Money Can't Buy Me Love

“I don't know the precise number and don't want to get into it, but a significant number of teams are continuing to lose money and they continue to lose money because their expenses exceed their revenue even with revenue sharing, and fairly robust revenue sharing, when some teams are receiving over $20 million checks from their partners.”

THESE were the comments from commissioner Adam Silver this past week about the economic realities of the NBA – or, at least, the way that he wants to spin those economic realities. Remember, Silver is fundamentally a mouthpiece for the owners, and now that the NBA is on the verge of unprecedented revenue growth, after one of it’s most successful seasons ever, the owners immediately start to play coy and try to cry poor mouth. It’s an act which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that the NBA made $4.8 billion in revenues in its recently concluded fiscal year, and a new TV deal is about to kick in which offers up $24 billion in broadcast rights over nine years.

Sadly, Silver taking this tact isn’t really all that surprising, given that labor relations between the league and the players union have generally been terrible – there have been three work stoppages in 20 years for a reason. Given that revenues are going to soar, it also means the players’ share of the pot are going to soar as well. The NBA’s salary cap already jumped 10% this offseason, to $70 million, and as per the terms of the CBA, where the players get half the basketball-related income, the salary cap is only going to get bigger and bigger from hereon.

Which it should. As I’ve said before, when it comes to professional sports, I am purely a Marxist. I think the players should get everything, frankly, because no one goes to an NBA arena to watch an owner. Not even Mark Cuban. (Sorry, Mark.) And I agree with the general premise put forth in this 538 piece that the élite in the NBA are, in fact, underpaid relative to their importance – not just in terms of their on-court value, but in terms of their overall importance to the continued growth and popularity of the league as a whole. The NBA is a star-driven enterprise, and has been for decades. Even in this era, when we’ve seen the emergence of the Spurs and the Warriors as champions through an emphasis on sophisticated tactics and great team play, those principles are still centered on transcendent talents like Tim Duncan and Steph Curry making it possible. First and foremost, professional athletes are entertainers. They are artisans and thespians performing on society’s favorite stage. And as has pretty much always been true in the entertainment business, for every popular entertainer who makes a large sum of money for their performance, there is someone who isn’t performing at all who stands to make even more through riding their coattails.

And in the NBA, that would be the owners, all of whom are now sitting on a gold mine. Forbes recently pegged the average value of an NBA franchise at $1.1 billion. You can primarily blame Los Angeles for this sudden and ridiculous escalation, just as you can blame Los Angeles for pretty much every shift in the business of sport since the Dodgers left Brooklyn, as Steve Ballmer ponying up $2 billion to buy the historically- and comically-awful Clippers, thus taking Donald Sterling off the NBA’s hands, has led to a domino effect sending values of other franchises skyrocketing. Ballmer, of course, also played a large part in the $500 million bidding war over the Sacramento Kings, another event jacking up the NBA’s collective value: if the league is only as good as its worst franchise (which the Kings most certainly are, but more on those idiots in a moment), and its worst franchise can pull half a bil when it crosses the block, then the league’s not really doing too badly, now is it?

Notice how I am throwing the word ‘billion’ around a lot in this post. Well, you can bet the players union notices how often you use the words ‘NBA’ and ‘billion’ together in a sentence. The league and its players formed something of a unique partnership in the early 1980s, when the league truly was verging on collapse. Implicit in the agreement with David Stern to cap salaries and tie them to a percentage of a basketball revenues was the idea that, as the revenues for the league increased, the salaries would inherently increase as well. This was smart business at the time, to be sure, but time and again the crux of hostile labor negotiations has been that owners want to somehow welch on that promise. In the last labor dispute, a lockout which cost 16 games of the regular season, the NBA extracted a concession from the union whereby the players’ share of the revenues dropped from around 57% to the 49-51% range it is now. This was, in fact, a huge concession on the players’ part, one which ultimately stemmed from the fact that it didn’t matter what percentage of the revenues you were getting when you weren’t getting any at all, which is what was happening with no games go on.

It sucks that the union capulated at the time, but you can see why they did, and it’s hard not to be incredulous. The players were simply doing their jobs, showing up and playing and putting on a good show and doing their part to make the league successful, but the league was struggling, in part because of the economic downturn and, in part, because of bad business decisions made far over the players’ heads. The owners were essentially asking to be saved from themselves and asking the players to do it for them – and ‘asking’ is putting it kindly.

So now the NBA stands on the verge of spectacular growth and prosperity, and you already have the owners and their mouthpiece Adam Silver talking about franchises losing money and the league having to write big cheques to cover expenses. This is all preemptive posturing for a CBA which isn’t going to expire for another few years. The players, of course, aren’t buying it.

“All of the data we have access to indicates that our business is thriving and will continue to do so in the near future. We agreed not to debate some of the finer points of negotiation in public, and aren’t going to change that approach now in response to some remarks from the Commissioner on Tuesday. We are, however, going to take him up on his offer to share the audited financials with the union. We also want to ensure that everyone understands the facts of this business: Under the CBA, we do not have a gross compensation system. The players’ 50% share is calculated net of a substantial amount of expenses and deductions. New and renovated arenas around the league have proven to be revenue drivers, profit centers, and franchise valuation boosters. That has been the case over the past few years in Orlando, Brooklyn, and New York, to name a few. In some instances, owners receive arena revenues that are not included in BRI. Many teams also receive generous arena subsidies, loans and other incentives from state and local governments as part of their arena deals. Virtually every business metric demonstrates that our business is healthy. Gate receipts, merchandise sales and TV ratings are all at an all-time high. Franchise values have risen exponentially in recent years, and the NBA has enjoyed high single digit revenue growth since 2010-11.” – Michelle Roberts, NBPA chief

And they shouldn’t buy it, because while half of the basketball related revenues are going to the players, it’s pretty apparent that there is a good amount of tangential revenue which is not going to the players. There is a fundamental dishonesty to all of this posturing going on by the league. Silver, meanwhile, pretty much directly contradicted himself in further statements about the state of the business of the game:

“The goal, of course, is to have a robust 30-team league, not just a league where teams … in large markets or owners who are willing to lose lots of money can have top-notch payrolls. So I think it’s very positive. The league is very healthy. I think owners recognize that are our owners are extremely competitive.”

So, it’s a healthy league with ‘signficant’ numbers of teams losing money? Hmm, those two notions don’t seem to jibe.

Now, I will freely admit that I am an NBA skeptic, and have done so countless times before. Being a former Sonics season-ticket holder will make you one. Emotions aside, however, the NBA made what were, in my opinion, two horrible long-term business decisions in a) permitting the Sonics to be stolen – yes, stolen – from Seattle and moved to Oklahoma City by Clay Bennett and his merry band of robber barons; and b) going above and beyond to prevent the acquisition and relocation of the Sacramento Kings to Seattle and going so far as to allow them to be sold to a guy who so far has proven to be an incompetent nutjob. The main reason for David Stern’s distaste for Seattle, of course, is that the little Napoleon and some of his enterprise’s dubious business practices got called out onto the carpet by a good number of political officials in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington – most notably, the need to extort municipalities for sweet arena deals financed with taxpayer money. Without going into great detail the economics and ethics of spending taxpayer money in such a fashion – I personally don’t mind it, but can understand why others do – posturing for what amounts to public subsidies is a hard-sell during times of greater fiscal austerity, and it’s even more of a hard-sell when it comes from an enterprise that it literally making billions and billions of dollars.

But that’s precisely what’s going on in the state of Wisconsin, where amid all of his efforts to gut the state budget, the would-be presidential candidate governor hasn’t seen fit to prevent the Milwaukee Bucks from further bleeding the public coffers. These should be the salad days for the NBA, yet this continual asking for public handouts would suggest that some of the franchises are as droopy as wilted lettuce.

The Bucks say they need a new deal, they need a new building, they need more revenue sources so that they can compete – and by ‘compete,’ of course, they mean competing in terms of profit margins and franchise values. And there is, in fact, some merit to this idea. It’s not complete nonsense. As I’ve explained previously, a great misunderstanding about salary caps is that a cap number is applied across the board – every team will have up to $70 million to spend next year – but the amount of revenue is vastly different from team to team. The Lakers’ newest broadcast deal, for example, is worth 10 times that of the Miami Heat’s. The operating costs of doing business in Milwaukee are therefore necessarily going to take up a larger percentage of your revenues than they are in a place like L.A. or New York.

But see, that fact alone is why emptying the Seattle market was, in the long term, a stupid move. Seattle is the 13th-largest television market in the country, and also one of the richest cities in the nation. By moving that franchise to Oklahoma City, and then keeping another franchise in Sacramento, you’re essentially stubbing your toes, since sheer demographics tell you that a healthy franchise in either of those two cities can never ultimately generate the sorts of revenues that one could in Seattle. Instead, Seattle is now the perfect talking point whenever an owner of an NBA franchise wants to posture for a new building. The Bucks’ brass made a point of saying that if they didn’t get a new deal, they’d look to move to Seattle in a couple of years – which was news to everyone in Seattle, of course, since no one there took the idea of the Bucks relocating there with more than a grain of salt. The fact is that arena deals grow stale, and building go out of date, remarkably quickly. They are little more than smash-and-grab jobs, quick infusions of cash for enterprises which often then go about squandering that cash rather quickly.

