Go Bad or Go Home

Carolina Panthers special teams, brought to you by Maalox

MY LOVE of bad football is well-documented, but the Thanksgiving weekend slate in the NFL was a veritable smorgasbord of indifference and incompetence that was almost too much for even me to eat.

There are always going to be bad teams, of course, but I cannot remember a year in the NFL when so many teams seemed to be so bad. We’re three-fourths of the way through the season now, and a full one-fourth of the league – eight teams – have only managed to win one-fourth of the time they take the field. If this were the NBA, I would just assume these franchises were all tanking to try and strike it rich in the draft lottery. Given some the utter incompetence on display last weekend, you might think that anyway:

• I said not too long ago that the blocked punt returned for a touchdown was just about the worst play in football. The Carolina Panthers allowed Minnesota to do this not once, but twice in their 31:13 defeat last weekend. It’s been a lost season for Carolina, who overachieved a year ago and earned a first-round playoff bye by winning the always humorous NFC South. Remarkably, Carolina still has a playoff shot with a 3-8-1 record, because their division is so bad that the 5-7 Atlanta Falcons currently have the lead. And given the fact that Cam Newton’s been a piñata all season – the Eagles sacked him nine times a few weeks ago, and he was sacked four more times by the Vikings – the fact he’s still standing at all is somewhat remarkable.

• Also somewhat amazingly still alive in the chase for the title in the humorous NFC South are the 2-10 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, though the Pewter Pirates did themselves no favours in squandering a winnable game at home to Cincinnati. Trailing 14-13 late in the game, with no timeouts remaining as they attempted a last-ditch rally, Tampa Bay completed a long pass deep into Cincy territory which would have surely set up a game-winning FG – only to have the play called back because of a penalty. The Bucs had 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! How does that happen? The play having been called back, the Bucs then did the classic dumb thing to do at the end of a game, which was to complete a pass in the middle of the field and allow the time to expire.

 
“This is why we’re 2-10.”
 
– Tampa Bay coach Lovie Smith


No argument here.

• The Redskin Potatoes have been quick to blame all of their woes on QB Robert Griffin III. RG3 had the look of a transcendent talent when he arrived at New Jack City FedEx Field, but injuries have slowed him and taken away much of his running ability, while a revolving door of coaches, a collection of lettuce-handed receivers and a general disdain for blocking by the O-line have contributed to the hindering of his development as a passer. And it certainly wasn’t the benched RG3’s fault that the Potatoes yielded six TDs of 30 yards or longer in their 49:27 debacle of a loss in Indianapolis, letting the Colts run up and down the field on them and playing like a group bound and determined to get (yet) another coach fired. Jay Gruden surely had an inkling of was he getting into when he took the head job there, but the extent of the dysfunctionality in the D.C. organization has probably got him wondering about his career choices right about now.

• Speaking of poor career choices, Ken Whisenhunt was the finalist for two head coaching jobs in the offseason – Detroit and Tennessee – after a successful stint running the offense in San Diego. The Lions, in fact, had a jet juiced up and sitting on the tarmac ready to fly to San Diego to pick him up. But for some inexplicable reason, Whisenhunt chose the Tennessee gig. Now, Detroit has a justly-deserved reputation as being a coaching graveyard, of course, but the Lions also have a roster which includes a 5,000-yd QB, the best WR in football, and a whoopass defensive line – which is six more good players than can be found in Nashville. The Lions may be a mess, but at least there is some talent there, which can’t be said of the Titans, who got blasted 45:21 by Houston on Sunday and who allowed journeyman Houston QB Ryan Fitzpatrick to throw six TD passes, including one to a defensive end.

• With all of these bad teams in the NFL this season, having two square off on a weekly basis seems almost inevitable. The Jacksonville Jaguars are awful and have been awful for several years now, but if you squint enough, you just might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. The Jags play hard and have a few pieces to build around. Their opponent last Sunday, the New York Giants, are old, slow, can’t run the ball, have 11 matadors masquerading as a defensive unit, and QB Eli Manning has regressed to being the turnover machine he was when he first came into the league. For the Jints, no lead is safe, not even their 21-0 margin at the half in Jacksonville. New York promptly conceded two TD’s on fumble returns in the second half on their way to squandering the lead and the game. Now, if you’re as bad as Jacksonville is – the 25:24 win over the Giants raised their record to 2-10 – it could be argued that you’re better off tanking and trying to get the first pick in the draft, but that logic doesn’t really hold in the NFL, where you need so many players to fill out your roster. Unless he’s a franchise QB, one position in the draft isn’t going to make much difference, and as we’ve seen with Cam Newton and RG3, even if he might turn out to be a franchise QB, you still have to keep him upright.

• Or you could just decide to go without a QB entirely, which is essentially what Rex Ryan did on Monday night vs. Miami. Give the beleaguered Jets head coach credit for realizing that his best chance to win a game with Geno Double Donut Smith at the helm was to abandon the forward pass entirely. The Jets channeled their inner Nebraska and ground out 277 rushing yards in the game, thus becoming the first team in recent memory to tally up that many rushing yards in an NFL game and lose, because the Jets always screw it up somehow, and this game was no exception. Their attempts at boring the Dolphins into submission almost worked, but the Dolphins rousted themselves out of heavy slumber to take a 16-13 lead in the last 90 seconds of game, meaning the Jets then had to pass – at which point Geno Smith was promptly intercepted, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

• Oh yeah, and the Raiders lost 52:0 in St. Louis. Yeech.

That right there is a lot of bad football. (And I didn’t even get into the Cardinals’ tackling shadows in Atlanta, the lousy defensive efforts put forth by Chicago and Pittsburgh, or the heap of hot garbage which is the current 49ers offense.) So much lose, so little time. The standings are now getting wackily stratified – in the AFC, 12 teams are .500 or better, and the other four are 2-10 or worse – which should make for an interesting playoff chase. I’m not sure, however, if these NFL back markers are necessarily worse than bad teams of games gone by. Being someone who contemplates relative awfulness, this is an idea which intrigues me. I’m not sure teams are worse than before so much as the game has changed to the point where bad teams appear to be worse. It’s getting harder and harder to hide your weaknesses in football. Whereas, in the past, a bad team might be able to go about eking out a few 13:10 games here and there, and win a few more games than should be expected, in the modern day they’re not only less likely to win, but you’re more likely to wind up getting annihilated.

The blowouts have been everywhere in the NFL this season. The Rams putting up a half-century on Oakland was the 6th time a team has scored at least 50 this season. The Packers did it twice in a row, v. the Bears and then the Eagles. Team Cheese’s 55:14 win over Chicago came on the heels of the Bears giving up 51 in New England in their previous game, which marked the first time in the NFL since the Rochester Jeffersons of 1923 that a team gave up more than 50 in back-to-back games. It wasn’t that long ago that 40 points constituted a monstrous offensive outpouring in the NFL, but along with six 50-pt. games this year, teams have broken 40 another 21 times. NFL offenses are going crazy this year.

And this was bound to happen, at some point, since the offenses have been going crazy in football at pretty much every other level for most of the past decade. It’s most apparent at the NCAA level, where the numbers being run up are straight out of a video game. Western Kentucky and Marshall tried to break football last week. Had WKU not gone for 2 in OT (a gutsy and awesome move on the part of the Hilltoppers), there’s no telling what the final score would’ve been. As it stands, I’d be willing to wager the 67:66 final score of that football game will be higher than when then two schools square off on the basketball court. Games in the Big 12 and Pac-10 are track meets on grass. Everyone has a QB and a fleet of receivers, the ball is flying all over the place, teams are scoring tonnes of points and rendering the defenses as good as helpless.

Which is a revolution in the game that, quite honestly, should’ve happened about a century ago. It never made any rational sense to run the ball straight ahead into a pile of 14 guys, seven of which are your own. It always seemed to make more sense to run away from the defense entirely, or at least try to run around them. And no kids grow up playing sandlot football run the fullback dive. You spread everyone out and go out for a pass (except for the slow fat kid who stays in and blocks, of course). It’s obvious. Part of why it’s easy to teach, on a high school and collegiate level, is that it’s the natural way that kids grow up playing the game. It also negates size advantages and emphasizes speed, and fewer collisions around the line of scrimmage mean fewer injuries. It’s really the way the game seems like it should be played.

As is the idea of playing hurry-up and doing away entirely with the huddle. Keep the tempo up, keep the pressure on the defense, don’t let them substitute or get set. It’s an obvious idea, and one which should’ve been done decades ago. It’s sort of a no-brainer.

Throw in some sophisticated scheming and play design, and now you’ve got seemingly unstoppable offenses – spread out formations, 1-on-1 matchups against defenders and the like. The short pass becomes just as effective a tool for ball and clock possession as the run, even more so since you’ve got 1-on-1 matchups and the 7-yd pass can become a 15-yd or 20-yd gain with a single broken tackle. It’s all very logical. The revolution in the way football is played has been cerebral, first and foremost.

Now I personally don’t mind this trend in football, having found far too many sports becoming far too defensive in recent years. It’s a dead ball era in baseball with far too many strikeouts. Basketball went through about a 15-year period where nobody could shoot (and college basketball still sucks because the control-freaky coaches won’t let anybody shoot). Fewer teams are parking the bus in soccer, but everyone’s been parking the zamboni in hockey. The fact is that, in most sports, it’s easy to play defense. Overly defensive sport is a dumbing down of the game. Football has shown itself to be the most creative and imaginative of sports in recent years (although, to give it some credit, the NBA is pretty cool these days when teams, you know, aren’t trying to purposely stink).

