No More Onion Bags

What I watched

// September 29th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

As a follow-up from last week’s “What I’ll be watching”, here’s a little recap of the weekend games I saw.

Saturday

• - Everton v Liverpool, 7:45am on Setanta USA - woke up just in time to catch the two goals.  Rumor has it that the first 55 minutes were as boring as possible.  Everton looked completely impotent.  Note to self: don’t watch any more Everton games this year.  Tim Cahill got a red card for a ridiculous, if not overly violent, challenge.  Everton are appealing because Xabi Alonso wasn’t hurt that badly.  It shouldn’t matter.  It was clearly an I’m-really-frustrated-and-taking-it-out-on-somebody moment, and those should be penalized. 
• - Real Betis v Real Madrid, 2pm on GolTV – (wasn’t planning on watching it, but had a Madrid-fan friend around the crib.)  A ridiculous game.  Madrid goes ahead on a header  from a set piece, Betis scores on a penalty, Madrid go down a man, Betis dominates but can’t capitalize, Madrid wins with a goal on the counter in the last minute against the run of play.  Just another day ending in “y”. 
• - Espanyol v Barcelona, 4pm Saturday, GolTV – yet another game where Barsa dominates, gives up an easy goal.  This one came on a series of comedic errors inside the box by Pique, Puyol, and Valdes — sorry, but that’s what you get when you insist on playing the hometown boys.  (There was a lot of meaningless garbage in this game: 12 minutes of stoppage time because the Barsa ultras threw fireworks at the Espanyol fans.  So some of the Espanyol fans stop the game miday through the second half and riot against the security guards because they are pissed at the Barsa fans.  Duh.  And then Barsa wins on a howler by the Espanyol keeper and a ridiculous penalty.  Pique, who had nothing to do with the goal, but everything to do with the goal they conceded, celebrates by pointing to the ultras who caused all the trouble and generally sticking it to the Espanyol fans.  Oy veh.)  Back to the soccer: Henry was mediocre, starting in place of Etoo, who was just finding his form in the games prior.  Titi scored only because the keeper messed up, when he should have actually brought the ball down himself and scored to begin with – except now he can only score tap-ins.  Awesome.  Leo Messi remains completely unflappable, slotting home an injury time penalty, with the entire stadium against him. 

Sunday

• - Portsmouth v Tottenham, 8:30am on Setanta USA – In the preview, I wrote “this game seems like it could be a lot of fun.   Both teams need to do some venting.”  I was wrong.  Tottenham are terrible.  Really, really terrible.  Only Jamie O’Hara was decent.  Portsmouth aren’t that good either, and have a midfield that is Lassana Diarra, a surprising skillful Nadir Belhadj (watch out for him), and two players who belong several divisions below the Premiership (Richard Hughes and Glen Little).  Yet Tottenham not only still lost, but never really threatened.  Ugh and ugh.  They looked a little better when Lennon and Dos Santos came on.  David Bentley should soon start hearing chants of “Over-rated!”
• - AC Milan v Inter Milan, 2:30pm on FSC – surprise, surprise, a tight one-goal affair at the San Siro.  Ronaldinho scored the only goal on a header, for which the world press will likely say he is back to his best, but come on  – it was a header.  Call me when he dribbles by two guys and rounds the keeper.  I’ll be waiting by the phone.  I’ll be in the movie theater with the ringer set on a high.  Next to someone I want to impress.  You know why?  Because that phone call ain’t comin’.
• - Atletico Madrid v Sevilla, 3pm on GolTV – missed it.  Sorry.

Posted by Lazar

What to watch this weekend

// September 26th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

Lots of great action on the tube this weekend, including three big derbies.  Here’s what I will be watching and/or taping:

Saturday

• - Everton v Liverpool, 7:45am on Setanta USA - might be watching that delayed by about an hour.  Or I might just skip the nil-nil first half and just watch the nil-nil second half.  Over/under on balls that Gerrard puts in row 30 or higher is 4.
• - Espanyol v Barcelona, 4pm Saturday, GolTV – the Barcelona derby is always fun.  For Espanyol.  (At least recently.  Argh!)  Also, this game is being played under a Code Red Ray Hudson Alert.  5-4 odds that Andres Iniesta is referred to as “lovely.”  We aren’t taking any more bets on Leo Messi being called “magic,” a “magic man,” or having “magic dust sprinkled on his boots.”