And the NBA, as an entity, stands to make untold billions over the next decade – and also stands to squander enormous amounts of it. The salary cap is, first and foremost, a method at cost-control – an effort on the part of the league to prevent itself from letting its own bad business practices run amok. Even within that salary cap, which is essentially a glorified series of accounting tricks, there are all sorts of provisions which essentially give franchises relief when they make bad decisions: the amnesty clause lets you essentially pay players to go away and free up the same sum to sign someone else; the stretch provision lets you pay a player to go away over twice the length of their contract plus one year (i.e., instead of paying them $10 million over two years, paying them $4 million over five). The league has also invented revenue-sharing measures for teams in supposedly smaller markets (which freeloaders have OKC have made a point of taking advantage of) and a luxury tax system which is actually quite steep, whereby violating the salary cap leads to enormous financial penalties – but teams that want to win, and have the financial resources to do so, really don’t care much about that. The Warriors payroll for next season was verging on $100 million before they traded David Lee. Given that they just won the NBA championship, and are working on a new arena in San Francisco which, when if it eventually comes to pass, will make the franchise worth even more than the billion-plus it already is, going that far over the cap makes sense for the Dubs. But that drives the costs up for everyone else – in their need to win a championship and legitimize themselves before Durant and Westbrook leave and gut the franchise forever, even cheap and stingy OKC is biting the bullet next season and going over the salary cap. And consider a truly badly-run franchise like the Nets, who were saddled with what amounted to $180 million in wage bills and luxury taxes in 2014 while putting out on the floor a woefully old and mismatched club that could scarcely make the playoffs. All the money in the world didn’t make the Nets any better. If anything, it made them worse.

I haven’t seen an entity more infatuated with its own accounting than the NBA since I stopped working for nonprofits. There isn’t a single discussion about a player that doesn’t ultimately devolve into a discussion about that player’s contract. But the league has gone about doing this to itself over the past 30 years. The fact is that there is plenty of money to be had in the NBA, but money can’t buy you love and it also can’t buy you a clue. A great deal of the stories and the articles about the NBA over the past year make reference to how the business of the league is going to change once the new TV money kicks in. Why anyone thinks it’s going to actually change is beyond me. Just having more money at your disposal affords a franchise that doesn’t know what it’s doing even more opportunities to misuse it. Bad franchises are going to continue to be bad and, if anything, the amount of dollars being squandered will make those mistakes seem even larger than they actually are – which, in a P.R.-driven entity like the NBA, is actually the worst sort of mistake to make.

No amount of money from a tricked-out new arena or a new broadcast deal is suddenly going to make the Sacramento Kings less stupid. The Kings recently made one of the worst trades imaginable, shifting three players they didn’t want to the 76ers, who also got a first round pick and the right to swap draft positions with the Kings twice. The Kings did this so as to free up some cap space to pursue some free agents – most of whom, of course, had no interest in playing for the Kings. Remember the principles of Edmonton Disease here – if dollars are essentially equal (and a salary cap makes that the case) then why would a player willingly go to a franchise that sucks? (Monta Ellis actually took less money to go to Indiana.) After all that, the Kings signed a couple of bit players and then signed Rajon Rondo to a 1-year deal, in the hopes he will magically resurrect his career, but if Rondo does, in fact, do that, then a year from now, he will almost certainly try to go elsewhere, given that the Kings are likely to be terrible for the foreseeable future – a fact which the 76ers are banking on in obtaining the rights to swap draft positions. Of course, cashing in on that would also necessitate the 76ers improving. They’ve been a joke of a team on the court and given precisely zero fucks about it, made a million deals and have positioned themselves to have as many as four 1st-round picks in next year’s draft, but given Sam Hinkie’s track record with the draft in Philly – willingly taking on two guys who were hurt and couldn’t play, one of which, Joel Embiid, still isn’t playing, and also drafting Michael Carter-Williams whom they promptly traded a season after they picked him – I’m not sure the 76ers having four 1st-round picks is necessarily a good thing.They’ve shown an aptitude for being bad, but it’s easy to be bad. Actually being good is another question entirely.

What the Kings and the 76ers have in common is that they’ve sunken to the bottom of the heap in the NBA through being incompetent. Whereas Edmonton Disease speaks to the nature that some markets are more attractive than others, it also speaks to the idea that, as attractive as the idea is to want to ply your wares in New York or Los Angeles, being on a terrible team in a great place to live still constituted less-than-ideal working conditions. No legit free agent wants any part of the Lakers until Kobe is gone, nor the Knicks until the Zen master gets hold of how to actually run a professional basketball franchise in this day and age. You’ve seen free agents of some quality signing this offseason with places like Milwaukee and San Antonio, and also with the Lakers’ crosstown rivals the Clippers, because players know they’re going to get paid regardless and they want to win. No one wants to be second-fiddle to Kobe for a year with a Lakers club that looks to be a 55-60 loss team.

It shouldn’t be lost on people that two of the Warriors’ highest-paid players this past season – David Lee and Andre Iguodala – were rendered bench players and didn’t bitch about it. The weren’t happy about it, of course, but the Warriors went nuts and they went along for the ride – and, in the case of NBA Finals MVP Iguodala, he stepped up when needed. They wanted to win. Along with being quick to cast the players as superstar entertainers, the league has never done anything to disparage the perception that players are greedy and selfish and care only themselves. In fact, it’s often the opposite that’s true. In this labor-management dynamic, it really isn’t the labor that are the greedy ones.

Silver’s posturing in the press this past week should serve to remind us that, even with money raining down from the sky and growing on trees, it’s still business as usual in the NBA – which is too bad, really, since great commercial success over the years has afforded cover to an entity whose business often makes no sense and whose missteps are almost entirely self-created along the way. This is a league where teams routinely and willingly makes trades for guys they don’t want, knowing it will make them worse; where three head coaches got fired from playoff teams after the season, yet somehow Byron Scott and Derek Fischer still have a gig; and where franchises willingly tank entire seasons, and sometimes two seasons, in preparation for some sort of possible talent bonanza that rarely, if ever, comes to fruition. It’s all nuts, and it’s a testament to the quality on the court that this mad circus carries on.

Whereas you can argue about whether the EPL or La Liga or Bundesliga reigns supreme in the soccer world, there is no debate in basketball. The NBA has the best players and the best clubs, and the massive revenues to back that up. It would do well not to go about killing the golden goose. You’d like to think that labor troubles can be averted in the future. It’s an awfully big pie where talking about here, and as much as the two sides want to squabble about the pieces they get, they should at least all agree that they’re all going to eat the damn pie and go from there.

Mmm, pie … I haven’t had lunch yet … now I’m hungry …

So Much Bad Baseball, So Little Time ...

My Hero for the Week

GENERALLY, I don’t write that much about baseball on a day-to-day basis here on the blog just because there is so much losing going on that it’s hard to keep track. But now that we’re at the halfway point of the baseball season (and yes, I know that’s it not technically the halfway point, but it’s close enough so don’t get smart), I thought we would go back, revisit my preseason thoughts and further comment and pontificate:

• As pointed out by Friend of the Lose Jeff Sullivan (a long-suffering Mariners fan whose work I’m a big fan of), the team WAR of Chicago White Sox position players in July is 0.0 – and that’s the best month they’ve had all season. The Lose was quite skeptical of the offseason spending sprees by both the White Sox and the San Diego Padres, both of whom chased after every bright and shiny object available and wound up with veritable Islands of Misfit Toys for ballclubs. The White Sox offense has been so bad that, again using the WAR metric, their 5th-most valuable hitter so far is Jeff Samardzija – who’s a starting pitcher. In San Diego, meanwhile, almost everyone they acquired in the offseason – Matt Kemp, Will Middlebrooks, Wil Myers, James Shields – hasn’t been very good and now the Padres will look to be sellers at the trading deadline, but probably the only guy the Padres can actually move – Justin Upton – is the only guy on the whole team they might actually want to keep. Kemp, in particular, has been horrible, and even though the Dodgers paid $30 million to San Diego to have them take Kemp off their hands, it’s looking like money well-spent.

• Nothing cures your ailing club quite like the Phillies coming to town. They were in San Francisco this past weekend and got swept, outscored 27-7, and at no point in any of the three games did I think the Phillies had even the remotest chance of winning, not even when they were up three runs in the 6th on Saturday. And this is against a Giants team who’ve had so many injuries this year that guys keep showing on the roster that I’ve never heard of. The Phillies had so many balls bounce off fielder’s gloves today that I wondered why were even bothering to bring them with them on the field. The Phillies are now on a Houston Astros sort of pace for losses and desperately need upgrades at pretty much every position, but with Ruben Amaro still vastly overvaluing his own players and holding out for dumb trades like this, don’t hold your breath.

How have I not used this gif all season?

• Speaking of the Astros, they’ve been one of the more bizarro teams I’ve ever seen in the first half of the season (and are probably personified best by the weird season of Luis Valbuena). The Astros have been wildly entertaining with their approach to the game, which is basically to swing from the heels and run like hell. The ’Stros, along with the Twins and the Rays, qualify as pleasant surprises in the first half of the season but I’m not really sold on any of those teams, and would attribute a fair amount of their success to the fact that, other than Real Ciudad Kansas, the American League kind of sucks. A good number of supposedly decent teams in the AL more or less took the first half of the season off, yet are still only a good week’s worth of games out of the playoff picture, which should make for an interesting last few months, since so few teams seem to be playing with any sort of consistency.

... aaand the Rockies are terrible, in part because they do stuff like this

• From the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” department: by advanced sabermetrics of baseball, both the Toronto Blue Jays and the Oakland Athletics should be murdering their opponents. Instead, the Jays are only a .500 club and the A’s have been mired in last place for most of the season. (And notice in that FanGraphs link where a lot of the mystery wins are going. The White Sox, with the worst lineup in baseball, have exceeded expectations by 7 wins in the first half of the season, making them by far the luckiest team in the majors.) I make fun of stat nerds on this blog quite a bit, even though I’m more like them than not. I find most of the “conventional wisdom” of sports to be tired, clichéd, and often not backed up by any empirical evidence. (Dear NFL, please stop punting so much.) But there is not one catch-all statistic you can cook up which will always work to explain why one team wins and another loses. Games are multifaceted and complex, composed of hundreds of pitches and hundreds of plays. The numbers are recordings of what happened. They are not necessarily predictors of what will happen next. (If the .106 hitting Kurt Nieuwenhuis can go yard thrice in a game, all bets are off.)
Now, some would make the argument that, with impressive numbers in the run differential and the Pythagenpat, the fact that the A’s and the Jays aren’t winning more may just come down to some bad luck. Baseball is a game where we split hairs, of course. The difference between a great team and a lousy one is more win a week over the course of a season. I would suggest instead that it’s less a case of bad luck and more a case of bad timing.