But with all of these changes in the game of football, defenses are now under siege. At the high school and collegiate levels, the entire concept of what ‘good defense’ is has necessarily had to change. Given that your team is spread out all over the place, the offense is going to find seams and move the ball. It’s inevitable. So on the defensive side, your best bet is to play for big plays – sacks, turnovers and the like – and also try to minimize the damage along the way. Auburn gashed Alabama on Saturday for 44 pts. and over 600 yards of offense, but the Tide turned back the War Eagles repeatedly in the red zone, forcing Auburn to kick five field goals. In the modern age of football, this constituted good defense. Alabama wound up winning the game 55:44 – nothing Auburn did constituted good defense in the slightest – and Alabama head coach Darth Vader Nick Saban, long a proponent of solid defensive play, was surprisingly calm and pragmatic after the game when a reporter pussy-footed around and stated that Alabama’s defense ‘seemed’ to struggle:

“There wasn’t any ‘seemed like it.’ You’re not going to hurt my feelings. They passed for 465 yards. I’ve got it right here on paper. The way we’re headed in college football, there’s going to be games like this, and you’re going to have to be able to win games like this. There’s a lot more points being scored in this day and age of college football than ever before. I think the hurry-up offense, the advent of the zone read and the option passes that come off it that people throw make it very difficult to defend.”

And a fair amount of the tactics and techniques which have proven so successful in the high school and college ranks have begun creeping into the NFL game. This isn’t the least bit surprising – not only do the professionals have the best talent, but they ultimately will also find the best ideas for utilizing that talent. Chip Kelley brought the University of Nike Oregon offense to Philadelphia, and the Eagles are now so effective that not even retread former Jet QB Mark Sanchez can screw it up. Russell Wilson has been flirting with 1,000 rushing yards this season, and already has several 100-yd rushing games. QBs now have feet to match their arms and their brains. Modern receivers are huge and graceful and catch everything. Tight ends are former basketball players with great feet who are used to maneuvering in tight spaces and who simply post up the defenders. Spread the defense out and there’s all sorts of spaces for your speedy, agile running backs to race through. Playing defense in football these days is damn near impossible. Sometimes it seems the best idea is to just let the other team score and do so as fast as possible, get the ball back and try to score yourself.

Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly if you’re a bad football team and make the assortment of mistakes which bad football teams generally make more of, most of which occur on the offensive side of the ball. Turnovers, in particular, are more of a killer than ever, since it’s an opportunity lost to keep pace. And modern defenses which go hunting turnovers will attack the ball and look to score, which means you see quite a few pick sixes and fumble returns for TDs, as well. The whole goal of modern defense is to make big plays, so the last thing you want to do is make it easy for them to do that.

In the end, every mistake gets magnified when stopping the other team is so difficult. A good rule of thumb in sports is that the higher the score, the harder it is to spring the upset. You can luck your way into a 1-0 win in some sports, but in football you have to make 120 plays with 22 players and so many moving parts, and in this day and age, it’s very likely that you can’t stop the other team to begin with. Even the most élite of defenses in the NFL, the Seahawks, got abused by San Diego and Dallas earlier this season. It happens to everyone. If the Seahawks can’t stop anyone, how is an error-prone team going to stay within 20 pts. of a competent opponent?

So I don’t necessarily think there are more bad teams, they are simply losing more spectacularly – and more entertainingly in the process. All eight of the offenders mentioned in the buzzard points above are among the bottom-feeders in statistical categories on both sides of the ball, being neither able to score or defend with any sort of effectiveness. The 3-9 team of the modern NFL is probably closer in skill to, say, a 5-7 team of the past. (This year’s crop of 5-7’s include the Falcons, Saints, and Bears, three teams allergic to defense who have enough firepower to win from time to time.) But 5-7 is pretty boring, when you get right down to it. Mediocrity sucks. Go big or go home. If you’re going to be bad, be really bad!

And on that note, I think I’m going to check in on this 76ers game …

What the?

YOU know, it’s already hard enough to beat those pesky, annoying, green-and-yellow wearing fashionistas from the University of Nike Oregon. The Quack Attack have been consistently one of the best teams in the nation for the part of two decades now, and are perennial contenders for the national title. (They also tend to choke once they reach the big stage, but we can save that for another post.)

Oregon’s at #4 right now in the polls, and a good bet to reach the 1st ever national playoff if they can keep winning, but they were in some trouble last night in Salt Lake City against a pretty good Utah team. The Runnin’ Utes were up 7-0 after the 1st Quarter and then speed daemon Kaelin Clay got behind the Oregon defense to catch a 79-yard TD pass:

Wait, did he just, like, drop the ball in the field of play?

He did! About the only person who noticed this was the Side Judge, who didn’t rule a TD, but instead threw the bean bag, meaning it’s a fumble.

So now you’ve got three Runnin’ Utes celebrating in the back of the end zone, the band playing, the fans going nuts, 6 points going up on the scoreboard … and a live ball rolling around on the field which an Oregon DB then just sort of picks up, thinking it’s a dead ball, and then he sees the bean bag and suddenly realizes that it isn’t a dead ball at all. He promptly runs into a Utah guy and fumbles, at which point Oregon LB Joe Walker scoops up the loose ball at the Oregon 1-yard line and this happens:

99 yards later, after being escorted down the sidelines by a convoy of teammates, Walker and the Ducks have a tying TD.

What the?

So to recap, we have a play that covers 178 yards, includes two fumbles, leaves everyone confused including the broadcasters (the best part of the video is the band quitting in the middle of the fight song), takes a TD off one side of the scoreboard and hangs it on the other, and results in a lot of very tired Oregon defenders who just ran about as far as you can possibly run on a single play in a game of football.

We would do well, at this point, to remember the origins of the word touchdown, which come from rugby. The Lose is a big rugby fan, and to score the try in rugby, you not only have to cross the goal line but you have to touch the ball down on the ground. In American football, of course, it’s changed over the years and now the ball simply needs to break the plane of the goal line, but the point is that scoring points is all about what happens to the ball and not to the player. You have to complete the play. Since scoring a TD is the ultimate goal of the game of football, you would think that what actually constitutes a TD would be so ingrained in players that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to forget.

I’ve seen the exact same thing Clay did from players on several occasions over the years. People are always quick to assign dubious motives to players who make such a boneheaded mistake – guys being hot dogs who want to show off and the like – but it’s really just an honest mistake where guys are excited and get caught up in the moment. But I’ve always wanted to know why guys are in such a hurry to give up the ball. I mean, the ball is precious. You want the ball in your hands whenever possible. Damn, if I catch a 79-yard TD pass against Oregon, I’m never letting go of that ball. I’ll run with it over to the sidelines and make them pry it out of my hands. I’ll run with it all the way to Provo.

This play would be bad enough if it just resulted in a TD coming off the board, but to have the Ducks run it all the way back for a score of their own is disastrous. This sort of transition play is an absolute killer in the game of football if it goes against you, because it so quickly undoes everything positive you’ve set out to accomplish. (The single-worst play that can happen to your team in football is the blocked punt returned for a TD. I forget the exact stats, but if your team gives up a TD on a blocked punt in the NFL, you almost never win the game.) In this particular case, being down 14 pts. in a hostile environment could’ve spelled doom for the Ducks. Instead, the Ducks tie the score with what just might be a season-saving TD for them. They then do what good teams do when given a break, which is get their shit together.

Oregon goes on to win the game 51-27, although some of that margin was garbage time scoring when the Utah defense was out of gas. Quite simply, the Utes let Oregon off the hook. This right here constitutes the worst play of the season, and maybe any season. And I should just give up saying the phrase, “I thought I’d seen everything.” This year in baseball we had three Milwaukee Brewers runners score on a wild pitch and the Pittsburgh Pirates walk into a double play. I’m not even going to guess what I’ll see next on a football field. I’ll just sit back and watch and be confounded like everyone else.

Z-E-R-O Jets Jets Jets!

THE SPORTING landscape in New York generally consists of one team in a sport that actually knows what it's doing, and another that constantly craves attention, makes all sorts of flashy signings which are utterly nonsensical, and lives off its few great moments. It's always 1986 when you go to Citi Field for a Mets game. The Jets, meanwhile, have been living off Broadway Joe 1969 nostalgia for decades, and have scarcely put a competent product on the field since while their crosstown foes, the Giants, have won 4 Super Bowls and shown themselves to be one of the model franchises in the NFL.

Part of why the Jets love harkening back to Joe Namath's heyday is that they haven't had a QB since then who was any good. Their latest excuse for a starting QB, Geno Smith, put up a truly dreadful line during yesterday's 43:23 loss to the Buffalo Bills, as he completed 2 of 8 passes for 5 yards while throwing 3 interceptions. This earned him a QB Rating of 0.0 for the game. In essence, the Jets were playing without a QB yesterday, and would've been better off just direct snapping it to the fullback than attempting to throw a forward pass. On a day where Big Ben threw for 522 and threatened the all-time NFL passing record, Geno's zip-zip may be the most noteworthy of QB achievements.

With this performance, Smith joins this rather dubious list of the worst QB performances in NFL history. It's something of an amazing list, if you look at it. There are actually some Hall of Famers on that list, and some otherwise good players who had a really bad day at the office. And almost certainly some of those games were played in wretched weather where passing the football didn't work so well. What's really remarkable is the number of times a team actually won with a 0.0 QB (more often that you would think). Seriously, how bad does your team have to play to lose to a team whose QB was essentially for display purposes only? My favourite on that list is the Dec. 9, 1973 game where both starting QBs turned in a 0.0 – and clearly buoyed by their 32-10 win of the Falcons that day, the Cardinals started Gary Keithly under center the following week and he promptly put up another 0.0 rating. And I remember watching the Ryan Leaf game. Oy. That was basically the beginning of the end of his rather sad career, and very unbecoming of a Washington State QB. (As was proven again earlier this season, W.S.U. can throw throw the hell out of the football but can do nothing else right.)

