Failing Beautifully

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

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

Saving the Season (photo by Shaun Botterill)

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

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

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

– – –

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

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

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

Which, frankly, neither of those teams were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_ _ _

photo by Paul Ellis/AFP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – –

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

We Are Premier League

Just as we all predicted (photo by Joe Toth)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, so, now what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Fin Stevens (@fin131) April 28, 2019

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

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

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

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

My Apologies for the Absence

TRULY I have reached a place in this lifetime where I do not know what to say. Perhaps it is a case where I have reached the end of language, going beyond the point where words can express what it is that I feel. Perhaps it is a case where I have reached the point of pointlessness, a place where there is nothing that I can say, nor is there anything that anyone can say to me, which will affect me in any sort of desired way. Perhaps it is a case where all you have left is silence, knowing that nothing you can say nor do will make a fucking bit of difference. I do not know. All of it is plausible, yet none of it seems to matter.

The Red Jacket

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Grief

WHAT is it about me that leads me to find and discover so many absurd situations, or what is it that leads them to find me? I guess that I go looking for it. I am uniquely attuned to it, I suppose. Being a keen observer of humans and their interpersonal relations, curious as to what does or does not make people tick, I always have an eye and an ear out for whats going on around me. My tendency of making metaphors out of everything leads me to make these sorts of connections of whatever behaviour goes on all about me and then trying to find some sort of meaning in it, or even making meaning. So when people do weird things – which people are inclined to do – I tend to notice it and extrapolate what it means. I doubt my life is necessarily any weirder than that of anybody else, but I think that, instead, I notice it more, whereas others simply turn their attention back to their phones and turn the volume up in their headsets, blocking out their surroundings.

But still, weird things seem to happy to me a lot of the time. Weird things, most of which I fail to find any metaphor in other than it being a testament to the absurd nature of our existence. Someone doing something that makes no sense likely seems to be a sensible act in their own mind. For example, why would some 81-year-old man decide that it’s a good idea to start talking to the guy next to him on the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon?

“The 49ers sure are bad. They used to be good. I went to that playoff game that time, 1971 at Kezar Stadium. They lost though. They played the Dallas Cowboys.”

You could look it up: the NFC Championship game on Jan. 3, 1971, at Kezar Stadium. Dallas Cowboys 17, San Francisco 49ers 10.

He had limped his way onto the bus on Polk St., he had a whole bus’ worth of places from which to choose to sit, and he sat down next to me, proceeding to start talking to me about a playoff football game from 1971. I don’t know why he was doing that. Perhaps, at that age, speaking with anyone in the world seems like a good idea. Age is isolating. You limit yourself, you turn inward, you feel as if you no longer belong and that the world has passed you by. Just the night before, during our evening-long whiskey bender, I had been telling Geoff how my disinterest in making metaphors of music – mostly due to me being inherently opposed to nostalgia – means that all of the music I listen to is contemporary, but that I never go to any of their gigs when those bands come to San Francisco, because I would feel weird about being the oldest guy in the room by 10 or 15 or 20 or even 25 years. At an age like 81, the world must become so small, so silent and compact. Simply talking to some stranger on the bus would, I imagine, be liberating. If he wants to tell me about a football game from 47 years ago, I suppose that is okay although, to be honest, I think I am listening to him only because my phone is nearly dead. Otherwise, I think I’d have the volume turned up to 11 and be drowning out the world around me for a little while longer.

Which is what I did on the flight, one of those extremely strange and welcome sorts of flights whereby you take off late from one city and arrive early in the other. Due to turbulence all over the western U.S. at the usual cruising altitude, the captain had explained, they had clearance to fly higher in the sky, which also meant they had clearance to fly faster. What’s supposed to be a 2½ hour flight lasted 1:58. I had my earbuds in the entire flight and didn’t notice the commotion, and didn’t really understand why a flight attendant was wearing blue jeans and a purple sweater – not exactly proper work attire, nor did the colour scheme match that of Southwest Airlines. It was only when we landed, but couldn’t get off the plane for 40 minutes, that I took out the earbuds and figured out the reason for the commotion: a flight attendant had fainted during the flight; the stand-in dressed in a purple sweater was an off-duty staffer headed home to the Bay Area who stepped up in a pinch; an entire crew of paramedics and EMTs and firefighters then boarded the aeroplane. Suddenly, the flight that departed late and arrived early was deplaning very, very late. It annoyed me, and then I was annoyed with myself for feeling so indignant about being delayed getting off an aeroplane because of this medical emergency. Jesus fuck, show some compassion.