The anti-analytics crowd had a field day with the NHL this year when the stat-geek darlings, the L.A. Kings, missed the playoffs. The Kings had the best puck possession statistics in the NHL in 2015 in terms of time, and they took 733 shots more than their opponents, and they wound making tee times come April while two of the worst puck possession teams, the Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames, were playing one-another in the first round of the playoffs. The big bugaboo for the Kings in the 2014-15 season was extra time – the Kings were 1-7 in O.T. and 2-8 in shootouts. Even with all of the loser points they racked up (which kept them in the playoff race longer than a sub-.500 team deserved to be), giving away 15 possible points after three periods is probably what did them in – especially when you consider that the Calgary Flames, who nicked the Kings for the final playoff spot and who did quite a lot of things not particularly well on the ice (they were -847 in shots), did do one thing spectacularly well, which was handle “six attacker” situations at the end of games. The Flames were -1 for the season with a 6th attacker of their own (10 goals scored, 11 empty net goals allowed), and +11 for the season when opponents had 6th attackers (12 empty net goals scored, 1 allowed). Those 10 goals the Flames scored with 6 attackers translates to 10 games which went to OT that otherwise wouldn’t have, meaning 10 more points in the standings. Likewise, the 12 empty net goals scored likely sealed victories, meaning even more extra points in the standings. Those are all last-minute plays which cement results. And while being +10 in those situations is a little out of whack statistically, the fact is that, whereas the Flames were making plays at the end of the game to maximize points, the Kings were making plays to give points away. And in a sport where anywhere from 20-25% of the games are going into OT these days, if you suck in OT, you’re dead. Mistakes happen all the time in sports, but in a 3-2 league like the NHL, you can’t afford to make the last mistake.
Furthermore, so long as the NHL is going to keep settling games with cheap skills contests, it would behoove you to go out and find guys who are actually good in those situations.
 The Kings shot 5-for-35 in shootouts this past season, which is hideous. All of your ability carrying the puck into the zone in 5-a-side situations means nothing at that point. If it’s a skill required to be successful, then by god, go out and find someone who knows what the hell to do.
So let’s bring this idea back to baseball. The Jays and the A’s can both score runs in bunches. So why aren’t they winning games? Well, the obvious place to look would be on the mound, a perpetual source of migraines and malaise north of the border. And as is per usual, the Jays can’t pitch, so that makes things dicier than it should.
The A’s are even more curious, in that they have some good starters, if not excellent ones. But their bullpen has been terrible, and was particularly terrible at the start of the season when they dug themselves a hole they’re not likely to get out of. (More on that in a minute.) Baseball in the modern era is a game of specialists. Starters go six, you bring in set-up men and maybe LOOGYs or other specialists in the 7th and 8th, then you turn it over to your closer. Every team plays the game this way nowadays in the MLB. In the modern game, if your bullpen sucks, not much else really matters. You’re going to lose. Simple as that. You’re going to give away runs too late in the game to mount comebacks, you’re going to squander leads and turn wins into losses, and also go a long way towards killing the soul of your teammates in the process. (Look at any truly long stretch of bad baseball, and you’ll find a few blown saves mixed in there.) When it’s not going well – which happens a lot in baseball – the last thing you need to have happen is to have your bullpen constantly blowing games.
 As is the case in hockey, in baseball, you simply cannot afford to constantly make the last mistake.
To make matters worse, the A’s have a terrifyingly bad defense that gives away too many runs and too many extra bases. The end result is that a lot of good work done by the offense and starting staff is being undone by noodle arms in the bullpen and the Dr. Strangegloves in the field. In that light, I wouldn’t say the A’s are unlucky at all. In a dead ball, pitching-and-defense era, they are actually poorly equipped to compete.
And to be honest, I think they’ve been better than I expected, given that Billy Beane decided to hold a Smoke Damaged Furniture Sale in the offseason and unloaded the core of talent this team had a year ago. I’ve been ripping Billy Beane perpetually for the dumb Yoénis Céspedes trade at the deadline a year ago, after which the A’s went into a complete tailspin and went from being the best team in baseball to almost missing the playoffs. Apparently, he hasn’t learned from his mistakes. The returns for his off-season spree have been less than stellar, although not entirely awful. Marcus Semien certainly can hit, but he’s been terrible defensively at the shortstop position. Meanwhile, the swapping of 3Bs with the Jays – Josh Donaldson for Brett Lawrie – was one of those classically bad baseball trades where you deal a known commodity for someone who has the potential to be really good but you’re not quite sure he will be. Sure enough, Donaldson is playing at a near-MVP level yet again in Toronto, while Lawrie’s not produced at anywhere near that level. What made it even stupider was that Donaldson had four more years before he became a free agent, while Lawrie only has three. Giving up a superstar with such a team-controlled and friendly contract situation, when you’re a club without a lot of benjamins in the bank, strikes me as even more foolish. That trade struck me as one that was far too ego-driven, since apparently Donaldson and Beane had clashed. I’m sure Donaldson had something like this to say before he left:

And whereas you might suggest that the A’s have been somewhat unlucky this year, given that they seem to hit the ball extremely well and have not so much to show for it, and you might suspect that they are prime candidates for getting their shit together and figuring it out and turning their season around, this team as it’s constructed may not get that opportunity. The A’s are 8½ games behind the California Los Angeles Angels of Whittier Anaheim in the AL West with the trading deadline at the end of July. Billy Beane certainly has a few trade chips at his disposal, and there’s no doubt contending clubs will inquire about Kazmir and Zobrist, for starters, but given his history of trading everyone – he traded five All-Stars from the A’s roster a season ago – you’d assume that everyone’s available. We might not get to find out if the A’s weird first half is really an anomaly or not.

• And while we’re still on the subject of the A’s here, a note about “by-the-book” thinking in baseball. At what point here does someone actually figure out that the “by the book” way of building a pitching staff is no longer working and start doing something else? I mean, if you’re bullpen sucks, what good does it do to keep going to that well?
Think about a team like the Cincinnati Reds, for example. The Reds are 39-47 and 15½ games out of first place, so they’re obviously going nowhere. The Reds also have Aroldis Chapman on their roster, who throws 104 mph and is one of the most terrifying closers in all of baseball. Chapman has 18 saves this season in 19 opportunities. But the key there is that he’s only had 19 opportunities to close in 86 games, because the Reds are terrible and lose a lot. But he’s your best pitcher, for godsake. What good is he if you don’t put him in the game? Hell, why wait until the 9th inning? Put him on the mound in the 6th with two on in a 1-run game. 

The Lose wonders if, at some point, managers and pitching coaches start tinkering a little and trying to redevelop how they use bullpens. Certainly, the logic behind the development of bullpens into what they are now makes some sense. It’s well-documented that starters lose their effectiveness hugely which each pass they make through the lineup, so why not hit the opposition with a fresh live arm their third or fourth go-round? But if that ‘conventional wisdom’ isn’t working – and if you’re the Reds with Chapman or the Phillies with Papelbon, it clearly isn’t working because those guys aren’t getting into games at all – then why not try something else? More specifically, why send out bad relievers earlier in the game to render your closers moot?
One of the things you see in the playoffs from time to time are these strange sorts of hybrid relievers being developed on the fly who turn out to be just devastatingly effective. Many times, they are starters who do not fit into the short rotations you have in a playoff series. In 2012, Tim Lincecum was that way for the Giants – he would come into the game at any point from between the 4th and 7th innings and he just mowed people down. But also, it can simply be a case where you just want to get your best guy on the mound in any critical situation that arises. Alexei Ogando was the über reliever for the Rangers teams which made the World Series twice. He’d come in during the 7th or 6th or even the 5th inning and just wipe out the opposition. But I’ve yet to see anyone try to create a role such as this for an entire regular season. Certainly, there are concerns about overuse of such a guy during a season, but it seems to me that roles have become so clearly defined in baseball now that, if someone isn’t cutting it on a particular day, teams don’t really feel as if they have a Plan B. I’m not sure what a revisionist idea of a bullpen would exactly look like, but you’d think someone like the Oakland Moneyballs would consider it, given that they supposedly think differently over there on the other side of the Bay.

• So the case may be that, as pertaining to the A’s and the Jays, the statistics are lying. The same cannot be said in Seattle, where the statistics don’t lie at all. They are as bad as the numbers would indicate. There have been plenty of disappointments so far this season – the BoSox, Tribe, and the Fish have all grossly underachieved – but no team has been quite as truly, depressingly, agonizingly, miserably, terribly disheartening as the Mariners, who’ve taken the lofty expectations from pre-season and flushed them down the drain.

The Mariners won 87 games last season on the strength of their starting pitching and the best bullpen in baseball. They got something of a bad break in their rotation with injuries, rendering them with only about 1½ functioning starters at any given time. As for the bullpen, well, bullpens are notoriously fickle. Indeed, one of the more remarkable things about the Giants’ 3-in-5 World Series success has been that the core of their bullpen has been unchanged and continued to produce. In Seattle, the bullpen completely cratered early in the year and half the guys who made it up a season ago are no longer with the club.

But it’s the offense which is truly disgusting in Seattle. The Mariners rank near the bottom in runs scored, average, OBP, and RISP – and this comes even with the addition of Nelson Cruz, who’s been terrific. They hit quite a few home runs, but almost exclusively solo shots, since they never get anyone on base. They’ve already had 10 games where they struck out more than 13 times, which is a club record and we’re only halfway through the season.

Offense has been going to die in Seattle for years, of course, but the Mariners response has always been to constantly load up on these 1B/DH type of guys who have power but who don’t get on base, don’t make contact much, and also don’t really have a position. YOU CAN’T WIN THAT WAY! If anything, it should’ve been clear from watching the playoffs last year that, in this era of baseball, teams that don’t strike out much, and put the ball in play, are more likely to be successful. The M’s don’t even need to have a good offense to be successful. They won 87 games last year despite getting shut out 19 times. In that park, with their usual level of pitching, just being mediocre ought to do the trick.