Now, Geno Smith is a young player, and one would like to think there is some upside here. If you squint hard enough, you might be able to see it. But it's hard to tell when you're surrounded with as sorry a supporting cast as the Jets have assembled this season. The worst thing to do to a young QB is surround him with awful talent and somehow expect him to rise above the mess. (And the defense gave up 85- and 60-yard completions to the rather pedestrian Bills passing game, so it's not like they're any great shakes, either.) At 1-7, the Jets can thank only the woful Jaguars and the fighting Oakland Davises for keeping them out of the NFL's cellar. Blustery head coach Rex Ryan and his staff seem certain to get fired after this debacle, but probably the only thing worse than getting fired by the Jets is getting hired by the Jets, and they can use that high draft pick next spring to draft another franchise QB, or maybe just draft a potted plant instead, since a potted plant can put up a 0.0 and wouldn't be as big of a hit against the salary cap.

Grand Entry

She danced
this way, through all
my doors
this nomadic woman

who has danced away
from so much before
then changed her dance
and now she calls me

Home. She leaned into me
with all of her stories
and trusted gravity
trusted her sense

of balance, trusted mine
She leaned into me
with all of her hair
that would not be braided

She leaned into me
with all of her faith
that would not be traded
She leaned into me

and asked me to owl dance
and I could not refuse
She asked me to owl dance
and I remembered how

to dance that way, how
to move my body
with her body, dancing
about a specific fire

She danced
this way, inside all
my rooms
and changed their shape

this nomadic woman
who is the last curve
completing
the circle of my life

– Sherman Alexie

Now Available in Paperback

MY new novel, Juste un peu d’amour, is now available as a paperback. It is published by Orange Square Books and printed by createspace, the print-on-demand service from amazon.com. The cost is $11.95.

As I said in another corner of cyberspace, it is appropriate that the novel is 365 pages in length, because that number is representative of the year of my life it took to create that book. I think I am too tired to truly savour this moment, however. I may need some of this to help let this moment sink in. Seeing this through project all the way through to the end like this is probably my greatest accomplishment. I hope that you like it, and that you find it as fun and rewarding to read as it was for me to write.

There is No A in World Series

THE ALWAYS cheeky and clever marketing department for the Oakland Athletics came up with a particularly catchy ad slogan right around the turn of the millennium: “There is No A in …” You can catch the drift here pretty quickly: “There is No A in Quit,” “There is No A in Lose,” etc., etc. Like I say, it’s a pretty catchy hook. But in the hands of A’s haters, of course, this is the sort of hook which is perfect to revel in a brief soundbite of schadenfreude whenever the club comes up short:

There is No A in Slide.

(And, as an aside here, I fully expect Derek Jeter to be back and playing shortstop for the New York Yankees next season, if only because his insufferable grand farewell tour was the only thing relevant about the Yankees all season, and the Yankees aren’t one to miss a marketing opportunity as great as the Derek Jeter Reunion Tour.)

And I’ll start this entry by admitting, right from the get-go, that I pretty much can’t stand the Oakland A’s. You cannot grow up in the Pacific Northwest, following the Seattle Mariners, and like the A’s. You cannot spend a lifetime following the San Francisco Giants and have any respect for their cross-bay neighbours. You just can’t do it. I’ve been loathing the Oakland A’s for decades, and the only time I ever actually wanted them to win was in the 1988 World Series, as I was in college in Southern California at the time, which meant I was surrounded by the enemy:

Apparently there was no A in Save that night. The A’s really are useless.

But just because I may loathe a team, it doesn’t mean that I’m averse to giving them credit when credit is due. I despise Duke’s basketball team, yet if I could spend any amount of money to hire a basketball coach, I’d drive up to Coach K’s house and spill a dump truck full of money in his driveway. Likewise, I have a true sense of admiration for the way that Billy Beane has run the Oakland A’s. His use of advanced statistical analysis and modeling, and then the systematic approach to implementing such models throughout the entire organization, has helped lead to results which exceed the expectations of a club which is saddled with a low payroll. As such, he has revolutionized the way the game is managed on an administrative level. He’s also been ahead of the curve when it comes to recognizing trends and predicting how the game will change over time. This approach was born out of necessity, as the A’s have always found themselves struggling to compete with bigger, richer clubs in the world of Wild West capitalism that is Major League Baseball. Beane had to think differently. Franchises in other sports have then copied his approach – examine the success of clubs such as the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA and Olympique Lyon in European football and you can see a similarity in approach.

And for all of that, the Oakland Athletics have won exactly zero World Series titles during Billy Beane’s tenure as General Manager.

And there was no A in World Series this year. There is also no A in Choke, but there probably should be. And there is certainly an A in Atrocious, which is precisely what the Oakland A’s were in the last two months of the season. Their 9-8 loss in 12 innings to the Kansas City Royals in the AL Wild Card game this past week – in which the A’s blew a 4-run lead and then blew an 8-7 lead in extras – capped off one of the more stunning collapses in the history of Major League Baseball. The A’s had the best record in baseball as recently as late July, only to go into a full-on meltdown, watching the California Los Angeles Angels of Pacific Palisades Anaheim go racing past them for a division titles and barely squeaking out a Wild Card by a single game, on the last day of the season, over a Seattle Mariners team which trailed the A’s by as many as 11½ games in the AL West.

To understand just how awful the A’s were, consider that the Mariners made up all but a game of that deficit without even playing well – the M’s went 13-13 in September and had a 5-game losing streak in their last road trip of the year, and they still almost caught the A’s. Oakland were downright wretched, going  15-30 in their last 45 games. During this tailspin, the A’s previously potent offense, which had been leading the league in runs scored, completely disintegrated – which, as it happened, coincided with the boldest trade Billy Beane has ever made in Oakland, in which he swapped all-star left fielder Yoenis Céspedes to Boston for Red Sox ace Jon Lester. A move which was subject to a fair amount of scrutiny at the time, and which failed about as spectacularly as any deadline deal in history.

What’s been somewhat amusing to me, however, is to peruse a variety of online spaces in which baseball bloggers act as apologists and defend what was, in hindsight, a pretty stupid trade. This speaks more to the nature of the modern baseball pundit than it does to anything that takes place on the field. For the stat geek set, Billy Beane sprouts wings and shits marble. He is the hero of the sabermetric world. There is an annoying subset of baseball fans who seem to think that you play the game with a laptop instead of a bat and a glove. It is unthinkable that the great mastermind of saber-cyber baseball could possibly – gasp! – make a terrible trade. Which he did, and which likely contributed far more to the A’s failings than any other single factor. And it’s fair to point the finger squarely at the GM in this case, he being one who exudes far more influence over the day-to-day lineup of his club than any GM does or probably should, and he being one who as much as said, in Michael Lewis’ what-a-fawning-kissass-but-it’s-definitely-worth-reading book Moneyball, that the field manager was a step above irrelevant. This was his baby. It was his and his alone.

The greatest column I will never get to write in this blog of mine is the idea of being “critically acclaimed” in sports. (Grantland beat me to it.) There is no more critically acclaimed club going right now than the Oakland A’s. The A’s are so critically acclaimed, there was a Moneyball movie about the A’s which was nominated for Best Picture. (And, naturally, didn’t win.) The A’s are always the feel good hit of the summer, the quirky bunch of plucky outsiders who band together and rally against extreme odds to triumph, often putting together incomprehensible late season runs to pass bigger, better financed foes and capture AL West division titles. The script practically writes itself. And if I sound cynical, well, the A’s have done little to dispel that narrative. The franchise has been pretty quick to play it up so as to garner some hipster, indie cred while simultaneously crying poor mouth in their attempts to relocate to San Jose, a move routinely blocked by their big, bad neighbours across the Bay in San Francisco who claim the South Bay as part of their territory.

The A’s have now abandoned the San Jose plans, re-upping a short-term lease at the Oakland Coliseum while pursuing new avenues for securing a new ballpark, and one of the best ways to garner the needed public support for such projects – if not the best way – is to win a championship. Everyone wants to be a part of a winner, including a local politician. I witnessed this dynamic first-hand in 1995 in Seattle. The vote in King County on a financing plan failed. It happened to fail on a night when the Mariners rallied in the 9th inning against the Texas Rangers on a 2-run HR by the appropriately named Doug Strange, yet another step on a long strange trip from 13½ GB in mid-August to forcing a 1-game playoff, winning that playoff over the Angels, beating the Yankees in a best-of-5 that’s probably the greatest playoff series in history, and making the entire state of Washington fall in love with that ugly duckling of a franchise along the way. The momentum, at that point, was so great that the State Legislature stepped in and championed the cause of building a new ballpark in Seattle for the Mariners. (Thanks guys. Try building one next time that isn’t a hitters’ graveyard.) And lest you think there wasn’t at least some of that motivation beyond the A’s sudden need to make seismic shifts in their roster at the trade deadline this year, consider that the GM is also a part owner of the franchise.

Now, statheads in sports are quick to dismiss the nature of the short playoff series as being something akin to static. They use the term “small sample size” to describe it – particularly when their team loses, at which point it sounds suspiciously like sour grapes. The A’s have made the playoffs many times over in recent years, only to come up short. The company line in Oakland has always been something along the lines of that the club is set up for sustainable success which provides them the opportunity to possibly compete for championships – a notion which flies in the face of what they did in 2014, when the A’s went all-in at the end of July with their aspirations of winning a World Series, first making an understandable deal in trading one of their better minor league prospects to the Cubs for Jeff Samardzija, and then making the Céspedes for Lester deal after that – a deal which made less sense when it happened, and continues making less and less sense over time.

