blew everything up. They changed the idea of how they wanted players to play, they changed the way they coached, they changed the way they administrated the game at every level. A decade later, and the national team is two games away from winning a World Cup. But it’s the first part of that statement – “a decade later” – that’s important.  It took the Germans more than a decade for “das reboot” to result in winning a World Cup. This stuff takes time, it requires patience and a commitment to a process which, at times, may not seem like it’s going to pay off. And at the national level, that also means you have to have to have modest expectations, at first. You have to play the kids, you have to let them screw up and make all of the right kinds of mistakes, and hope that, eventually, they won’t be making those mistakes any more.
Now, not even the most optimistic Belgian would have thought, a dozen years ago, that 12 years hence they’d be playing in the semifinals of a World Cup. But in order to one day exceed your wildest expectations, you have to first be realistic about the point where you’re at – which, in the case of the Belgians, was nowhere. But the Belgians are proof that it can, in fact, be done. It’s only when you first meet your realistic expectations that it’s possible to eventually exceed them.