The M’s came into this season with platoon situations set up at LF, RF, and SS, only to abandon all of those because five of those six guys didn’t hit, two got DFA’d and a third spent most of his time in Tacoma. In order to just get a decent lineup on the field, 30-somethings Seth Smith and Nelson Cruz have had to play far too many innings in the outfield, meaning they had to go trade for another DH/1B/OF type – Mark Trumbo, who is pretty much the prototypical power/no contact/can’t play anywhere in the field guy the Mariners have been fielding (and the fans hating) for a decade, and to get him they gave up a decent backup catcher, Wellington Castillo, they’d had on the roster for all of about a week, thus further burdening starting catcher Mike Zunino – and he’s already burdened enough, given that he’s hitting .161 and striking out 36.1% of his at-bats. 

I’d have to think this is the end of the line for Jack Zduriencik as the GM. He’s been there six seasons now and the club is more than 100 games under .500 during his tenure, and they’ve never been able to hit their way out of a paper bag. Not only are they bad, but they’re boring. And no matter what he does, it seems to blow up in his face. The Mariners have become somewhat notorious for botching top draft choices, and also for being terrible at player development – there are a stunning number of former Mariner draftees floating around in baseball, some of them quite successful, but none of them having had any success before they left Seattle. 

My rooting interest in baseball has always been divided. I was rooting for the Giants when I first got into baseball, but I like to watch Mariner games, having grown up with that team, but it was during the month of June, when they averaged 2.5 runs and went two weeks without scoring more than three runs in a game, that I finally gave up. I just couldn’t take it any more. The Giants have been, well, meh for the most part, lacking a functioning and healthy outfield and cursed with a mediocre starting rotation. But it’s an odd-numbered year. I’m sure next year will be fine. As for the Mariners, well, I’m sure next century will be fine. Maybe. Nah, probably not.

The Lost Pilot

Goodtime Jesus
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
– James Tate

JAMES TATE died on Wednesday, and if you aren’t into poetry, you’ll probably have no idea who he is. If you are into poetry, you realize what a loss this is for modern literature and the arts. James Tate won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Yale Young Poets Award. I was first introduced to his work when I began taking poetry classes in 1988 – Goodtime Jesus there was the first poem of his that I had read, and I wondered what the hell I’d just read, and then pretty much made a point of reading everything he’d ever written after that, and emulating it, if not just out-and-out stealing it – bad poets borrow, after all, and good poets steal. And it was his poetic voice that I wanted to have. James Tate was my poetic hero, and probably still is.

And what voice is that? For starters, it’s funny, goddamnit. I went to school with a whole bunch of narcissists who wanted to drown themselves in faux angst and malaise, having been inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath. I wasn’t interested in confessional crap. Give me comedy, damnit, because poetry is all about lying, and the best way to get away with telling a lie is to make it funny. James Tate taught me that poetry could be funny – and, more importantly, that it should be funny. In the kingdom of literature, he was the court jester. I still remember sitting in the office of my professor, Jim Harms, with three of my poetry buddies after writing class, the five of us reading through Tate’s poems while drinking beer and literally laughing until we cried.

But the comedian is always sad behind the masque. Tate’s genius was his ability to take the absurd and make it poignant, to verge on abstraction and yet make that abstraction seem somehow tangible – and he could do it in the same verse. His personae in his work were often losers, fringe characters, dumb guys next door happening upon a situation that suddenly became profound. He’d write poems about going to visit doctors, about wild rounds of cheese roaming the countryside, about Galapagos birds which had grown duller over time, about listening to the nondescript neighbour having awkward sex. There was something amazing about his ability to turn the mundane into the meaningful. The world according to Tate was mad as hatters. His work is often described as ‘dreamy’ because it was only in the dream world where the world seemed sane.

One of my great triumphs from the days of Serendipity, Berkeley’s world’s greatest bookstore, was unearthing a copy of Row With Your Hair from somewhere deep in the bowels of the 1,000,000 volume store. Peter Howard, the store’s owner, was notorious for being unwilling to part with a book if he didn’t think the buyer deserved it. He and I had clashed several times, as he disapproved of me making off with some of his finest books of poetry, and he was particularly displeased to see someone approach with Row With Your Hair in hand. Row With Your Hair is a hand printed, hand illustrated, limited edition (1,000 copies) of James Tate’s work published in San Francisco in 1969. It may say $1.50 on the cover – the original cost – but penciled inside the front cover was Peter Howard’s asking price: $90. Much as he had done with another 1960s book I’d made off with  – Jack Gilbert’s Views of Jeopardy – Howard quizzed me on the contents of Tate’s book. 

“What’s your favorite passage?” he asked. Not poem, mind you, but passage.

“Yes, Sister Michele, it is all true: the fire-dance you are waiting for in the next life happens every night on my livingroom floor.”

I quoted verbatim a passage from The Fire Dance, a poem on p. 27. He turned to p. 27, confirmed I had uttered it correctly, and then sold me the book for $75.

And there was always an element of heartbreak in his work. Optimism, too – his poems would have this curious sense about them of “it’s all going to be alright … well, not really, but we’ll manage and get by.” Tate was, in some ways, born with a tinge of heartbreak to him by nature. His debut book was titled The Lost Pilot, and the title poem is about his father, a WWII bomber pilot who was killed when his son was only 5 months old. He had grown up never knowing his father, only imagining him, and yet there was a connection there impossible to let go of. It was unshakable and unbreakable, a disappointment he was destined to be saddled with that what never of his choosing:

The Lost Pilot
for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,  
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,  
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.  
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,  
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,  
read your face as Dallas,  
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads  
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.  
However frightening, I would  
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make  
you face your wife, or Dallas,  
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy  
orbiting, and I would not try  
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know  
is this: when I see you,  
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,  
spin across the wilds of the sky  
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were  
the residue of a stranger’s life,  
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,  
I cannot get off the ground,  
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling  
to tell me that you are doing  
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune  
placed these worlds in us. 
 – James Tate

And when I began writing poems again in 1998, after a long hiatus, one of the first poems that I wrote was in a similar vein – it was called Breaking Down the Bridge, and is about the grandfather that I never knew, but whose influence upon my family and the way they acted was inescapable. And I had Tate’s Lost Pilot in mind when I wrote it:

Breaking Down the Bridge
for George Morgan (died 1971)

Yours is a lost entry: never was your name
a subject of dinner conversation, no jaundiced
photographs perched upon bookshelves
or the hearth. My one true point of
reference: an abridged quotation

from your second son. When I asked
of you, he paused to edit and strategize,
portraying you as a man content
rocking in a rocking chair, passing
the hours with a volume of Plato.

We were driving that day, perusing
valleys of butternuts and zealous fog,
incomparable landscapes inhabited
by the sorriest of folk. Your homelands.
After decades of founding and refounding

your dreams – Chicago and Detroit,
Bay City and Watertown – you built
an empire here, a hotel and stone
castle on the bank of a small pond,
and you fancied the horses, spending

your every last moment at the Downs,
even as misdirected trotters carried
your dowry and your ægis back
to the stables. I inherited your features
and your luck at the races (I hit the Daily

Double and it paid $4.80). I’m saddled
with the bitterness of your two youngest
sons, anchored in the mud while
the eldest – my father – cut himself
loose. I never even knew you, yet

I find myself inexorably stuck with you,
the bridge between us a ludicrous
wrought iron bridge which hovers
atop a dry riverbed, the river long since
having altered its course. Place a hammer

in my grasp and I would hammer free
the rivets and bolts, reducing that bridge
to an elegant heap of rubble, waiting
for summer rains to overflow the gulch
and carry the remains to the sea.

That poem was published in Washington Square, the literary journal of New York University, in 2000. I still have the copy of that literary journal over here on the shelf, a copy I remember purchasing at a bookstore in Santa Fe on what was otherwise one of the lousiest days of my life, a day so lousy that I’ve spent 15 years and $10,000 on therapist bills trying to come to terms with what it meant. But there was my work on the pages of this terrific literary journal, and for a moment there, being an abandoned and mentally ill artisan suddenly seemed worth it. A few weeks later, I was at City Lights in San Francisco and I peered over the shoulder of a man reading through that particular issue of Washington Square. I asked him what he thought about the poem on p. 50 (mine), he read it and nodded and said it was pretty good, I then said, “I wrote that,” and he not only bought the journal but asked me to sign it. What price, small victories?

And also published in that edition of Washington Square were three poems by James Tate.

I always wondered if, when reading through the issue, if he noticed the poem on p. 50, noticed the subject matter and the word “lost” in the opening line, and made the connection, coming to realize that it was an homage to his work. Probably not. He probably just read it and said, “this Morgan guy, he’s kind of a jackass.”

There’s a weird sensation when someone whose work you so admired, whose work meant so much to you, passes on. It’s an odd sort of creative emptiness you cannot really explicate. You feel a great loss, even if you never knew them. You feel like you disappointed them somehow by not living up to their level of inspiration – you weren’t good enough to say that they influenced you. Robin Williams made me want to be funnier. Roger Ebert made me want to be more mutable and insightful. I wish I’d been a college kid when Kind of Blue and Time Out came out in 1959 so I could use Miles’ and Brubeck’s masterworks to try and seduce cute girls. When I turned 46 on the 25th of May, and began to attempt to plot some sort of life course for the umpteenth time, I was instantly reminded of three other artisans, across a multitude of genres, whose work I truly admired and revered who died when they were 46 – Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Sandman. My new life course immediately involved vowing to make it to 47, since none of those three did.

But on the writing front, I know what I want to say. Or should that be that I know how I want to say it. I am proud to be an absurdist, a humorist, a satirist – understanding that doing so requires sharper senses of observation, incisiveness, and compassion than I thought I was capable of. It’s who I am, who I want to be, and who I strive to continue to be. And I owe more thanks to James Tate for that than anyone else. I wish I’d had the chance to thank the Lost Pilot himself for steering me in the right direction all of those years ago now, even if I was too dumb at the time to realize it.