One of the excuses I’ve heard from Billy Beane apologists is that Céspedes really isn’t that good and that, as proof, he only amassed (fill in the number) WAR in Boston after the deal. Well, considering how badly the A’s offense cratered once the lynchpin in the lineup was removed, I would submit that his true value was considerably higher. WAR is a rather clumsy stat creation that reduces a baseball team to a collection of nine individuals to begin with. But baseball is, and has always been, a symbiotic game. Save for the leadoff batter in the top of the 1st, every single action in the game is based upon what has come before it and what could come after. This isn’t to dismiss the notion of WAR – it’s a useful tool. But it’s only one among many. Too many people seem to think that statistics are foretelling of what’s to come when, in fact, they are simply a record of what’s come before.

Quite honestly, there is no better example in the game than the A’s of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Take a look at that roster, as constructed, and honestly tell me there is a guy that, were you starting a baseball team and had your pick, that you would pick for your team. The team, year-in and year-out, seems to be a collection of spare parts and also-rans which exceed expectations, and any A’s player who goes elsewhere seems to turn into a pumpkin. Name me a former Athletic who was a significant contributor in the game once they left Oakland. Tim Hudson? Two months of Barry Zito in 2012? Now, in fairness, a part of that has to do with the way the A’s are managed – they are the ultimate club when it comes to platoon splits and specialist relievers, thus doing what they can to hide their players’ weaknesses. Some key injuries to A’s hitters, particularly a spate of them at the catching position, exposed a few players’ liabilities down the stretch – most awfully those of Derek Norris as a defensive catcher, as the Royals ran wild on him and stole seven bases in the AL wild card game.

The trade for Samardzija certainly made some sense, and the price of a prospect wasn’t necessarily all that great while adding someone who was a #1 calibre starter to their pitching staff. Having done that, the Lester trade then made no sense whatsoever, because because they traded for something they no longer needed. The A’s were winning so many games, in this somewhat dead ball era of pitching-dominated baseball, because they had the best offense in the game. Why you would go about deadening your offense, at a time when offense is at a premium, is beyond me. And I’ve also read a few comments along the lines of “there were signs the offense was already starting to slip,” but that’s even more of a reason not to damage your offense. Taking Céspedes out of their lineup, with his assortment of raw talents, seemed to eliminate the only player in the lineup who was truly considered a threat by opponents. The A’s have guys with power, of course, but they’re one-dimensional guys who also tend to hit about .260 and strike out a lot of the time. Ultimately, those guys really don’t strike much fear in opposing pitchers. Sure, they’ll launch one every so often, but they’re far more likely to whiff (and adding another one-note guy in Adam Dunn was a rather curious, if not laughable, idea). And no, there is no way to quantity that sort of effect in a statistic. I don’t need a statistic. I watched it with my own eyes.

And this is not to diminish the value of Lester in any way – he is a legit #1 starter and he pitched like it in Oakland, winning a whole lot of games and probably singlehandedly saving the A’s from the ignoble end to a season in baseball history. It was something of a cruel irony that the hired gun and short-term rental, a #1 starter and playoff ace who will be a free agent in the offseason and command a price far above Oakland’s budget, floundered in the very game – the AL Wild Card – that he was brought in to win. I can certainly applaud the thinking of trying to win in the here and now. Flags do fly forever. Don’t think for a second that the folks in Oakland didn’t watch those downtown parades in San Francisco in 2010 and 2012. The A’s relevance as an organization diminishes drastically any time the club that shares their market wins another championship. I just think Billy Beane miscalculated this year. He considered the A’s biggest threat to be the Detroit Tigers, a logical assumption given the standings in July and given that Detroit has knocked them out the past two years, and he tried to line up a starting staff which could trump theirs – only to be trumped by the Tigers, anyway, when the Motor City Kitties made the David Price trade, acquiring another #1 calibre starter for a laughably small price. (And, as it turned out, the Tigers weren’t much of a threat, but we’ll get to them later in what’s shaping up to be MLB Choking Dog Week here at IN PLAY LOSE.) I think he outsmarted himself, in the end. There is an A in Smart, but the smartest guy in baseball acted far too much instead like the smartest guy in the room.

And The LOSE also wonders if this is a case of regression to the mean. Remember, this team was almost universally picked to finish dead last in the AL West in 2012. The team hadn’t been very good the two years prior, and then the payroll was gutted in what many considered a cynical ploy to make the team purposely terrible and try to force the MLB to permit that pipe dream idea of theirs to move to San Jose. For the first few months of that season, the team looked like a cellar dwellar, only to catch some of that magic mojo the A’s always seem to catch and ascend to a lofty height by the end of the year. Some would look at their results in the playoffs the last three years and say they underachieved. I look at the talent on that team and cannot conclude anything but that they overachieved, which is a compliment and testament to their ability to punch above their own weight. I’ve seen them win a lot of games over the last three years, and wondered how it is that they do it. Well, they stopped doing it, and given the way the AL West is shaping up for the near future, I’m not sure they’re going to continue to do it. Honestly, I think they’re more likely to finish last in 2015 than finish first. It would be a long, hard fall were that to happen, and the A’s would be right back where they were just a few years ago – a team playing in a cesspool of a park, the worst stadium in all of American sports, trying to do more with less and not being very good at it. Take the A’s methodology and add some money, and you have the Boston Red Sox winning three world titles in a decade. Take the A’s clubhouse ethos and sense of collective and add some money, and you have the Giants winning two titles in the past four years. They are definitely a model franchise, in the end – a model for others’ success. The subhed for Moneyball reads “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and it’s still a big money game, to be sure, but it’s also not unfair when you lose because you go about beating yourself.

With the 1st pick in the NFL dead pool ...

THE LOSE selects ...

Commitment to idiocy

I give you the 2014 Oakland Raiders. If there is a dumber play this season in the NFL than this one, I will be impressed. There are some other contenders, to be sure – the Rams look bad, the Cowboys look bad, and the Jaguars look like the Jaguars – but if the Raiders aren't drafting #1 come next April, I will be surprised.

Suffice to say, summer break is over for The Lose.

My Hero for the Week

Local boy did good

“It’s a very large asylum. I can walk down the streets of San Francisco, and here I am normal.”
– Robin Williams, 2007

THIS is a space reserved primarily for fun and games – which is a little strange, if you think about it, since this blog generally focuses on failing at games, which isn’t fun at all. Losing sucks. It’s the default setting in all competitions. If you don’t do anything, you lose.

The reasons for failure are numerous, of course, but often they come down to a lack of talent, a lack of execution, or a moment of downright, out-and-out stupidity which decides the outcome. And in the moment, of course, losing sucks ass, but in hindsight, it’s the source of what’s the funniest. The greatest stories in sports are told by those who survived the most miserable of seasons – be it the 1916 Philadelphia A’s, the 9-73 Philadelphia 76ers, or the 0-and-seemingly-forever Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose coach, John McKay, when asked after a loss about his team’s execution, said “I’m in favour of it.” Casey Stengel never had to ask, “can’t anyone here play this game?” when his Yankees clubs were winning five consecutive World Series from 1949-53. His attempts at skippering the rudderless ship that was the 1962 Mets of 40-120 lore and infamy, however, has become far more memorable than any of his earlier managerial triumphs, achieving a folk hero status that success never could have brought. Hell, if you didn’t laugh when your team did dumb stuff like this, you would probably go insane.

Failure is funny, in the end. Failure shows weakness, vulnerability, and inability. It should therefore not be a surprise that the funniest persons we know are also often the most vulnerable and most susceptible. And no one has ever seemed more innately, inherently vulnerable to me than Robin Williams, who died at his San Francisco area home on Monday at the age of 63.

Robin Williams has always been a hero of mine, because Robin Williams taught me how to laugh. He taught everyone in my generation how to laugh, for that matter. He was an A-list star for three decades. Seeing that he was listed in the credits of a film immediately got your attention – even when he was a cold streak, which happens in moviemaking. Even in his bad films, there were still a few moments of genius. And even when he played a lesser role – or, in the case of Dead Again, an uncredited role – he threatened to steal the film with his mere presence. (And in the case of Dead Again, it wasn’t even a comedic role, but we will get Williams’ dramatic skills here in a moment.)

Robin Williams was a hero to all of us who strive to be funny at all times. Robin Williams was both a hero and the enemy in that arena – a hero because no one could do it better than he, and the enemy because no one could do it ever even hope to do better than he. No one was quicker with a quip than Robin Williams, a quip which would inevitably resonate on some sort of deeper, more cerebral level the more you thought about it. Not that you would have much time to think about it, since he was so quick that you’d be laughing about something entirely different in a matter of seconds. His sheer ability to generate one joke after another in quick succession was utterly amazing, and it all seemed to flow out of him almost naturally. Countless times as a guest on a late night talk show like Letterman or The Tonight Show, Robin Williams would upstage the other guests. It was never a selfish act, either – he simply couldn’t help himself. He seemingly had no off switch.

That he found the off switch himself is something that is deeply saddening, but not that surprising. Robin Williams took his own life on Monday. The sheriff’s reports on the scene are unsettling and disquieting, the details of which need not be repeated here. Robin Williams’ struggles with alcoholism, substance abuse, and mental illness have been well-documented over the course of 30 years in entertainment. One of his classic lines, culled from personal experience, was “cocaine is nature’s way of telling you that you have too much money.”

Robin Williams was a comedic talent like no one has known, nor is likely to ever know, but that talent sprung from a dark, dark place in his soul. He was the embodiment of the notion of a tormented artist. Many of his greatest roles in cinema, in fact, were characters in which his usual quick persona was coloured by that darkness. His villain in Insomnia was so creepy, and so effective, precisely because we knew him as a funny man from so many films before, and Robin Williams knew that and played upon that fact. He delivered every line in that film with the same aplomb as he would deliver a joke in a stand-up routine, only to repeatedly give the audience the back side of the hand.