Sunday

• - Portsmouth v Tottenham, 8:30am on Setanta USA – this game seems like it could be a lot of fun.   Both teams need to do some venting. 
• - AC Milan v Inter Milan, 2:30pm on FSC – hard to know who to root for given that I hate both Berlusconi (fascist) and Mourinho (jerk).   FSC has decent English-language announcers for Italian games, except when they force that one guy to go it alone.  It’s hard to listen to one person for 90 minutes, even if his pronunciation of player’s names is impeccable.  (For real, listen to that guy.  I also love that he calls Kaka “Ricky Kaka”, as if he knows him personally.)
• - Atletico Madrid v Sevilla, 3pm on GolTV – Atleti has won 4-0 in their last three home games.  Sevilla is always fun to watch.  The only downside to this game is that Ray Hudson will be doing color commentary.  The over/under on “Aye, aye, aye!”s is 4, and homoerotic descriptions of Kun Aguero’s “sturdy backside” is 3.  Who wants some of that action?

Posted by Lazar

Atrocious Refereeing Decisions – Suitable Player Response?

// September 25th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

Last weekend saw an unbelievably bad piece of refereeing when a phantom goal was awarded for Reading against Watford in England’s Championship. See below:

This prompted a very well researched article by the Guardian’s Scott Murray detailing the 6 worst refereeing decisions of all time. I was very glad he included my absolute favourite refereeing howler of all time consisting of a ball boy scoring a last minute equalizer in a South American game. See below:

Anyway, this got me thinking about what the suitable player response is in such a situation. For fans of the team that are penalised by the decision it’s obvious: surround the referee, scream at him like you’ve just witness him murder your children and generally take out a lifetime of anti-refereee anger. The referee will tell from the overall reaction that he’s made a mistake (but won’t change the decision) and will avoid sending you off if at all possible as it will only be confouding his initial error. For the team that benefits, it’s a trickier conundrum.

The most common behavior seems to be to run away celebrating the outcome, but with an incredulous grin that says ‘I know that was ridiculous, but it’s not my fault’. A grin similar to that you would wear should a waiter accidentally deliver to you the next table’s chocolate mousse and then allow you to keep it because you’ve already started eating it by the time he realised his mistake (about 3.5 seconds later). Although telling the referee that he made a mistake doesn’t afford him to change his decision, there is a precedent set whereby a team benefitting from a phantom goal immediately allowed the other team to score an uncontested goal and thereby even up the game (unfortunately I can’t recall the game in question). Is this an isolated incident of incredible sportsmanship or the least we should expect from a group of adults?

Most of us, upon receiving too much change back from a cashier will alert the cashier to their mistake and hand back the extra cash. In this situation nobody will even know about the mistake, yet most people own up to it. As a personal rule, I always give the cash back unless I’m in Target, when I think of it as a special tax I deserve from having to suffer their obnoxious employess. Anyway, I digressed. But in saying that, I play in competitive leagues and while I like to shout my frustration when the referee makes a mistake, I say nothing if my team benefit. In my games the stakes are so small it doesn’t seem worth making a big deal about a relatively small deal like a throw-in error. Do the huge pressures attached to professional soccer mean it’s completely reasonable for players to take every possible advantage they can and forget sportsmanship? Based on recent events, it seems so.

One further element to add is this incident by everybody’s favourite fascist, Paulo DiCanio.  When playing for West Ham against Everton and presented with a relatively simple goal scoring opportunity, he instead caught the ball as the Everton goalkeeper lay injured. Although he received much adoration for this act of sportsmanship, including the 2001 FIFA Fair Play Award, I had a slightly cynical viewpoint that he chose personal fame and glory at the expense of a benefit for his team and his teams supporters. Maybe my cycnicism was affected by his politics or maybe sportsmanship isn’t as clear cut a topic as first thought.

posted by Cass

The Most Unknown Greatest Player of All Time

// September 25th, 2008 // 9 Comments » // Uncategorized

Might have been more famous had he smiled more.

I remember when I was little, growing up in New York, all the Central Americans used to talk about this guy “El Mágico Gonzalez,” who they said was the best player in the world.  Apparently, he played in Spain, whose games we rarely got here — if we did, it was just one of the big teams.  We did get Italian games regularly, which my father and I watched religiously every Sunday morning (we were members of the Church of RAI, Channel 25), where I got to see Maradona, who my Dad said was the greatest player in the world.  But the Central Americans assured me, no, no, this other guy was just as good.  In the 1990s, I finally saw a little bit of El Mágico, but he was old, and playing as a sub for the El Salvadorean national team.  But when I moved to Spain in the late 90s, people were still talking about him.  Michael Laudrup had just made his switch from Barsa to Madrid, and despite this (I’m a Barsa fan), I still loved him.  What a player.  But every time I talked about Laudrup, people said, yeah he’s amazing, and if he scored goals he would be El Mágico Gonzalez.

It’s funny to find so many people who still don’t know who he is.  In case you’re one of them, enjoy the clip below.  What’s your favorite moment?  Mine is the nutmeg at 3:00, which just boggles my mind (does he roll it up onto the top of his foot?).  I can watch it over and over (and, well, I do).  Thank goodness for globalization — now there is no chance we will miss talents like this.

posted by Lazar

Soccer – A Very, Very Naughty Word?