5-Course Meal with a Side of Chile

That one is gonna be hard to live down

MYSELF and The Official Wife of In Play Lose were eating our way through the Napa Valley during this long holiday weekend, and the weekend also offered up a scrumptious meal of footballing losedom to take stock of. And there were plenty of other tidbits of losedom as well, but we’ll dine on bad baseball and the folly of NBA free agency here later in the week. In the meantime, let’s contemplate the 5-goal feast from Sunday:

1. 
I said yesterday at lunch that not only was the U.S. going to win against Japan, but that they were going to win big. My reasoning for this was that the U.S. could do every single thing against Japan that England did, and do it better, because the U.S. has better players than England (and pretty much everyone else, for that matter). The best counterargument anyone offered up was, well, that it’s a 1-game situation, and anything can happen in a 1-game situation, and that soccer is a stupid fucking game because the wrong team wins an awful lot of the time in 1-game situations. And yes, the U.S. found that out the hard way four years ago in the final against Japan, dominating the game and then basically throwing it away. But Japan wasn’t as good as they were four years ago, and the U.S. was arguably better. And in truth, in 1-game situations, the better team generally does, in fact, win.

Japan, of course, love to possess the ball and play defense with their offense, slowly driving their opponents mad in the process. They can do some truly awesome stuff. They were the defending World Cup Champions for a reason, and against the uninitiated, mesmerized opposition they faced in their first five games, it always seemed inevitable that they’d prevail:

This goal is just sick

But in the semifinal, the English didn’t give a shit. They just went out and knocked the Japanese around and took the game to them, and should’ve won the damn game. So it stood to reason that the U.S. was going to try and do the same thing. And a good way to attack a team that wants to play defense with their offense is make them play defense with their defense. Watch any match that Spain has lost in the past decade – granted, there aren’t very many of them – and generally what you see is a direct approach to the game that forces the defense to be honest and minimizes comfortable possession in the midfield. Up until the England game, no one really attacked the Japanese with any sort of authority, but the U.S. love damning the torpedoes and charging straight ahead. It is their favoured way to play, in fact. Their size and athleticism made them a terrible matchup for Japan.

And really, if the U.S. was going to lose this tournament, they were going to have to get nicked early on, when they couldn’t figure out what sort of a lineup to play, but other than a goalless draw with the tepid Swedes, that didn’t really happen. While the offense was finding its way, the U.S. defense didn’t give up a goal for nine hours. When you don’t give up a goal for nine hours, you have plenty of time to figure stuff out. The defense really won them the tournament, affording them ample amounts of time to fine tune and tinker under the hood. And once Jill Ellis found a lineup and a formation that she liked, everyone else was in trouble.

I figured the only way Japan could win this game is if they got to halftime nil-nil and some nerves started to settle in on the U.S. side. Instead, it was basically over in 15 minutes.

2.
I flashed back to January 1990 while watching a full replay of this match last night. I was in the U.K. at the time, and we American exchange students were starved for some “real” football, so stayed up late to watch the replays of the NFL playoff games, which I think were on ITV. The 49ers played the Rams in the NFC Championship in San Francisco, and the field condition was absolutely terrible, like it always was at Candlestick. (Which mercifully, is no longer. RIP Candlestick my ass.) Heavy rains in the run-up to the game had turned Candlestick into it’s usual muddy mess, and the players were slopping all over. And yet, amid all of the slop and the mud, the most striking image of that particular game was the jersey of Joe Montana, which was perfectly clean. Montana would drop back to pass and no Ram defender ever came near him. He was 26-30 for 262 yards and 2 TDs in the game, and never once was even as much as touched by a Ram defender as the 49ers won 30:3. Montana was a maestro conducting a symphony. The 49ers were near perfect.

And two weeks later, the 49ers basically were perfect. We had a Super Bowl party which started at something like 12:30 a.m., and it was over pretty quickly, because the 49ers were up 34:3 on the Denver Broncos at halftime. Mick Luckhurst, the British former Falcons kicker, was the host of the British TV broadcast, and I remember him trying to give a justification as to why people should keep watching such a blowout even though it was well after 2:00 a.m.

“You’ll probably never see a team play football this well again,” Luckhurst said.

The U.S. Women’s 5:2 win over Japan was like that. I would also liken the Screamin’ Eagles’ performance yesterday in Vancouver to the Seahawks 43:8 win over Denver in the Super Bowl a couple of seasons ago, or maybe Spain’s emphatic 4:0 win over Italy in the 2012 Euros. Great performances by great teams, triumphs of great talent but also great preparation.

We love the tension and the drama of close, competitive games, of course, but sometimes one team is clearly better than the other going into that final, and when that team plays to its maximum potential, and simply blows away the opposition, it really is beautiful to watch. You don’t get to see that very often.

In the end, this was a landmark performance by the U.S. Winning in 1999 was cool, but that match was still 0:0 and decided on penalties. This match in Vancouver, meanwhile, was dominant and emphatic. This is the gold standard in women’s soccer, just as Brazil’s 4:1 win over Italy in the 1970 final is the gold standard on the men’s side. (Colossal Brazilian defensive faux pas aside.) It simply gets no better, and sometimes you just have to be thankful that you got to see it.

OK, there, I’ve done some gushing and praising. Now it’s time to trash some shit.

3.
WTF Japan? Play some defense! That team just didn’t look ready to play in a lot of ways. The Japanese had to expect a U.S. onslaught at the beginning, and yet they seemed woefully unprepared. Like I said, the U.S. game plan was to make Japan play defense with their defense, and it was a wise game plan, because as it turned out, Japan’s defense was absolutely horrible.

The goalkeeping, in particular, was miserable. The defining moment of this game, and of the entire tournament, was Carli Lloyd chipping Japanese goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori from 60 yards. Props to Lloyd for having the audacity to even try it, but that was exactly the right time to try something like that – up three goals after a full-on barrage to start the game, Japan forced to press forward, etc. Also, the high ball in the sun is actually really problematic for a goalkeeper, but it almost never happens that the ball gets up high enough to cause that problem. The art of goalkeeping is all about employing the right sorts of techniques in an instant to cope with a split-second of panic when a shot comes your way: how you dive, where you place your hands, how you guide the ball if you cannot take hold of it, and so forth. So when you lose sight of the ball, you can get all crazy legs and get yourself tangled up. (This may or may not have happened to me before.)

Now, I don’t know if Kaihori lost it in the sun or what, but she’s at sixes and sevens on that chip from Lloyd and she gets herself all screwed up. The end result is a truly terrible play. It was a stamp of incompetence on a truly inept all-around performance by Japan. This play was so bad that it, in retrospect, it almost makes you forget how badly Kaihori flapped at the 5th American goal, a fairly standard cross on a corner that she turned into a mess. The fourth and fifth goals were a case of just awful goalkeeping, plain and simple.

And look, Hope Solo is a lunatic. There isn’t any doubt about it. She’s absolutely a crazymaker. But she is also about the best female goalkeeper we’ve ever seen – even when she doesn’t have to make the save. Solo clearly put the ziggy on Sasic in the semifinal, getting into her face and into her head, and the German promptly shanked the penalty. You never feel like Solo is going to make the big mistake. She’s like Neuer is for the German men, that rock at the back you can count on, one who can afford you the chance to make some mistakes on defense, and thus also provide you some freedom with which to take risks. The Japanese didn’t have that rock. Quite honestly, few teams do.

Of course, Kaihori can also sue her teammates for non-support. The Americans scored three goals on set pieces, and the Japanese basically didn’t mark anyone on any of them. And hey kids, if you’re watching at home, here’s an important safety tip: don’t ever do this …

Egads. Lauren Holiday should’ve yelled “fore!” with a ball so nicely teed up as that one.

Pass the Hot Sauce
Andrés Cantor should call every match, ever. Thank you, that is all.

4.
Scoring in open play can be really damn hard. Most of the time, you either have to do something brilliant, or have the defense completely gift you one. The set piece, meanwhile, always provides great opportunities for goal scoring. But time and again, you see the opportunities go wasted owing to a lack of imagination. As dramatic as the swerving free kick around the wall can be, most of the time it doesn’t come close to working. Likewise, the corner floated into the box doesn’t often amount to much, in part because the defense knows exactly what’s coming.

The set piece offers up the chance for the element of surprise, and a chance to use the defense’s tendencies against itself. I was going to make mention of this at some point, anyway, and it’s fresh in my mind after Real Salt Lake worked this masterpiece in the MLS recently. Great goalscorers have outlandish egos, of course – in fact, that sort of outlandish ego is somewhat necessary to be that brilliant – and it can take some coaxing to convince them that the arrogant approach of shooting from a free kick position isn’t the best course of action. Sometimes, the right ploy is to use the element of surprise. Watch that Salt Lake video again and notice how the Columbus defenders have no earthly idea what’s going on. Some of them don’t even move.

But this sort of ploy seems to go ignored a lot of the time when it comes time for a set piece. Soccer isn’t a game where people break from conventional wisdom nearly as often as they should. Well, this is the World Cup Final, so you may as well empty out the arsenal.

The U.S. ran two brilliant set pieces in the first five minutes of the game which were triumphs of imagination, but also clearly the result of some film study and some messing around on the practice pitch. There had been suspicion throughout the tourney that Japan would be susceptible to the set piece, and the Americans had some very definite ideas of what to do.

On this first corner, they catch the Japanese not paying attention. Carli Lloyd is lined up 30 yards from the goal at the start of the play. Now, if you’re Japan, the red flags need to be going up all over the place. Lloyd is the hot hand for the U.S. in this tournament. She’s scoring all the goals and making all the plays. You need to know where she is every single minute of this game. So what the hell is she doing 30 yards away from the goal? She ain’t there to play defense. That makes no sense. Something is up. Sure enough, here she comes charging like a bat out of hell:

And the play works, of course, because the service is perfect. It’s a wormkiller skidding along the astroturf, the type of ball you never see on a corner unless it’s a mishit, and one which also uses the playing surface to an advantage, since you can skid the ball and make it move a little quicker than on grass. It’s a genius play all the way around, one you would’ve had to have practiced ahead of time, given that it flies in the face of all accepted soccer logic and you wouldn’t be inclined to make it up in the game on the fly. Chalk this one up to superior preparation.