As you have no doubt come to realize from reading this blog, will come to discover if you follow this shameless plug of a link, or this one, and buy one of those novels, I am someone who believes entirely, and wholeheartedly, in the value of humour. I find life and the world around me to be inherently funny. It is ridiculous and absurd and worthy of mockery. Laughter may seem  to be an impulsive and emotional behaviour, but humour is, in fact, extraordinarily rational. It is an attempt at making sense, albeit one with which you draw a different sort of conclusion.

Even though I use the terms ‘black comedy’ and ‘dark comedy’ fairly frequently, I’ve always believed those terms to be redundant. We’ve come to define the word ‘comedy’ to simply mean something that which is humourous, At the root, a large part of what’s funny is black, dark, or borderline cruel.

I remember a moment many thousands of years ago, while heading to a Shakespeare class at Washington State University. It was December, there was snow and ice on the ground, students were scrambling about, and in among all of us traipsing through one of the plazas, a woman slipped on the ice, lost her balance, fell and splayed her cup of coffee everywhere, which caused the 10 or so people surrounding her, including myself, to immediately stop and see to it that she was alright. Well, seeing to her being alright was the 2nd thing that everyone did, the 1st thing being to laugh at her. And once she proved to actually be alright, she laughed right along.

It wasn’t mean-spirited, it wasn’t cruel, it wasn’t some act of reveling in schadenfreude. It was an instinctive response, because it’s not normal for someone to have their feet in the air and their ass over their head while walking through a plaza. Was it ‘funny,’ per se? Well, yeah, to be honest, it was. Would it have been ‘funny’ had I been the person doing the falling? Well, in grander schemes and greater contexts and over the course of time, yes, it would’ve been. In the moment, of course, I would’ve been embarrassed as hell – but one of the most fundamental emotions in comedy is embarrassment. It was Eric Idle who theorized that the appeal of Monty Python stemmed from there being something extremely appealing about watching such incredibly intelligent people behaving like idiots. He was onto something there.

Laughter is life’s best medicine. Laughter is life’s greatest coping mechanism. It is often the best way to respond to the horror that the world can present. I’ve always admired the work of Roberto Benigni, simply because he has made one comedic film after another in his career about subjects which are so horrible as to be almost considered ‘off limits’ to comedy. He makes comedies about mass murderers, about murderous mafiosos. His magnum opus, Life is Beautiful, proved that humour could even trump the Holocaust. Countless books (Catch-22) and films and television programs (M*A*S*H, Hogan’s Heroes) have attempted to portray and explain the darkest periods of human history in terms of how far they can move the needle on the Laugh-o-Meter. The reason the cliché of I Pagliacci – the clown who paints a smile on his face and is so sad beneath it – exists in the first place is that those were the only sorts of people who were any good at it. Wherever there is darkness, cruelty, and evil in the world, comedy is never far away. Les extrêmes se touchent, as the French say. The extremes come together.

And for comedians, there is often no difference between the good and the evil at all. Humour is inherently a performance. It is artificial. In order to make you laugh, I usually have to do something outside what is my normal way of being. I am, thus, pretending to be someone I am not. And for those of us who strive to make others laugh, it becomes all that we do after awhile. This explains, to some extent, why so many of the funniest people we know turn out to be so ‘troubled,’ which is a word often used in the media to explain it. It is a constant state of release and relief, going about pretending to be someone you are not.

For those of us who struggle with mental illness, Robin Williams’ succumbing to his own is, inevitably, a reason for reflection. For those of you who do not know me all that well, I have struggled with mental illness my entire life. I was born with it, it is a part of me, it has played a predominant role in my existence and, often, proven to be debilitating and nearly fatal. I’ve been hospitalized for it, medicated for it, and very nearly succumbed to it. It’s taken an entire lifetime to learn to live with it, and even then, I know that there will never be a cure. My existence is a day-by-day, moment-by-moment act of case management.

I’m somewhat impressed, in fact, that Robin Williams even made it to the age of 63. Living with a memory such as this, in and of itself, seems like it eat away at even the healthiest of psyches. And a good number of depressives meet untimely, and early ends – perhaps it is suicide, perhaps an overdose, or perhaps through an accident where a lifetime spent struggling with the pains one feels makes self-care difficult. Depressives become reckless, they takes risks, they can come to lose that self-preservation instinct. Why save yourself, when it’s so readily apparent that your own body is attempting to kill you? It can seem miraculous, at times, that you’re even alive at all.

And see, it’s that sense which builds up within that is difficult, if not impossible, for a good number of people to comprehend. Asking the question, “why did Robin Williams kill himself now?” completely misses the point. When you struggle mightily with depression and other mental illness, the cumulative effects of a lifetime of oneself generating negative thoughts, emotions and feelings makes it such that any time could be the time. There is a threshold of misery there, a line you cross which renders each passing day to be nothing more than another day borrowed. So Robin Williams committed suicide on August 11, 2014. It could have happened on any day, most likely, in the past 40 years, if not longer. Once you cross that threshold, and touch the void on the other side, it’s no certainty that you’ll ever truly come back. There comes a point where you feel like you’re simply holding back what’s inevitable, and that day just may come when you feel as if you no longer have the strength to fight back.

And not all depressives wear black and listen to The Smiths. Some of the most loving, ebullient, beautiful people I know suffer from mental illnesses of one sort of another. Some learn to manage it, while others learn to hide it really well. You do a lot of hiding, a lot of pretending. The most difficult thing to do, after a while, is to stop doing that.

Robin Williams is my hero because he did something, in his work, which was far, far harder than I could ever do, nor most comedic actors could ever do, which was to allow that dark side of him to be more than just a well-spring for his work. His best work had that depth and texture to it, something which many comic actors fail to adjust to. It’s one thing to show up at the set or on the stage and put on your usual routine in your usual persona. It’s another thing entirely to truly be angry, be bitter, be petty and cruel and sometimes evil and create that experience for others. It’s somewhat paradoxical – in order to be a solid dramatic actor, the comedian often has to stop acting.

And I know I could never do that. It makes me a half-assed artisan, I suppose. I’ve spent 10 years – 10 fucking years – working on a novel. It is a very complex piece, and I’ve probably written about 500 pages’ worth of material during that time. Some of the best work I’ve ever done, in fact. And it was dark. Very dark. It dealt with some issues and subject matter that I’d never imaginged writing about. And it was good, too. It was really fucking good. It verged on being scary, that’s how good it was.

And then I threw it away. I threw it away because I realized that, while the story was entirely fictional and the characters conjured up from scratch, I couldn’t even bring myself to subject even a fictitious person to that. And so I junked it and wrote a comedy, instead. Why fill the world with any more misery and sadness? We already have enough of that. I already carry around enough of that sludge to begin with.

And, see, that’s the mindset of the comedic if you put a pen in their hands or a mic in front of them. They will attempt to make you laugh, rather than wish to directly spread the unhappiness and the suffering within them. That unhappiness is innate, and no amount of external stimuli will necessarily change that. You’re still walking around, carrying around all of this sludge about with you. That burden is still there. That pressure is still there. It doesn’t ever truly go away. And that’s not ‘normal.’ The ‘normal’ people that you know do not feel that way. They are often incapable of even comprehending what that feels like.

You feel, in short, like a loser.

I remember reading a profile of Robin Williams some years past – maybe a decade, maybe a longer – in which he and the writer go mountain biking in Marin County, and Robin Williams constantly races away from the reporter, leaving them far behind. It was as if it were a race, a competition that he had to win. Keep in mind that he is one of the most successful entertainers of his generation, maker of multimillions and winner of an Oscar, etc. Robin Williams should be considered an unqualified success. He shouldn’t have anything to prove at all. What difference would some recreational bike ride ultimately make?

But in the realm of a game, however, I’ve known quite a few depressives over the years who were absolutely vicious competitors. You focus entirely, you target that moment and put every ounce of your effort into it, augmented by a healthy amount of pent-up aggression. And it doesn’t matter if you’re ill-prepared or don’t know how to play or what have you. In that moment, you absolutely, positively have to win. Sports and games constitute another form of escape, a chance to disprove the idea that you are flawed. Winning disproves that notion, losing simply cements it.

But losing is also funny. And, as I say, losing provides a wealth of source material. Failure, and the fear of it, is good for business. It provides steady work. And no honours nor plaudits nor successes were ever going to permanently dam that flow.

The internal world Robin Williams personally inhabited was clearly not a funny one. That other world, the one he shares with the rest of us mere mortals, is now a whole lot less funny that is was just a few days ago. Maybe what needed to happen is that, instead of laughing with him once again, we all had a good cry together, instead. I once laughed until I cried while I was institutionalized. I laughed so hard that the tears began to flow, and then I felt bad for laughing so hard.

“Shouldn’t being crazy suck?” I said. “Being crazy isn’t supposed to feel so good.”

Robin Williams is my hero of the week for constantly reminding me, in the past three decades, that being crazy doesn’t have to suck. If nothing else, you have a gift in that you have a unique perception and insight, a way of seeing things which others cannot when, shaped correctly, can create art and literature and that which is beautiful and timeless. If nothing else, you can bring some joy and lightness to everyone around you. If you cannot find that joy within, spread it elsewhere. There is a value in that act which you cannot put a price tag on. A depressive life is often one filled with drugs of every sort, but if nothing else, maybe you can make a few people laugh – laughter being the most precious drug of all, a drug that always seems to be in the shortest of supplies.

A Worthy Final

A fitting end

HISTORY will show that the biggest names in international soccer wound up taking center stage in Brazil, but everything written about the World Cup should be followed with a one-word sentence.

Barely.

Germany won their fourth title. Barely. Argentina reached their fifth final. Barely. The Netherlands and Brazil reached the semis. Barely. The names may not have changed from the past, but the means with which they got to that point in the tournament certainly did. Part of what made the World Cup so remarkably compelling, both from a viewing standpoint and the standpoint of a commentator such as myself, was just how close the margins were.