Where was I going anyway, and what was the need for urgency? The Coliseum BART station, the Embarcadero, the shed alongside Embarcadero Two where you catch the 1 California, which would then amble for 35-40 minutes, having a leisurely Sunday drive westward, up Nob Hill and towards the beach. Wherever it is that I am wanting to go, I am not going to get there very fast. Mostly, the sense of urgency was due to being hungover, and wanting to find some sort of a remedy for the throbbing in my head. I asked Geoff how he was feeling this morning, as he was preparing to take me to ABQ, and he said he was feeling “appropriate.” I then made reference to how, in the era of the Chinese emperors, those applying to be civil servants were subject to rigorous examinations which included a study of their skills as a poet. They were expected to be able to write about, and speak to, all of the important states of life, including being able to write about what it feels to be drunk, and also being able to write about what it feels to be hungover. Drinking to excess, therefore, was necessary. Never before had drinking to excess felt so necessary as it had on Saturday night, so when I awoke this morning, I considered the hangover to be proper and just.

By late Sunday afternoon, however, after my too short-cum-too long flight from ABQ to OAK, I really would like my head to stop hurting. I really would like everything to stop hurting. Flying hurts. I dreaded such a short trip – flight out on Friday, return on Sunday – simply because that much time cooped up in an aeroplane with so little time in between was likely to twist my neck and back into even more of a pretzel than they already are. Being on a 1 California bus with so few other passengers meant having some space to stretch out.

But now I have got this guy, this 81-year-old Chinese American with a hearing aid and a shopping bag full of foodstuffs yammering to me about how bad the 49ers are, but they weren’t bad back in 1971.

“But they lost though,” he shrugged. “Everyone loses sometimes.”

I suppose he has my admiration for his nonchalant attitude towards defeat. I have declared myself to be an expert in defeat, I have made it a point of emphasis in my life to attempt to explicate the nature of failure. Failure is the default in life. Everyone loses sometimes. 

But he’s just saying stuff. This happens all the time on public transportation in San Francisco. There is some transient, some crazy guy babbling away. But it’s different in this case – he speaks clearly, coherently, short bursts of descriptives. I just lack any context for what he is saying. Is it a memory? Did it happen 10 years ago? 10 minutes ago? I don’t know. On another day, I suppose it would annoy me. Amazingly, on a day when seemingly everything else is wont to annoy me, he does not.

He then reaches into the pocket of his jacket and takes out some photographs, all of them old, most of them black & white, all of them with torn edges or crease marks or other signs of heavy usage. He starts looking through them, one after another, a smile on his face. There seems to be a smile on his face no matter what. There is a smile on his face as he is hustling to catch the bus on Polk St., having waves to flag the driver down. There is a smile on his face telling me about how the 49ers had lost to the Dallas Cowboys and missed out on a chance to go to the Super Bowl – which, as a lifelong fan, must have been extremely disappointing at the time. He is looking at his photographs, smiling slightly more than he had been before, as they obviously pique and tap into memories. Given the wear and tear on the prints, I suspect he might do this often. I turn my attention elsewhere, as he seems delightfully occupied.

“This is me,” he taps me on the knee to get my attention, showing me a photograph.

He didn’t really ask whether or not I wanted to see his photos. He just did it. I suppose that when you are 81, you just do what you want. You don’t give a shit anymore. Quite frankly, you shouldn’t give a shit anymore at that age, and maybe not at any age.

In the photo, he is dressed in his Army uniform, handsome and standing tall, proud. A sharp looking, strong young man. He must be 19, maybe 20 in the photo.

“1956,” he says. “Presidio.”

Presidio. San Francisco. My old co-worker during my Seattle banking days had served in the Army during World War II, and I remember him telling me about being assigned to the Presidio, and how getting stationed at the Presidio was the plum gig in the army at that time. If you were a scrub the Army brass thought little of, they would station your ass in some dumb place like Great Falls or Nebraska or some other wasteland. But the Presidio? Damn, that meant they thought you were good.

I nod in response. I am impressed.

The 1 California is just passing the JCC on California and Presidio, heading westward towards The Avenues. He sifts through the stack of maybe 6-7 photos, shows me a b&w pic ripped slightly down the middle, stained yellow around the edges, but the image itself remains crisp.