The U.S. had so much fun with that one, they thought they’d try something even nuttier a couple minutes later, this off a free kick from the right flank. The U.S. run a pretty standard pick play on this one, the idea being that you free up someone at the near post for a flick-on using the back of the head – only the cross comes in at the feet of the server, Julie Johnston, who then backheels it. This is flat-out, let’s-make-mayhem stuff. It’s based upon the idea that the defense isn’t going to be looking for this kind of ball, that they are just going to ball watch instead of maintaining their marks, and that chaos can overcome inferior numbers. I mean, count the numbers in the box here. It’s four on eight on this play. This play should not work.

And yet again, find #10 Carli Lloyd for the U.S. on the field at the start of the play, because the Japanese sure didn’t. She’s open before the play even begins, and no one picks her up amid the frenzy:

Now, most of the time, this stuff doesn’t work. But it’s soccer, for heaven’s sake: most of the time, nothing works. You’re always at a disadvantage in this sport when it comes to scoring goals. Sometimes a little unorthodox thinking goes a long way.

5.
The single-best thing FIFA can do to improve this tournament going forward, apart from never having it on astroturf again (and FIFA has said it will be grass only from hereon) is to put some money into the development of better officials. The officiating in this tournament was absolutely awful. Where you see the amateurism of it stand out the most is through the continual awarding of penalties on fouls which occurred outside the box. There was way too many of those. These are the best players in the world, these are professionals, and one of the things professional defenders actually know how to do (somewhat cynically, some would argue) is to know when you do and don’t commit fouls. Too much of the officiating on those types of plays was guesswork. There was too much decision-making based upon what was anticipated to happen on the pitch, rather than in response to what actually went on.

And it certainly made an impact upon the matches. There were five penalties called in the last four games, and three of them were downright awful calls, while the fourth probably should have resulted in Julie Johnston getting tossed from the game. Now, to the Germans’ credit, they didn’t bitch about the officiating after they lost the semifinal. Germans generally don’t bitch about officiating, and a good rule of thumb is that you don’t get to complain about the officials when you shank the penalty chance you’re given.

Part of the problem is that there is just not enough worldwide depth yet in terms of talent. Most people would agree that the Americans and the Germans and the English have the better officials, but we can’t have those teams’ refs on the pitch when those teams are playing in the meaningful games. The referees wound up having far too much impact on the games in this tournament. We need more good officials. Simple as that.

Mmm, Delicious Chile
Lost in the shuffle over the weekend (at least in this country) was the fact that, after 99 years of complete futility, Chile finally won a Copa America. Chile has always been a good footballing nation, but never quite good enough. This being South America, football and politics are impossible to separate. Chile’s Copa America triumph came on their home grounds, Estadio Nacional in Santiago, a venue which has a truly terrible place in history. This victory for La Roja was definitely something of a national catharsis, and their achievement, on many levels, should be celebrated.

The game itself was pretty lousy, a 0:0 draw with Argentina that La Roja won 4:1 on penalties. There were a lot of goalless draws in the tournament, and not a whole lot of creative play on display, whereas there were plenty of bad tempers to be found and quite a bit of strange officiating going on – Chile’s triumphs being aided somewhat by curious red cards awarded to Uruguay in the quarters and Peru in the semis. That said, you’d expect Chile and Argentina to put up some goals, given Argentina’s attacking talent and Chile’s frenetic, up-tempo, hell-bent-for-leather mindset. It was a compelling final in terms of tenacity, but lacked some creativity.

La Roja breaks their terrible jinx and props to them for doing so, while Argentina’s drought in international tourneys is now up to 22 years. Not even having Lionel Messi, the greatest footballer in the history of the planet, can get La Albiceleste over the top. Which is what Messi is – the greatest footballer in the history of the planet. And some of the dumbest narratives coming out of this game are about how Messi’s legacy is somehow tainted or lessened by his inability to bring home trophies for Argentina from big tournaments.

The goalless draw with Chile in the final was fairly typical of the recent plight for Argentina and also for Messi when he slips on the Argentine shirt. He sets up two chances for this teammates late, and neither one materializes in a goal. Messi then steps up and drills his penalty, just like you knew he would, and then the next two guys wearing the blue and white stripes promptly flub theirs. Game over. Yet in the eyes of many in the realms of the footballing media and punditry, this is somehow Messi’s fault.

You have to get your best XI out there on the pitch for these types of matches, and Argentina’s best XI these days is somewhat top heavy – lots of forwards, but not enough good link-up play. As such, Messi has to play the creator role on this team, playing deeper than he does at Barca, where he can just run at anyone and make shit up as he goes. If Messi doesn’t take on that creative midfielder role on this team, no one will and they’ll likely spin their wheels. Now, Messi can fill that playmaker role, because he’s also a great passer – he notched three assists in Argentina’s 6:1 throttling of Paraguay in the semis – but time and again, he does everything but put the ball on a silver platter for his teammates, and they constantly squander the chances. What more can he do? He can’t take penalties for them, for goodness sakes. He cannot make them not screw it up.

Messi’s game is a wonderful combination of imagination and a motor that just won’t quit. He simply moves in directions others can’t fathom, creating space for himself to shoot and make plays which others can’t even think of trying to do. Barcelona’s great triumph of this past season was putting Messi together with two other forwards – Suárez and Neymar – who think the game in a similar fashion and can key off of him. They’re a whirling dervish out there, they constantly move and shift shapes and create new angles. You simply have no idea how to defend them because the attack can come from any space and in any direction at any time.

Now, Messi has certainly not had his best games when it comes to playing in championship finals, but he was pretty damn spectacular at times last summer in Brazil. He’s done enough to put his team in a position where they very easily could be currently both World and South American champions. But at some point, someone else from Argentina has to step up and make a play.

The Copa America’s 100th anniversary is being celebrated next year with a centennial tourney to be held in the United States. Assuming this tourney doesn’t become a casualty of the ongoing CONCACAF/CONMEBOL/FIFA scandal, it has potential to be a great event. Oh, and speaking of that FIFA mess, notice who was conspicuously absent from both Santiago and Vancouver over the weekend. Uncle Sepp apparently had too many other things going on. Uh-huh. Sure he did.

The OG

I don’t even … what the …

“Look, football is cruel. Moments change matches. And sometimes, not always the best team wins. Sometimes you don’t get what you deserve.”
              
– Mark Sampson, Head Coach of England Women’s National Team

ONE of the many peculiarities about soccer which makes it both intriguing and maddening is the fact that, for a game in which it’s so damn hard to score, it’s comparatively easy to score on yourself. This happens exponentially more regularly in soccer than in any other sport. Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings did this, of course, and no play epitomized the 0-16 Detroit Lions more than Dan Orlovsky doing this. You might see the odd basketball tipped in by a defender. Own goals can occur in hockey, of course, but are still quite rare. Occasionally, you pull the goalie and thus empty the net – during a delayed penalty, or going with six skaters late in the game – and the worst thing imaginable then happens, or occasionally something completely ridiculous will occur. The most dubious of these was in 1986, in Game 7 of a Stanley Cup playoff series between Edmonton and Calgary, when the Oilers’ Steve Smith put it in his own net and it proved to be the series-deciding goal.

But those are oddball one-offs. Scan the scorelines at the end of any weekend in the EPL and you’re likely to see 2-3 goals listed as ‘og’ in the boxes. There have been five own goals during the Women’s World Cup already, including Angie Ponce of Ecuador doing it twice in the same game. She also scored on a penalty in that match, thus converting one of the most unique hat tricks in history, but not the uniquest by any stretch: Belgium’s Stan van den Buys has her beat, and Sunderland once managed to score on itself three times in seven minutes. Point is, own goals happen all the time in soccer. It’s part of the game.

But no own goal in history was ever quite like what we saw on Wednesday in Edmonton, during the Women’s World Cup semifinal between Japan and England, when Lioness’ defender Laura Bassett steered one into her own net deep into stoppage time with the score level at 1-1, mere seconds from the end of regulation, thus sending the Lionesses out of the tournament with a 2:1 defeat in probably the most shocking, heartbreaking fashion I could ever imagine.

Which, for England, is saying something, since they’ve turned the act of crushing defeat into something of an art form. England have lost more penalty shootouts – six – than any other footballing nation on earth. It’s become something of a national joke. There have even been scientific studies commissioned about it, just because it seems so implausible that, in a format which seems something of a lottery or a dice roll, England somehow always turn up snake eyes. And even when they don’t get knocked out of the World Cup on penalties, England finds a way to make their exits memorable – be it the Hand of God in 1986, David Seaman forgetting to jump in 2002, or the fact that they won 3, drew 2, lost none, had a goal difference of +5 and still managed to be eliminated in 1982. (I’m serious.) But this latest in a long line of English footballing failures – this time on the women’s side – did something that may have seemed unthinkable. It even knocked the snark out of the Fleet St. press.

The stage for England’s 1998 exit from the World Cup was set when, mere seconds after the second half had begun in a 2-2 game with Argentina, David Beckham got baited and lashed out at an Argentine and got himself thrown out of the game. England had to play with 10 men from there and wound up losing on penalties. Now, never mind that it was a marginal call, if not a terrible one. Personally, I think it’s crap, but I also think Beckham was stupid. And never mind also that England played pretty well with 10 men for 60+ minutes, actually had a goal disallowed and then shanked two penalties in the shootout. In the eyes of the British press (and the public, who easily form these opinions), England’s loss was due entirely to the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl losing his head. They even burned him in effigy. It was a ridiculous sort of overreaction, but when you carry the badge of being the ice queen metrosexual pretty boy married to a Spice Girl, the verdict has already been made for you. I have no doubt that, had that been John Terry blootering an attempted clearance into his own goal at 92’ of a World Cup semifinal instead of Laura Bassett, he would have been absolutely crucified in the press and online.