Consider that of the 16 games in the knockout fazes in the tournament, only four of them were decided by more than one goal – and a case could be made in almost every one of those other 12 games that the losing side could’ve and maybe even should’ve won (and even in one of those four ‘routs’ – France’s 2:0 win over Nigeria – it was goalless until the 79’ mark, at which point the Super Eagles’ best player – their goalkeeper – inexplicably gifted the game to Les Bleus). Germany’s majestic 7:1 win over Brazil was remarkable, in part, because the Germans looked so awful against Algeria. They looked old beyond their years and looked completely worn out by the end of the game with the Fennec Foxes, resorting to cheap chicanery in lieu of any good ideas. This followed a two-game stretch where they were nearly run into the ground by Ghana, only to be saved by Klose, and then went into a self-preservationist shell v. the U.S. That team which tore the hosts to shreds in Belo Horizonte had seemingly risen from the dead.

But every team which advanced in this tournament suffered a near-death experience along the way. Argentina should’ve lost to Iran, for heaven’s sake, and somehow the Swiss kept looking the gift horse in the mouth against them and getting spooked. The Dutch manufactured two goals in the last five minutes against Mexico, and then van Gaal essentially trolled the whole tourney with the goalie switch v. Costa Rica. Brazil was not the better team v. Chile, nor v. Mexico for that matter. The Belgians would’ve gone home if Wondo hadn’t choked. Costa Rica would’ve gone home if Greeks had a clue – and the only reason the Greeks were there at all was the Greek tragedy sort of ending which befell Côte d’Ivoire. On and on it went. Almost every team that advanced needed a miracle at some point or another in order to do so. About the only team who didn’t give their fans a heart attack on their way to the latter stages was the Colombians, which definitely speaks to their quality.

And yet for all of the nervy finishes and tension, if you were betting on the favourites according to the lines, you were making a fair amount of money. All eight of the group winners advanced out of the 16s, all four favoured sides advanced to the semis. The recurring theme of this World Cup was that, time and again, the upstarts had the favourites on the ropes and failed to take advantage. It’s easy to play “woulda coulda shoulda” with this tournament, the point being not that those teams who advanced somehow didn’t deserve it so much as the margin between victory and defeat was always so small. The skeptic could say that it is proof there really were no ‘great’ teams in the tourney, but I would argue that the field was deeper and more balanced than ever before. But you have to finish them off. We saw countless stoppage time goals, substitutes saving the day, and more comebacks than had been seen in the tourney in years. Bottom line is that when you have the chance to pull the upset, you have to seize the moment, because it could very easily come back to haunt you.

And I really felt like the Argentines left this game on the table today. They had the bulk of the better chances in regulation, they dictated the terms and had the pace of play the way they wanted. The longer that game went on, the more likely it seemed to me that they were going to lose. Messi seemed somewhat laboured in his play as the game went on, but I think the only thing he truly did wrong was not be able to get on the end of his own passes. With all the goals he scores, it’s forgotten sometimes what a great passer Messi is. Several times he made beautiful, almost perfect passes into empty spaces which should have been occupied by teammates making runs, if only those teammates had bothered to make them – the lot of them too pre-occupied by watching Messi to actually finish the play. You can understand why Argentina went into such a defensive shell, given what a hash of things they were making up front. They may have gone 7½ hours without conceding a goal, but they also went about 5½ hours without scoring one. When you shank chances like this, you had better trust your defense:

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Whenever the Germans verged on unlocking that defense, either Kroos or Müller would step up and do something useless. Once Klose came off – he having actually played a very good match as a target forward – it seemed like maybe Argentina were going to get a reprieve, as the Germans struggled again to break it down. But unlike the worthless Argentine subs, the Germans still had some firepower on the bench. It was somewhat appropriate for the tournament that Götze got the goal – not only because so many goals have been scored by subs in this tourney, but also because Götze was benched after being, well, awful in the group stages. This tourney seemed to always reward those who made the most of being given second chances.

And it was a beautiful goal, as well, a fitting end to a great tournament. I am not sure I would call it a great game, but World Cup finals rarely are. It certainly was a very good one, and a very intense one as that, and it made for a worthy final. In terms of quality of play, I would say it was probably the best final since Mexico 1986. In terms of the overall quality of play among all 32 teams, I would say this is probably the best World Cup that has ever been played – and given how close the margins seem to be, I can imagine the competition is only going to get tougher and more intense from here. I honestly was not planning to do a daily blog on the World Cup, but the storylines were impossibly compelling. And I do think, in the end, that the Germans were the best overall side, and the best team won out.

Barely.

Inept

Oh for heaven's sake

NORMALLY, I wouldn’t give a shit about the consolation game of the World Cup from a win/loss perspective. With the pressure off, guys play loose and so it’s usually pretty entertaining, but given the catastrophic loss to Germany on Tuesday, I was curious to see how Brazil would respond in their final performance before their home fans.

Not very well, as it turned out. Brazil were inept.

Had the Dutch not dialed it back a bit after scoring two early goals – understandable, given they’d played four hours of nervy football in the past week and were considerably fatigued – the final scoreline may not have been that far off from the 7:1 debacle the other night. As it was, a 3:0 win by the Oranje was a pretty emphatic rebuke of the hosts, who offered up a lot of the same nonsense as they did v. the Germans four days ago.

The Brazilians came out in the same 5-0-5 alignment as the other day – and I say that only partly in jest. The Dutch ran through the Brazilian midfield in the first 20’ like they were frolicking in a meadow. Much of the scorn on the 2nd goal goes to David Luiz for his aimless, blootering attempt at a clearing header which landed at the feet of Blind in the center of the box, and deservedly so, but it should be pointed out that Blind plays left back for the Oranje, which means he went on about an 85-yard run to find himself unmarked right in front of the Brazilian goal. It’s not like Blind is particularly fleet of foot, either, and when you go on an 85-yard run, you don’t exactly have the element of surprise on your side. How does that happen?

What’s particularly depressing from a Brazilian point of view is that, even though he was awful the past two games, David Luiz is still one of their better players. Such is the dearth in the front 2/3 of the field that the Brazilian backs – David Luiz, Marcelo, Thiago Silva – had to try to do everything in the absence of Neymar. (And if you’re Paris St. Germain, and you’ve now spent €100,000,000 to pair David Luiz and Thiago Silva in the back, are you not going rummaging through the desk in research of the receipts right about now?) Oscar was the only guy up front who played worth a damn. I think the enormous pressure of trying to win in Brazil may have gotten to them, in the end – everyone was trying to do much, the back four kept freelancing but no one gave them any cover. And that’s not a novel concept. It’s basic football. At times, Seleção looked as if they’d never played together before.

We’ve probably all downplayed the amount of pressure this team was under. The ramifications of this sort of failure are going to be felt well into the fall, I suspect – not just on the footballing front, where wholesale changes seem inevitable, but there is also a presidential election in October in Brazil, and Dilma Rousseff’s reëlection campaign probably isn’t feeling so comfortable at the moment. It wouldn’t be the first, nor last time where failure on the football pitch translated into failure at the ballot box in Latin America, where the game and politics are seemingly inherently intertwined. The cost figure I’ve heard thrown about for the World Cup is around $11,000,000,000 altogether – that’s a lot of zeroes – far too much of it public money and far too much of it over budget. The general consensus going into this event was that, for all of the corruption and cronyism and resulting discontent, the general public in Brazil would ultimately put up with it if Seleção won the World Cup. Well, they didn’t. Now what? And don’t forget that other endeavour in political pulled pork on the Brazilian BBQ at the moment, the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, preparations for which haven’t been going very well. Such calamitous boondoggles no longer have place in a developing nation attempting to become a major international player in arenas far, far greater than the Maracanã.

As I said the other day, there has been an overwhelming sense of entitlement about everything Seleção did in this tournament – and the 1st goal in today’s game was in keeping with that notion, since Thiago Silva should’ve been red carded and probably would’ve been were he wearing any other jersey. (Awarding the penalty was something of a compromise, since it was debatable that it should have been, but on the other hand, watching the Brazilian play a man down for 88’ would’ve made us all squeamish.) If you were a Brazilian, anything short of committing a felony was going to let you stay in the game, which Scolari knew and which he used in the way he crafted his strategy. In chopping down Colombians much like Washington chopped down cherry trees, the Brazilians were almost boasting that there were no repercussions – and they were then shocked and aghast when, in what became an overheated game, their only hope and saviour Neymar was seriously injured. (Not to say it was justified in any way, of course. In no way do I think there was intent to injure on the part of Zúñiga. But if you are going to actively fan the flames, you do not get to bitch if and when the fire rages out of control.) The Brazilians seemed to think there would be no consequences for their actions. This tourney has ultimately been an exercise in arrogance and just desserts, a dessert baked with the rottenest of apples.

Perder

Cone will be starting at striker for Seleção on Saturday.

I DON’T need to give any ink to that wretched Argentina-Netherlands game. Congrats to them for essentially tying for 2nd place in this tourney, since it will go down as a 0:0 draw in the books, and since neither of them will stand much of a chance come Sunday, in my opinion, and it was a shame that one team had to win. There was really only one game that mattered this week in the World Cup, the result of which was rather seismic in nature.

Valhalla is Burning
The record will show that the game took place in Belo Horizonte, but it may as well have been Bayreuth. Such was the catastrophic nature of Brazil’s defeat that it seemed more like something out of opera. It didn’t seem real. In the length of a Wagnerian aria, more than six decades of Brazilian mythology was razed to rubble. With each additional goal, another wall collapsed, and by the time the Germans scored the fifth, some 29’ into the match, even they were stunned at what they had done.