“This is my wife,” he says.

Oh my. She is quite the looker, dressed in a white dress. He sees me nodding with approval and he nods in response, his smile growing in both width and in glow.

He then shows me a second photograph of her, a colour photo, wearing a vivid red dress. It’s a traditional Chinese wedding dress. The fading to blue of the fringes of the photograph contrast that red dress, making it all the more radiant, ebullient.

“Beautiful,” I say.

“She died young.”

He somehow manages to smile when he says this.

“She died young. She was only 62. I am 81 now.”

He goes silent for a moment, nodding and, somehow, again he smiles. I have no idea how he does that.

I’m exhausted. I didn’t really sleep last night. Awakened by a ghost. New Mexico feels haunted. I awoke in a state of delirium this morning, not knowing where I was, hallucinating. For a moment I was 29 again, I was in the New Mexico that still felt like a dream and hadn’t yet become the nightmare it has now become. I am 29 and in control of my life, no longer suffering from any symptoms of mental illness, only to fully awaken to find I am 49 and grieving and feeling that mental illness enveloping me all over again, washing over me and threatening anew to drown me, just as I had started to drown the instant I first left this place back in November 2000.

There have been these moments, here and there, since the end of the ceremony on Saturday in Santa Fe where it has threatened to occur. A few tears have managed to slip from my eyes. It kept happening on the aeroplane, that being a place where I have always felt a certain sense of claustrophobic anxiety which seems to pull out and heighten whatever emotion is deeply affecting me in the subconscious at the time. I’ve been known to just spontaneously burst into tears on flight, crying for no apparent reason. But I held it together on the flight, at the aeroport, and even held it together during the necessary all night drinking session Geoff and I had engaged in after the service was over, having driven back to Albuquerque from Santa Fe and immediately commenced killing a bottle of bourbon in some quixotic but, ultimately, necessary attempt at also killing all of the pain.

Clearly, it had not been a success.

And I had held it together as I stood in the roomful of familiar strangers, people who I’d thought little to nothing about in the time since I’d last seen them, whose aging faces I had to compare and contrast to those making up my memories. None of them had aged well. Maybe none of us ever really do. The service was taking place in a hall near to my old house in Santa Fe, a mediocre neighborhood traversed by Cerrillos Road, the obligatory kingdom of ersatz sort of street you find in any city with furniture stores and rug dealers and strip malls and the like. An ugly, utilitarian part of town. A part of town which, to my 29-year-old eyes, seemed to be beautiful but, to the failing 49-year-old eyes mired behind thick glasses, no longer did so. It no longer felt like home. I’d left that home behind, I’d left New Mexico and moved to a city where I have never, ever truly felt like I am at home. Santa Fe is a place that Kate wanted to be from, but no longer wanted to be, and she wanted to leave so badly that she left me behind. It’s a place that she wound up returning to, and I knew when she made that choice that she would never, ever return to San Francisco.

But I held it together when I spoke, having figured out what I would say in my head the day before on the flight, having committed it to memory, tattooing it to my psyche, creating another scar and spot and stain that I can never scrub out. But goddamnit, I held it together. I’ve held it together all of this time. Go me. Aren’t I so fucking brilliant and so motherfucking proud?

I have my phone in my hand, which barely has any power, but there is just enough juice left for me to pull up a photo. I tap him on the knee to get his attention, and then show it to him:

“She is very beautiful,” he says.

“She died,” I whisper, rendered barely able to speak.

“Oh?”

“I had to say goodbye to her yesterday in New Mexico. I had to say goodbye.”

This is how I come to cry on the shoulder of an 81-year-old man while riding the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon, a man who somehow thought it was a good idea to talk to passersby and show old photographs that, likely, no one other than he would care about.

“You will come to smile again,” he tells me, his arm around me, clinging to a stranger as if he were a son. “You will come to smile.”

We get to 25th Avenue, my stop. I wasn’t sure where exactly that he was going – somewhere further up California St., I suppose, but there are only three more stops on the route, so it’s somewhere nearby. Perhaps he is a neighbor. Perhaps I should try to find him sometime. Or, perhaps, he was simply riding for the sake of riding, which is what many of the supposedly crazy people do in this city. They ride because going somewhere, anywhere, is better than the stasis, the solitude and the stillness.

I stand up and shake his hand.

“Bless you,” I whisper.

“Okay,” he replies with a smile and a nod. “Okay, it is okay.”