But as I say, the Lionesses toil in anonymity. This tournament has their best performance ever on a larger stage, and they play with great tenacity and organization and combative spirit – traits which will always ingratiate you to the British footballing fans (or fans anywhere, for that matter). That they seem to have the same trait for colossal disaster at the end of World Cup knockout matches as their male counterparts is, well, problematic, but they’ve earned a lot of cred. This is a likable lot of gals who the Brits have come to be fond of, they’ve spurred legitimate interest in the women’s game back home, and them managing to lose in the most awful way conceivable hasn’t undone the good cred they’ve built up. (Of course, when they inevitably lose on penalties to the Germans in 2019, well, all bets are off.)

England were not the favourites against Japan, although people who were saying they were not the favourites were apparently not paying much attention to what was happening on the pitch during the tournament, since the Lionesses were going about knocking out the hosts and duking it out with the French (who should’ve tanked, but we’ll get to that some other time), while Japan was sleepwalking their way through about the easiest tourney schedule imaginable, playing one World Cup debutant after another. England were arguably the better team against Japan – their physical play knocked the Japanese out of their usual rhythm, they outshot Japan 15-7, and they hit the woodwork several times. But as we’ve seen time and again, being the better team in football doesn’t necessarily matter. What a stupid game. Why do we put up with this shit?

‘Bassett 92 og’

I saw that in the scoreline and thought to myself, “oh, dear god, what have you done?” And then I saw the replay and couldn’t believe what I just saw. It’s the defenders’ worst nightmare, of course – you’re turned towards goal, scrambling to cover space, you have to make a play and the ball caroms crazily. Own goals are usually either the product of defenders actively trying to do the right thing and make a play on the ball, or by getting in the way of a shot or a cross and having it ricochet off them. They’re not trying to do that. (Unless you’re in Madagascar, of course. And now I’ve moved one step closer to mentioning all 209 FIFA members on earth in the context of this blog.) I still remember, from my last year of playing organized soccer, our team losing a game 1:0 on an own goal at around the 85’ mark. I dove left to make a save on a fairly harmless shot, our defender lunged to his right to make a block, the ball pinballed off his shin and went exactly where I’d been standing a second earlier. Now, as the captain of this bunch, I had to put on the proper air of authority after the match – we lose as a team, we lost because we didn’t score, blah blah blah. But of course, I was also thinking, “god damn it Kyle, why did you do that?” We managed to score on ourselves thrice that season, including our central defender doing it twice, one of which being a rocket from 20 yards into the top left corner that was maybe the best shot on goal we had all year. Too bad it was the wrong goal. (We made him a center forward after that, pointing him in the opposite direction.)

And you have to laugh about it, in the end. It’s all that you can do. Own goals are, by nature, ridiculous. They’re about as far away from the desired effect as you can possibly get in the game. If you’re going to play football, and you’re going to play defense, it’s probably going to happen to you at some point or another:

This was not Vincent Kompany’s finest hour

Oh, Liverpool, what are you doing?

Go online and you can find all sorts of gifs and videos like these. They are acts of high comedy, of impressive and well-meaning incompetence, and they happen more often than you might think throughout the course of a footballing season. But ‘Bassett 92 og’ didn’t occur in some Sunday club match. No, it happened on the game’s biggest stage, at the biggest moment in the history of the English players’ careers. Other players, past and present, were quick to offer words of encouragement. “Don’t let this one play define your career.” But of course it’s going to define your career. How could it not? Moments do, in fact, change matches. I mentioned before how my clubbers gave up three own goals. All three cost us results – two of those matches wound up draws, and the third was a 1:0 loss. In a sports where, on average, fewer than three goals are scored in a game, giving up any sort of a goal is potentially disastrous, much less doing it to yourself.

And, of course, you cannot talk about own goals without talking about the World Cup of 1994. Like most everything in soccer, it’s only funny until it isn’t. One of the greatest wins in U.S. history, 2:1 over Colombia, was due in part to an own goal by Andrés Escobar, who paid the ultimate price for this mistake when he was murdered in Medellin after the Colombians – thought to be a favourite to win the tourney – had been ousted early from the event. It’s one of the saddest moments in the game’s history. What should have been one of the greatest moments in American soccer – a huge upset by a young team which helped springboard American soccer success – feels forever tarnished. And blaming Escobar for the loss was nonsense, of course. The own goal came at 35’ and made it only 1-0, so the Colombians had plenty of time to equalize, but they got flat-out outplayed, as the U.S. made it 2-0 and had a third goal disallowed. The Americans were simply the better team that day, but Escobar – their captain and their leader – made for a convenient scapegoat.

Players from both sides have said they’re haunted by the memories 20+ years on. It took the Colombians 20 years to recover from that moment –  the game more or less fell apart on all levels in the country, and they did not return to the World Cup until Brazil in 2014. Like everything else in Colombia at the time, control of the game had fallen into the hands of the drug cartels. (The Two Escobars is a terrific documentary on the subject.) Soccer wasn’t safe, it wasn’t an escape. But it never is, in the end. We like to think of sports as an escape from real life, but part of why the game of soccer is so impossible to ignore is that the cruelty and unfairness inherent to the game mirrors real life, and sometimes comes to symbolize it.

Fortunately, common sense and an appreciation of absurdity prevail in the case of the game from Wednesday in Edmonton. It was a fluke and it was weird and it was nuts, and anyone who has ever played the game can empathize. Laura Bassett was understandably inconsolable after the match, but it wasn’t the only mistake of the match. It was simply the last mistake, the one from which there was no return. Consolation matches in World Cups are always dreadful for the players – your hopes and dreams have been crushed into dust, and yet you have to go out there and play another match amid the disappointment – but it’s also an opportunity for a side to go out on a positive note. The game doesn’t have to suck. Given the way they’ve played, I imagine the Lionesses will put in a good effort against the Germans. My hope is that the Lionesses prevail and Laura Bassett scores one in the process. For her own side this time. The footballing gods owe her one.

All the News That's Weak, We Print

Sigh

QUICK, to the buzzard points! We have no time for an intro:

• The Women’s World Cup is a wonderful event, showcasing some seriously badass lady footballers, and I recommend that everyone watch. The women’s game is still developing internationally, and while seeing two teams put up 10-spots might suggest FIFA was overly ambitious in expanding the field to 24 teams when there wasn’t really the depth of talent worldwide to merit it, there has been a surprising amount of parity so far, as only two teams have taken a full 6 points from the first two games. It’s good stuff and you should tune in when you get the chance (which, regrettably, I’ve not had nearly enough opportunities to do).
The women have been clamoring for years for their event to be taken seriously, and deservedly so. A good way to start would be for their governing body to take it seriously. That FIFA signed off so willingly on the damned fool idea of having this entire tournament be played on artificial surfaces is an abomination. It’s weird enough that they’re holding this tournament in Canada and none of the games are in Toronto, but I know they have the Pan Am Games there in July so I can understand it. Like I say, it’s just weird. (Would you have a World Cup in England and no games in London?) The idea to play the whole thing on artificial turf, however, is terrible. The Lose loves me some Canada, of course, but they got this one wrong from the beginning and it never should have been allowed to happen. Artificial surfaces have certainly improved since the Astroturf heyday of the 1970s, but it’s hard on the knees and the ankles, the turf burns are still gnarly, and the rubber and the sand flying everywhere is an ungodly mess. And even though Canada has winter 9 months out of the year, June and July ain’t among those months. Playing on a plastic pitch full of rubber and sand on top of concrete in 30°C temperatures or more is sort of like trying to work out in a tandoor. Only bikram yoga disciples are dumb enough to want to do that.
And I can certainly understand that all of the stadia in use for the Women’s World Cup are multi-use venues that operate year round in municipalities where the weather makes keeping a quality grass a challenge. Canada isn’t alone in having that problem. The two MLS clubs in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle Sounders F.C. and the Portland Timbers, play on artificial surfaces as well, since heavy rain + sea level tends to = swamp. Among the unexpected problems Iceland had when they nearly qualified for the 2014 World Cup was that they had to scrounge and scurry to get a pitch together for their playoff with Croatia, since Iceland hadn’t hosted a football match in November in its history, and grass has a peculiar way of not growing there at that time of year. They managed to do so, however.
And that’s precisely the point. Iceland managed to get a nice pitch together because they had to. FIFA generally doesn’t allow international matches on artificial surfaces – for men. Now that Costa Rica has a grass surface in its new home football grounds, none of the listed national stadia around the world have plastic pitches. Were the World Cup to take place in the United States in 2022 2026, they would almost certainly play some matches at Whatever The Hell The Phone Company Is Called Field in Seattle, and they would plunk down a temporary grass surface, just as they did in the Silverdome in Detroit back in 1994. If you can lay grass down in a dome, you can lay it down in Edmonton in June. Even though the Canadians were basically rubber stamped as hosts for this World Cup – they were the only bidders – FIFA has been pretty clear in saying to bidders for other tourneys that matches are to be played on grass. Choosing not to enforce that, in this case, seems incredibly careless and thoughtless.
And, quite possibly, sexist. Some 60 players filed a lawsuit to that effect, saying that it was discriminatory to make the women play on artificial turf pitches when FIFA would never permit that in the men’s World Cup. They have a point. The lawsuit wound up being dropped, since it wouldn’t have been heard in time. Scotts Lawn Care, upon hearing of all of this plastic pitch tomfoolery, offered to lay down temporary grass fields in the six stadia used for the World Cup for free – a cost of $3,000,000 they were willing to eat, having correctly viewed that laying sod for the event and solving an international dispute would constitute a pretty good use of their advertising budget. FIFA’s response to this was basically one of indifference.

“It wasn’t a long, drawn out explanation. We didn’t get a lot of detail back … I read about it in the press like everybody else.” 
– Chris Strunk, Scotts marketing director

The problem with suing FIFA is that it’s run by a bunch of stubborn old dirty bastards who respond to such a showing of dissent by digging in their heels and turning it into a pissing contest. They make bad decisions and, when called on their bad decisions, have a tendency to respond by making worse ones. In this case, they’ve dug their heels into the rubber and the cement. So we’re stuck with this nonsense. FIFA insists this is never happening again, but it never should’ve happened in the first place.