// September 23rd, 2008 // 9 Comments » // Uncategorized

 Picture the scene: You’re sitting in a bar somewhere in London early on a Saturday evening. A man sitting at the bar wearing an XL replica Jersey, pint of lager in hand is joined by another man who greets him with a punch on the arm while exclaiming ‘alright f*** face’. The first man calls him a c*** and tells him to f*** off while simultaneously asking the barman for two more pints of Stella. The two men are then engrossed in friendly chat until suddenly the first man erupts: ‘what did you say?’ and the atmosphere turns sour. For two men that use the ‘c’ word as a form of friendly greeting, you replay their conversation to determine what could possibly have caused such outrage. ‘Did you catch the soccer results?’. Boo Yah! There it is my friends, ‘soccer’, a six letter word that causes much alarm whenever it is used outside of America

This actually pretty hilarious video (begin at 0:57) below shows John Cleese mouthing off on the same topic and while I understand the basic logic that using the word football to describe a sport that relies on hands rather than feet and uses an ovoid rather than a sphere is somewhat misleading, this in no way explains the anger that accompanies ‘soccer’. Having studied the facts, I can only put this down to anti-Americanism.

Growing up in Ireland where football/soccer was one of 4 main sports, depending on where you lived or who you were talking to, football and soccer were used interchangeably. In areas where Gaelic Football was popular you would use the word ‘soccer’ to differentiate from it. This made total sense and nobody ever had a problem with it until some time in the early ’90s. With USA qualifying for Italia ’90 and all the concern and excitement over the World Cup being hosted in the States in ’94, we suddenly started to hear Americans comment and give their views on the game. Let me tell you, hearing a loud American accent telling you how they wanted to make the goals bigger, split the halves into quarters, give points for hitting the post, and so on, did cause much fear. But as these fears have proven to be unfounded, the use of the word soccer still causes as much hate and derison as if you’d claimed to be a Glasgow Rangers supporter.

The fact is that soccer is an English word that’s a shortening of ‘Association Football’ which was used to distinguish it from Rugby Football and was coined in the late 19th century. Indeed, in the North of England where rugby is the dominant game, the word soccer has been in constant use and the same goes for the continent of Australia who have to distinguish it from Aussie Rules Football. So next time a limey snorts down his nose at you for using the word soccer, feel free to remind them of the origins of the word. I’d even go so far as to gamble that two of their favourite shows are ‘Soccer AM’ and ‘Soccer Saturday’, both of which have been mainstays of British TV for the past decade. However, I want to make it very clear that just because I’m happy with use of the word ‘soccer’ does not mean I accept ‘aluminum’….

posted by Cass

The Fall of Ronie

// September 23rd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

The consensus in the article seems to be that when he came back to Barcelona after the World Cup, he was a changed man.  I actually think it was just before that.  He won the Champions League in May, and was awful in the World Cup.  I think he just finished two incredibly long, hard seasons, ending in winning everything you can win (he already had a World Cup from 2002), and he just lost his drive to compete.  The partying and not-practicing are symptoms, not the problem.  Why keep attacking defenders who are trying tooth-and-nail to hurt you when you’re that rich and have won everything?  Just watch this clip, and stop at these moments 0:21, 1:11, and 1:20.  The other guys are simply trying to kill him  — and this is just one match! Of course, it’s part of the game, but once you’ve made gabillions and have won everything, you can see why you might not invite these moments any more. 

Nicolas Anelka: Into Linen?

// September 21st, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Uncategorized

Can I get this in a cotton gauze?

Watching today’s Chelsea – ManU, one cannot help but think that Nicolas Anelka will not last long at Stamford Bridge.  The poor guy looks totally out of sorts: shooting when he should pass, passing when he should shoot, or losing his concentration at the worst times and making a complete mess of it all.  It just doesn’t seem like the same guy who played the first half of last season at Bolton, who was a constant danger on the counter or in the air, or the fellow from Man City a few years back, banging them in from passes by Berkowitz and Benarbia.

There’s a great expression in Spanish that seems to apply here: “la camiseta le pesa mucho”, the shirt weighs heavily on him.  Le Sulk (a world-class nickname), it seems, just cannot perform in the “heavy” shirts: Real Madrid (2 goals in 19 league games), Liverpool (4 goals in 20 league games) and Chelsea (3 goals in 19 league games).  The one exception is Arsenal (23 goals in 65 games), but I wonder if that actually proves the point—it wasn’t a heavy shirt for him since he was so young and had very few expectations on him.  (One wonders how he’d fare there now.  Not so well, methinks.)  Can anyone remember him doing anything important for France in a game that mattered?  Anyone?