Brazil’s first half on Tuesday was the single-worst 45 minutes of soccer I have ever seen at this level. Even the Tahitians were better than that a year ago, and would have done better against the Germans than Brazil did. Tahiti lost all three games at the Confed Cup last summer and gave up 24 goals in the process, but a good number of those goals were attributable to fatigue late in the matches. (Having a goalkeeper with lettuce hands didn’t help.) The Brazilians couldn’t even use fatigue as an excuse. Their pre-made excuses for defeat – no Neymar, no Thiago Silva – went out the window as well. There were no excuses left by the half-hour mark. Brazil weren’t, and aren’t, any good. For Brazil – mighty Brazil! – to be behind by five goals after 29 minutes was the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen on the pitch. Take another good look at it, because I reckon you will never see anything quite like that again in your lifetime.

Full marks to the Germans for being ruthless and methodical and clinical, of course – but Brazil were so bad that the Germans would have been disappointed in themselves if it wasn’t 5-0 at half. The Germans couldn’t even muster up much of a celebration after scoring the 5th goal. They seemed almost as shocked as the spectators at just how awful their opponents were.

The narrative of this game is, and always will be, about just how terrible Brazil were. The first German goal was a set piece on a corner so basic that it probably isn’t even listed in the German repertoire because it can’t possibly work. Müller moved about 10 yards to his left (and not particularly swiftly), was unmarked and the ball fell at his feet. That play doesn’t work in U-13 soccer, much less in the semifinal of the World Cup. Marcelo should probably change his nickname to Toast after getting burned so badly on the second goal, a fairly simply worked give and go. What was shocking was just how easy it was for the Germans to score again and again. Fernardinho’s giveaway which led to the 4th goal, where he was leisurely strolling towards his own goal and had Kroos pick his pocket, was noteworthy in that it was the only proof offered all day that Fernardinho was actually on the pitch, for as bad as the Brazilian defense was, the midfield may have actually been worse. (Here is a good tactical analysis of what a shambles the Brazilians were, although I think the commentator is a bit harsh on Julio Cesar, who easily could have conceded 10 goals with the way his defense hung him out to dry.)

And as I say, Brazil had several ready-made excuses were they to suffer a 1:0 or 2:1 defeat – blame it on Neymar’s injury, blame it on Thiago Silva’s suspension, blame it on reckless Colombians and clueless Spanish referees – but this defeat was so thorough and so comprehensive that even those excuses rang hollow after half an hour. And along with those excuses, out went the Brazilian mystique, as well. Brazil hadn’t lost a meaningful match in 39 years at home, and hadn’t lost any sort of a match at home in more than a decade. As I said the other day, the danger comes when you start to believe in your own mythology. Not only have the Brazilians believed in it all this time, they’ve actively flaunted it, and used the mystique of all-mighty Brazil as a weapon on the pitch.

I’ve been watching the World Cup since 1982, and something which was struck me in nearly every single tournament is the fear the Brazilians instill in their opponents. Teams play extraordinarily cautiously against them, terrified of Seleção unleashing some astounding display of skill against them which will lead to a rout. That fear has always been as big a weapon as the skills itself – skills which the likes of Romario and Bebeto and Ronaldo and Ronaldinho actually possessed, but very rarely needed to show. Brazil basically won a World Cup in 1994 simply through showing up and seeing their opponents cower in the corner for 90 minutes (or, in the case of Italy in the final, 120 minutes). Teams weren’t just playing the 11 Brazilians on the pitch, but also playing Pelé and Garrincha and Jairzinho at the same time. I remember very nearly screaming at the TV in 1998, wondering why no one would dare press against a Brazilian side that was so clearly weak in defense. (It was the Norwegians, of all teams, who finally figured this out, as they finally said the hell with it when down a goal and threw caution to the wind, promptly scoring two within about 5 minutes and pulling a historic upset.) Unsurprisingly, the two sides during all those years who’ve shown Brazil the least amount of respect – the French and the Dutch – have produced some of the best results against them. The French have knocked Brazil out of the World Cup three times; the Dutch, meanwhile, knocked them out four years ago, and their games with Brazil in 1994 and 1998 were the best matches of those tourneys, games where they brought out the best in the Brazilians. There is some value to football idealism after all, I suppose – both France and the Netherlands are going to do whatever they feel like, opposition be damned. Neither has ever been afraid to go out there and punch the bully in the mouth.

And neither have the Germans, for that matter. The Germans really have no history against Brazil at the World Cup, the two teams somewhat amazingly having met only once before. Since the Germans had no history v. Brazil, the also had no reason to fear. And among the many narratives the World Cup has put forth in its history, a narrative played out in Belo Horizonte which has been around even longer than Brazil’s magic touch. Be it the Hungarians in 1954, the Dutch in 1974 or the French in 1982 and 1986, the Germans have always been the destroyers of others’ dreams. The Germans are the ultimate buzzkill. As my Dutch brother-in-law joked after the game, this is why you never invite the Germans to the party.

And FIFA viewed the 2014 World Cup in Brazil as the greatest of parties, the greatest of celebrations of the sport in the country that loves it the most. Suffice to say, the party hasn’t really gone to plan. The locals didn’t want to play along, as it turned out – we’ve seen an endless stream of protests surrounding the World Cup in Brazil over the past year, often turning violent. One of the best descriptions I’ve heard of Brazil came from Franklin Foer, author of the book How Soccer Explains the World, in which he calls Brazil ‘the bizarro version of the United States,’ a massive, diverse and resource-rich country which failed to become a global hegemon. In that book, Foer delves into the idea of the ‘Top Hats’ as they are known, cronies and shysters who run Brazilian soccer and who have exploited the native Brazilian love of football over the years for their own selfish political and economic gain. And once the World Cup was awarded to Brazil, every Top Hat and would-be Top Hat had their hand out. Stadium and infrastructure construction for the World Cup was rampant with corruption, cost overruns and political strongarming. It was business as usual in Brazil, and the people who took to the streets in protest had finally had enough. (This excellent New Yorker piece from January delves into the mess surrounding stadium construction in São Paulo, which was never quite finished.) They weren’t protesting Brazilian football. They were protesting the business of Brazilian football, one which had just come to assume that Brazilian people would go along with anything put forth, their love of the beautiful game treated as if it were some sort of drug by political and business officials who acted like a cartel.

Much like they just stuck a bunch of guys in yellow jerseys, ran them out on the pitch, and assumed that just because the jerseys said Brazil across the front, the team would win another World Cup in and of itself. Not be good enough to win one, mind you. Just show up and win.

Brazil has always been able to find a convenient excuse or two when Seleção have failed. If only they had “played the Brazilian way,” they would’ve succeeded. If only they’d returned to the glory of Samba football and the 4-2-4, instead of trying to beat European sides with European tactics. Truth is, there are lots of European tactics instilled in Brazilian footballers these days, seeing how so many Brazilian footballers are playing in Europe. With 1,200 Brazilian expats on the payrolls of international clubs worldwide, it could be argued that footballers are one of Brazil’s most lucrative exports. And if you think it is harsh of me to think of players as being little more than commodities, it certainly hasn’t stopped them from thinking that way. But it is probably just as well that players leave Brazil, since the domestic game is such a mess. Players would rather play in places like the Faeroe Islands than put up with a never-ending Brazilian domestic season and a constant string of promissary notes come payday. Even the fans are tired of it – Série A in Brazil, the top division in the cradle of the world’s footballing talent, draws 5,000 fans per game fewer than an MLS game on average. The basic infrastructure of the Brazilian game has been rotting for decades now, and it finally all caught up to them on Tuesday night in Belo Horizonte.

Brazil needs a restart. Scolari will certainly be gone when this is over, and he should be. His 2002 World Cup title was far more attributable to talent (three world players of the year on the roster) and a weak tourney field than anything he did, and he had Cristiano Ronaldo and Figo and the remains of a so-called ‘golden generation’ on his Portugal team in 2006. He is like Phil Jackson in that regard – a guy who has created a track record of coaching success through not screwing up marvelous talent he was given. Expecting Scolari to coach this group of players to a title in 2014 was sort of like expecting Jackson to coach the Atlanta Hawks. Phil has always been choosy with his jobs for a reason. Scolari will be gone and, honestly, everyone in the Brazilian F.A. should be gone with it. The whole program needs a redo. The sooner some of these idiots are gone, the sooner Brazil can start moving back towards a place at the top of the sport again.

And the fans will ultimately be forgiving of the players, I suspect, some of whom should be able to rehabilitate their Seleção careers. In the meantime, I would be inclined to clear the bench for the consolation game with the Dutch, let the young players and the backups play, given that the ones who took the field in Belo Horizonte are likely to be mercilessly booed. Which they should be, quite honestly. And maybe that Cone kid mentioned above will prove to be a good striker. He certainly could be no worse up front than what they have been getting. That Brazil cannot score the ball and is so obviously bereft of offensive ideas is absolutely depressing.

The Germans, in the end, may have done the Brazilians a favor. This loss was a long time coming, and the magnitude of it was such that major changes will have to come. And it was good that it happened fast and happened big – better that way than to lose close and continue to live in denial. I think losing like that may come to be viewed, several decades from now, as the best thing that could’ve happened to Brazil. Maybe now they’ll clean up their act, get over 1950 and 1982, stop pretending they are untouchable, and root out some of the rot and the corruption related to the game which has turned off players, fans and everyone else in the country. Everyone else in the world, for that matter – a great Brazil is great for the game. Brazil are always the people’s choice, the neutral’s choice. Brazilian success is always viewed by sporting public outside of countries whose names rhyme with Bargentina as a sign that the game is in great shape. That ideal of Brazilian greatness and superiority was, in fact, earned long ago. It was earned with three World Cup titles from 1958-1970 and a steady stream of players possessing vision and imagination and joy on the pitch which had never been seen nor expressed before. Even in one of their most dubious defeats, this quixotic endeavour from 1982, the Brazilians made many friends with their Rebel Without a Cause sort of spirit. Right or wrong, our notion of the beautiful game is firmly rooted on the beaches of Brazil. It is now up to the Brazilians to rebuild from the rubble and make the game beautiful once again.