• The soccer ball bounces and skids and whizzes about on the artificial surfaces, so it takes a little getting used to, but other than the fatigue factor seeming heightened in the heat, I don’t think the quality of play has been diminished too much so far. Apparently, some of the players beg to differ:

“I think I score if we’re on grass … The ball as it comes off my head against Sweden hits a dry turf and bounces higher. If it hits grass, it's harder for a goalkeeper to react, so if the ball bounces higher the goalkeeper has more time to react off the turf.” 
– Abby Wambach, after the U.S. women’s 0:0 draw against Sweden.

Now, I gotta be honest here. That just might be the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. She’s one of the best players in the history of the game, and also one of the players who was most boisterous in the fight against FIFA to get the grass pitches installed, so this might be a case where she just doesn't want to let that fight go. But implying that the U.S. team’s inept offensive performance had to do with the pitch is nonsense. The Swedes were dealing with it, too. Everyone is. Who knows, maybe the Germans would’ve scored 13 or 14 against the Côte d’Ivoire on grass instead of just 10. I have a better idea: try playing better.
The USWNT has a loyal and allegiant fan base in this country, and deservedly so, because they’re terrific, but everyone involved seems remarkably prickly and defensive when sub-par performances are called into question. It’s the one thing I don’t care much for. Hey, if you suck, you suck. Take the hits and move on. Frankly, I think they choked in the final four years ago against Japan. Well, guess what? It happens. They are back and they are among the favourites and if they get offense out of neutral, they’ll probably win the thing, even though they’ll have to possibly navigate a mine field to do so once the knockouts begin, which leads me to my next buzzard point …

• What didn’t get nearly enough press, while everyone was griping about the turf, was the pairings for the Women’s World Cup. When it came time for the draw, the organizers locked all of the top sides into specific groups from the get-go and then built the schedule matrix from there. In the men’s competition, other than designating the top seed in Group A, which is always the host, everything is done through the random draw. In the process of locking top teams into specific groups, organizers also managed to arrange it so the Top 3 teams in the world – Germany, the U.S., and France – are all in the same half of the bracket should the games go to form. The reason for this was “financial considerations.” In other words, keep the U.S. and Canada as far away from each other as possible in the field, since they’ll have most of the fans between them and the organizers want to maximize the gate receipts. Some might also suggest the organizers dumped those Top 3 powerhouses together potentially in the other half of the bracket for the purposes of giving the host nation a better chance of reaching the final. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a host country did that. (For Italia 1990, the young U.S. squad was ‘randomly’ drawn into the same group as the Italians, to the surprise of absolutely no one.)
The Lose thinks it’s lame to resort of that sort of stuff under the guise of getting more asses into seats for the games. Hey, here’s a good reason to go to the games: IT’S THE FUCKING WORLD CUP! They do the same thing for the women’s NCAA tournament, whereby teams are allowed to host games on their home floors whereas that’s strictly forbidden on the men’s side. Unsurprisingly, there tend to be very few upsets in the women’s NCAA tournament – teams don’t make it to be a Top 4 seed in the tourney by being lousy on their home court. The reason they do this is, of course, all about money – the NCAA wants to maximize their attendance, and really good teams also tend to have the largest number of fans. But the event should be big enough, at this point, that you don’t need to do that. It contributes to the same teams winning titles over and over again, which is boring. Connecticut and Tennessee winning every year is boring. We only love dynasties until we don’t.
UCLA won 10 NCAA men’s titles in 11 years, and part of why they were able to do that is because the tourney back then was, in fact, broken down geographically, so UCLA was playing whatever western fodder existed in the first couple of rounds. Not necessarily bad teams, mind you, but they weren’t going to play a Big 10 or ACC side until the Final Four at the earliest. The NCAA did away with the hard-fast regionalization, and while UCLA won 10 titles because they were really damn good, it would’ve been a lot harder, if not impossible, to match that feat using the sort of set-up you see in the NCAAs where they ship teams all over the place. The NCAA also did away with home court advantage in the tourney, and the game, as a whole, is better because of it.
The point is that if you’re seriously worried about financial considerations during a World Cup or an NCAA tourney, then you may need to question about why you’re holding it. Personally, I think the thing should stand on its own. Hey, its great athletes performing at an incredible level. What’s not to like? Were I hanging out in Moncton right now, I’d go and check it out.
And a funny thing tends to happen in football when you go about trying to play the meta game and massage the groups – the players aren’t in on it, and most of the organizers’ hopes wind up going out the window. The Spanish organizers went to great lengths in 1982 to try and set it up with the desired idea in mind of having Brazil v. Argentina and West Germany v. Spain in the semifinals if it all followed form, and that lasted all of one match in practice, because Argentina lost to Belgium in the very first game. Spain then lost to Northern Ireland, the Germans got beat by Algeria, the whole tourney went loopy and all of those organizational pipe dreams went kaput. Already in Canada this summer, the #3 rated French got beat by Colombia – a huge upset which may turn out to be a convenient one, as well, since the French now have a good chance of finishing second in their group, thus getting out of the bracket with the Germans and the Americans and being in a direct collision course with the hosts. Everyone should be careful what they wish for.

The Landsliðið are friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome.

• When the XI from the Faroe Islands defeated the Greeks 1:0 in Piraeus last November during European qualifying, not only was it the first UEFA win for the Landsliðið in four years, it was arguably one of the biggest upsets in the history of international football, if not the biggest. The Faroes were ranked 187th at the time by FIFA, the Greeks 18th. And we can hate on the Greeks for not passing the eye test and not being as good as their ranking, but they’ve been failing the eye test for 15 years now and it doesn’t keep the Greeks from getting results.
So that was a pretty remarkable win for the Landsliðið, who then decided to have even more fun at Greece’s expense in Tórshavn over this past weekend, beating the Greeks again, this time by a 2:1 scoreline. And neither match was a fluke. The better team won on both occasions.
And yes, I just wrote two paragraphs about the Faroe Islands. Go me.
UEFA 2016 in France will have an expanded field – 24 teams instead of 16 – and while it may water down the competition somewhat, it also generates more interest among the abundant number of European minnow nations, some of whom have taken to biting the big fish. After beating the Belgians over the weekend, Wales are on the verge of qualifying for a major tourney for the first time since 1958. The aforementioned Iceland XI have already beaten the Dutch and the Czechs and may qualify for the first time ever. I think you may see even more surprises in the future on the international level, simply because the club demands on top players, from top nations, are so great now that the international game has to take a back seat for them. Sides from the lesser nations, often built around players who sat on the benches for their clubs for a lot of the year, tend to have a bit more cohesion and freshness to their play which can somewhat neutralize the talent gap. You’re still going to get some Gibraltar 0:7 Germany scorelines though. There are still a lot of bad teams in Europe. And with the expanded field, all of the big dogs will still qualify unless they are completely incompetent. Who knows? Maybe England might actually make it.

Umm, where exactly are you going?

• Watching LeBron James attempt to singlehandedly beat the Golden State Warriors is pretty remarkable. In Game 5 last night, LeBron went for a triple-double and had a direct hand in 70 of the Cavs’ 91 points. 50.3% of Cleveland’s possessions in the NBA Finals result in LeBron doing something – a shot, a turnover, an assist – which is a figure you’re more likely at some small high school which has one good player, let alone in the best basketball league in the world. To their credit, the Cavs have stuck to their game plan of essentially playing defense with their offense – running the shot clock all the way down and then crashing the offensive glass for extra possessions – at least until last night, anyway, when David Blatt inexplicably decided to bench Timofy Mozgov, who is pretty much their 2nd-best player right now, as Blatt was mistakenly lured by the opiate that was J.R. Smith’s hot early shooting into thinking he could go small and match the Dubs’ small lineup for 48 minutes. Trying to play small against the Warriors made ZERO sense to me. Sure they were in the game for a while, but so what? Losing is losing. Mozgov had 28 in Game 4 and has been really effective crashing the basket from the high post and giving LeBron an option when he drives the ball. When he isn’t in the game, the other four guys basically stand around and wait for LeBron to do something for them, which tends not to work very well. Andre Igouadala has shown he can at least slow down LeBron in a one-on-one matchup, which is all the Dubs need because no one else for Cleveland is doing anything.
Thank you for not coaching, David Blatt.
Steve Kerr’s switch to a small lineup for Game 4 was mostly beneficial for the Dubs on the offensive end of the floor, as it created better tempo, better spacing, and some awful defensive matchups for the Cavs. Golden State’s defense has been fine in this series, but they lost two games mainly because their offense was a mess. Going with such a small lineup – 6’7” Draymond Green is playing center – came with the risk of getting hammered on the boards by the much bigger Cavs, but that potentially huge advantage that David Blatt basically neutralized last night by having his 7’1” center sitting next to him, and by the 4th Quarter, the Dubs were constantly first to the ball off the glass. Sure, Mozgov can’t guard anyone out on the floor, but like I say, the Cavs are better off playing defense with their offense. You gotta play to your strengths and take your chances.
Now, in practice, the Warriors have so many options that, in a 7-game series, eventually they are going to find something that works. I’ve felt all along that Golden State would only lose in the playoffs if they actually played badly. (A sentiment Nate Silver echoed. Always good to put some numbers behind my assertions.) Playing adequately is usually good enough, because they can just throw wave after wave after wave at you. LeBron has bordered on non-human in this series, and he still might be able to get them to a Game 7 through sheer force of will, but I can’t imagine he’s got two more games like last night in him. Or does he?

• And from the “something’s gotta give” department, the Official Wife of In Play Lose and I are going to the game tonight at Phone Company Park between the Giants, who are doing their usual odd-year-bullshit June swoon and have lost eight in a row at home, and the Seattle Mariners, who have lost 12 of 17, got beat 10:0 and 13:0 by the Astros over the weekend, and have pretty much shat on every prognosticator’s suggestion of their impending success this year (including mine). The Mariners are such a disaster that they merit further discussion later. As for the game tonight, which promises to be about as gloomy as the foggy skies over head, at least it also promises to be over quickly, since neither team can score right now.