Yet in the “lighter” shirts, he’s great: Bolton (21 goals in 53 games) and Man City (38 goals in 89 games).  There were also seasons with PSG and Fenerbahce, where he was good-not-great, so we’ll leave those out. It’s just funny that there are certain players whom we all know are “light-shirters”: Andy Johnson, Kevin Davies, Raul Tamudo, but we always think Anelka is ready to burst onto the world scene for a big team again.  And again. I think it’s time to get Anelka back into some lighter fabrics.

posted by Lazar

Annoying Commentators – Part 1,478

// September 21st, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Uncategorized

Watching the Chelsea v Manchester United match this morning on Fox Soccer Channel, co-commentator Robbie Earle used one of those commentator cliches that really get my goat up. Approximately 9 minutes into the game, Joe Cole received the ball just inside the area and let loose with a rasping shot that just clipped the outside of the post and side netting. Indeed, many Chelsea fans celebrated in the mistaken belief that a goal had been scored. Earle added a zany religious element to the oft used cliche by exclaiming ‘it’s a cardinal sin not to hit the target from there’. Forgetting His thoughts on the issue, I’ve never understood why it’s better to hit the target and not score than to narrowly miss and not score. We all agree that the best outcome is a goal but I don’t understand why a weakly hit shot right at the keeper is any better than a powerfully hit shot that beats the keeper all ends up but narrowly misses.

posted by Cass

US Tax Payers – Financing Manchester United?

// September 18th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized

So the photo shop skills are somewhat lacking but you get the point. The US Treasury’s recent purchase of AIG, who happen to be Manchester United’s main sponsor, means that in a way, all US tax payers are financing this team. This will be particularly galling for Man City fans, but at least they can be happy in the knowledge that a small percentage of $4 gas is going into the city coffers via new owners Abu Dhabi group. It really has become a global game!

 posted by Cass

Improving the Beautiful Game – Lessons From the Yanks?

// September 13th, 2008 // 9 Comments » // Uncategorized

A couple of weeks ago the normally entertaining Bill Edgar over at The Times Online blogged about 10 Rule Changes to Improve Football. The list was very unimaginative and poorly thought out with such ideas as ‘scrap the rule that forces injured players to leave the pitch after receiving treatment’ bizarely followed by ‘automatically stop the game if a player falls and remains on the ground for 3 seconds’. Can you imagine if a player is through on goal and suddenly half the members of the opposing team collapse to the ground as if hit by snipers. Don’t think it wouldn’t happen. Anyway, the list got me thinking about what ideas we could take from American sports and apply to the nearly perfect beautiful game to improve it. Here’s my top 5:

1. I’ve always been impressed by the way the umpires in NFL clearly explain each decision to the crowd / TV viewers by way of a mic. Certain soccer referrees suffer from a kind of God complex where they deem themselves so superior to everyone else in the ground that they don’t even have to explain their decisions to the players involved. Even if you disagree with a referee’s decision, having them publicly explain their decision can only lower the feelings of outrage.
2. I see no reason why we still persist with the crazy secrecy of time keeping. The scoreboard could contain a large clock (a la Ice Hockey) under control of the referee (or even the 4th official). Players will surely cut down on time wasting and play acting if they can see that the clock is stopped and it’s surely going to be less aggravating for opposition fans if they know that the foreigner (only foreigners fake injury) writhing on the ground is not dimishing the amount of time they have to gain an equaliser. As a further bonus, imagine all the home crowd counting down in unisom the final 10 seconds of a famous victory!
3. The current system of extra time and penalties is far from perfect (hence all the failed attempts at improvements lately; golden goal? silver goal?). The NASL had a shootout system whereby an attacking player had a limited amount of time to dribble from the halfway line and shoot past the keeper. It offers all the benefits of penalties (quick, exciting, not predetermined) but requiring more technique and offering a bit more drama. Check out the following on YouTube (2:25) to see what I’m talking about.
4. If you don’t like the idea above, what about taking a leaf out of baseball and continue the match until one team emerges as winner. To ensure we don’t have games actually playing for eternity, we could force each team to remove a player every five minutes. 
5. Sin bins. This one’s got to be a no brainer. There is so much cynical infringement and bending of rules going on that just isn’t punished. For some reason referees are terrified of penalising somebody for shirt pulling even though it can be just as decisive in impeding the opposition team as a handball or bad tackle. How many times do you see a referee running towards a perpetrator of a cynical foul reaching for his breast pocket only to remember the player has already being booked and chickening out of showing the card. A punishment in-between a sending off and a free kick is needed and a Sin Bin is the obvious contender to help clean up the game.

That’s my short list to get started, but I’m sure there’s lots more we could incorporate from US sports, what are your ideas?

posted by Cass