Everyone Sucks

THE LOSE has been doing studious research in the run-up to the World Cup semifinals, some of which may or may not involve the use of some fine products from The Official Distillery of In Play Lose, but after going through a number of foreign press services scouring for bits of information, I’ve come to the conclusion that you shouldn’t watch tomorrow’s semifinal between Brazil and Germany, nor should you watch Argentina and the Netherlands on Wednesday, and don’t even bother with the final on Sunday because everyone involved sucks. The Brazilians have abandoned the beautiful game, the Dutch are unattractive, the Argentines consist of Messi and 10 stiffs lacking any sort of expression, and the Germans are back to being nothing more than ruthless, unimaginative automatons. And this is the ‘best’ the game has to offer, which speaks to a sorry state of affairs. Clearly, it’s the worst of all possible worlds, seeing the sport reduced to this sort of rubbish.

It’s amusing to read this sort of stuff, especially when you consider the pedigree on display over the next few days. The four teams remaining in the World Cup have 10 championships and 19 finals appearances between them. They are among the greatest footballing nations on earth. Yet when it comes to the mythology of the game, no one taking the pitch in the next couple of days can ever quite match up.

Even if that mythology is, quite frankly, a crock of shit.

Let’s get it out of the way here and kill some idols right off the bat. Argentina has never won a World Cup where it didn’t cheat – either on the pitch or off of it. The Dutch ideal of Total Football apparently involved three minutes of brilliance followed by 87 minutes of patting yourselves on the back about how great you are, and not bothering to, oh, you know, win the World Cup final. (Today is the 40th anniversary of the single-most written about soccer match in history. This Guardian article from 2008 is probably a bit more deconstructivist than need be, but you get the point.) The great Brazilian teams of yore occasionally did stuff like this on their way to greatness (hint: everyone does). The supposedly great German side had become so cynical and downright loathsome by the 1980s that it was a sure sign of the need to reform the game when, in 1990, the Germans found themselves to be the most likable team in the tournament. (Albeit one lead by a certain striker who tended to act like he was shot whenever someone breathed upon him.)

A bit hyperbolical of me? Well, sure, but so are all the myths of grandeur which came before. It should always be remembered that the French word histoire can mean both ‘history’ and ‘story,’ not differentiating between that which is real and that which is fabricated. The truth is that winning is an ugly business a lot of the time. Winners write history – and also periodically go back and rewrite it, overlooking a few blemishes and inconvenient truths here and there.

(And it should be pointed out that losers write and rewrite history as well. In sport, no one rewrites history quite like the English, of course. A particularly grumpy curmudgeon of an Englishman said on ESPN FC the other day, soon after the 3 Lions exit from Brazil, that back in his day, England could have fielded two sides among the 10 best in the world. Given that England have failed to qualify more often than they’ve reached the semifinals in the last 48 years, I’m not sure exactly which era he’s talking about.)

The three great sporting pastimes on earth – soccer, baseball, and cricket – are all sports whose continuing to thrive, in some ways, is dependent upon the mythology of the past. All three also happen to be sports in which, in fact, not a whole lot actually happens in way of action. Because let’s be honest here, not much really does happen. A soccer game ends 0:0 or 1:0, while baseball and cricket feature bursts of action a few seconds in length followed by quite a few moments of everyone standing around. And yet there has probably been more literature written about those three sports than the rest of the pastimes on earth put together. When such small moments and small details prove to make a difference, those moments are magnified often beyond the point of comprehension. Just imagine the ramifications in Argentina in 1978, a tournament a military junta was attempting to use as a stamp of legitimacy, had the Dutch shot in the dying minutes not hit the post but tucked inside of it and given the Netherlands a shocking 2:1 victory in the final? It was a random moment in a game – and yet one which explodes metaphorically. When the whistle blows and the match is over, games invariably become the domain of commentators, writers, artisans and philosophers. (Indeed, the full quote from Sartre serving as this blog’s epigram reads, “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.”)

Listen to a baseball game sometime, actually listen to the game and tell me what it is that you hear. Is it the sport, or is it a narrative of the sport as revealed by a storyteller? I have no problems whatsoever stating that it is the latter, and that I grew up believing in the fiction of baseball. I grew up listening to Dave Niehaus, who was a phenomenal broadcaster and who could make any sort of game situation sound compelling. He could make even 100-loss Mariner teams worth following. It didn’t matter what the situation – once you tuned in, you didn’t want to turn the radio off. He had a mix of populism and eloquence about the game which was spellbinding. You could only imagine how someone which such command of the language and the ability to captivate an audience could’ve scared the hell out of you had he been telling ghost stories around a campfire. In the abstract, of course, the idea of listening to the Mariners was a completely hopeless and futile endeavour, and yet the story of every game, laid out for you like that, made you want to come back for more – and also made you foolishly think that somehow, some way, the team was going to actually improve. The Mariners were god awful most of the time, and going to the games in this empty concrete mushroom of a stadium was shocking in just how silent it was. At least listening to the broadcast gave you the same sort of enjoyment of having a good book to read, even if you didn’t like the ending.

And when you broadcast baseball, of course, you just fill in the gaps with stories of games gone by. In true absurdist Mariner fashion, those stories were usually hysterical – Niehaus had also been the broadcaster for some truly horrid California Angels teams, so all of his stories tended to lean towards the absurd. Listening to a Giants game here in San Francisco, meanwhile, is rife with stories of players who actually knew what they were doing, guys like Mays and McCovey and Marichal. Listening to cricket is baseball to the extreme, in that it would seem the entirety of the game is the stories of the past. I tried really hard to get into cricket when I lived in England, and I was just amazed listening to a broadcast of a 5-day test match in the West Indies where England were getting mercilessly thrashed in that the entirety of the broadcast basically consisted of telling old stories. There wasn’t anything new to report on the pitch – the West Indian opening partnership batted for about two days and scored something like 398 runs – so it was just one story after another about some heroic England bowler getting the Aussies all-out in 19(fill in the blank), or batting for a century vs. India in 19(fill in the blank), with the occasional “there’s a shot for four,” thrown in to keep you on your toes. I wondered sometimes if the script had been penned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the whole endeavour simply a serialized radio show on the BBC. At times, it didn’t even seem like there was a game going on.

Soccer isn’t quite to that extreme, although if you ever read the commentary in a newspaper after a match, it sure makes it seem like even the dullest match was worth watching. To borrow my favourite XPFC from a previous post on this blog:

It’s hard to say which was greyer, the skies over the pitch in Aberystwyth or the action upon it, as XPFC were held goalless by 10-man Liverpool, the Merseysiders reduced by one when Suárez was giving his marching orders after 10 minutes, responding to being denied by the keeper Morgan’s ample reach by lashing out and biting him on the boot. Bassett-Bouchard produced some joy down the right flank for the home side early on, but his questions went unanswered, as XPFC’s lumbering forward Day was unable to make the most of early chances. Gerrard wrong footed Frentz in XPFC’s central defense but shot wide at the quarter hour mark. The stout defending which ensued permitted both goalkeepers ample time to learn Spanish and eat cheese sandwiches in lieu of any steady work. MacNeil’s clattering tackle in central defense just before the stroke of halftime perhaps should’ve earned the visitors a spot kick, but appeals went unheeded and play continued. The two sides lacked both ideas and the initiative to go forward after the interval, apart from the Venezuelan substitute del Solar attempting to rally the home side, providing some brightness with some dashing darts through the center of the pitch, only to see his final ball continue to go awry. The introduction of Pianowski up front provided a strong target for the Welsh XI, but the service in the final third was little more than crosses drooping like wilted lettuce, and Day’s final touch let him down a stroke from the death, missing a sitter as he shot wide from 5 yards. Disappointment for the home side, but truth be told any result other than a point taken for either side would have been an unjust one.

All that for a 0:0 draw. Imagine if anything good had actually happened. Open up a weekend edition of a British newspaper and you’ll get 10 stories just like that – all very evocative, rather clever, and probably more than a little bit embellished.

The stupidity ultimately comes when people start to believe in their own myths. For some reason, the Dutch seem far more interested in being critically acclaimed than actually winning. History seems to have stopped at 1970 in Brazil (or perhaps 1982) and around 1986 in Argentina (minus a few pesky details along the way). A lot of the greatest critics of the modern game are former players, of course, which I find completely amusing. Yes, there is no doubt they were great in their time, but the game has evolved. Players are bigger, stronger, faster, and tactics have changed. No sport stays the same over time. You have to enjoy it for what it is, in the here and the now, not for what it was in the past. If anything, I think the game of soccer has gotten better in recent years, with the advent of all sorts of new formations and new strategies. 

But never mind me. Everyone sucks. The game sucks and the semifinals will all be about tactics and nothing about imagination – which, in truth, it probably always was, but there is no longer much of an element of surprise. A large part of the mystique of the South American side of yore came from the fact that players tended to stay in South America, and thus were somewhat unknown quantities. That just doesn’t happen in a globalized world where everyone plays on the same club teams, coaching ideas cross borders and training routines become standardized across the globe. If anything, winning a World Cup is now harder than ever, given that everyone starts on much more equal footing.

And 50 years from now, whomever wins this coming Sunday will be hailed as great champions, of course, because they always are, and whomever will be wearing the shirt of that country will likely be considered to be terrible and unimaginative and not up to the standard of the nation set a half-century earlier. They will all suck, just as much as the guys playing tomorrow will suck, when the Brazilians will score more goals than the Germans because they will suck slightly less, and the Dutch will suck slightly less on Wednesday than Argentina. But that’s not a prediction, and I’m not really interested in watching such drek, anyway. And neither should you, because these guys are all terrible.