Tag: sports

1. Italy clearly deserved to win the European championship. They were the best team throughout the tournament, and after watching the Copa America final, in which Argentina beat Brazil 1-0, they have to be the favorites to win the World Cup next year.
2. Nice to see Messi finally get an international trophy. Pity he couldn’t score in the 88th minute; he should have shot sooner. And De Maria’s goal was a beautiful example of playing the miss.
3. Chiellini’s foul on Saka at the end of extra time was correctly given a yellow card. He was not the last man back, therefore taking down an attacker by pulling his jersey is a clear and obvious yellow, not a red. The ironic thing is that it was totally unnecessary, as all he had to do was put the ball out of bounds rather than wait for it to go out for an Italian throw-in. But he’s an old pro and he was taking no chances after the ball didn’t go out on its own before Saka arrived.
4. I don’t think there was any diversity agenda on England manager Southgate’s part. First, he was open about how Rashford and Sancho were the two best penalty-takers in training. If he’s lying, someone will leak it. Southgate is a genuine equalitarian, so he simply failed to take into account that emotional young Africans are not exactly known for their cool under pressure and practice penalties are not the same as the finals of the Euros at Wembley. Second, the fifth spot is not the high-pressure spot, in fact, it’s where you put your weakest of the five shooters due to the fact that it’s the only spot where the shooter might not get to take a shot at all.
5. That doesn’t mean that UEFA wasn’t attempting to take advantage of the situation. The VW ad for diversity playing while an African had the chance to win the championship for England was probably not a coincidence. It was amusing to see all three of them demonstrate so clearly that diversity is not a strength.
6. Southgate also said that he didn’t put Rashford and Sancho on earlier because he was afraid that if he did, the Italians would win the game in extra time. That’s not what one would call indicative of a diversity agenda.
7. Southgate’s real mistake was not sitting Harry Kane down for the final. Kane – or Kanezaghi as I like to call him given his predilection for flopping – is big, strong, and slow. It was obvious that he presented no problems for Chiellini and Bonucci, the two big, strong, and slow veterans in the Italian central defense. He should have sat Kane and put Sterling in the lone striker position, since Spain’s Morata showed how speed and quickness were the Italian defense’s weak spot in the center. Leaving Sterling on the wing meant that he could be marked by the fast young Italians on the sides.
8. Speaking of Sterling, it’s a fool’s game to think that you can successfully dive against the Italians. They have literally decades of experience in dealing with it; again and again Sterling looked to dive, but the Italians simply didn’t make contact with him in the box.
9. Most people didn’t notice it, but Italy should have scored in the 57th minute. If Insigne had kept the ball on the ground instead of going high, it was going right through Pickford’s legs.
10. Pickford and Walker were England’s best players. And Luke Shaw’s goal in the second minute was a LOT harder than he made it look.
11. If Spinazolla hadn’t been injured, the game wouldn’t have even been close.
12. Diverse teams can be strong in terms of the individual parts, but they are incredibly fragile as a whole. One minor difference of opinion between two players of different races can rapidly turn into accusations of racism and the complete destruction of any sense of being a team. France and England are experiencing this in the aftermath of their exits, which suggests both teams will underperform in the upcoming World Cup qualifiers.
13. The diversity-obsessed English sportswriters actually gave Saka, who was a complete nonentity in the game before missing his penalty, a 10/10 rating. “Saka was given a 10 out of 10 rating, the highest out of all England and Italy players, with the writers highlighting the winger’s bravery.” What a joke. He was a 5/10 on the field, and deserves to have a point knocked off for his choke job at the line. 4/10 is more like it.
14. Avanti Azzurri! L’Europa e’ vostra!

England got off to a shockingly good start, but the Azzurri took control of the game after the first 15 minutes and dominated it, although they only managed to break through and score once. However, if Insigne had gone low instead of high when he jumped on the rebound from Chiesa’s shot in the 57th minute, he would have put the ball right between Pickford’s legs for another score.

Southgate made a horrific error at the end of extra time, in my opinion, by having two young Africans, who hadn’t played at all throughout the 120 minutes, take the penalties. Not only did both of them miss, but one didn’t even put it on target.

Italy was clearly and consistently the best team of the tournament, and definitely deserved to win. And in light of Brazil’s underwhelming performance in its 1-0 loss to Argentina in the Copa America final last night, they have to be feeling very optimistic about their chances at the World Cup next summer.

The Italians, of course, are taking the championship calmly in their stride, as is their wont.

L’Europa è nostra!

Italia campione d’Europa a Wembley, Inghilterra battuta 4-3 ai rigori. Donnarumma para i due tiri decisivi.

That was big. Italy was much better than the world #1 Belgians, although a stupid and totally unnecessary foul gave Belgium the penalty that let them keep it close. I thought the Italians were the best in the group stage, and I don’t see any of the teams that are left beating them now.

Speaking of penalties, the Swiss did a fantastic job of playing catenaccio for 45 minutes to take the game to penalties after a dubious red card took them down to 10 men against Spain. But they promptly choked, missing three in a row to go out in an unexpectedly respectable performance against a better Spanish team.

It’s official. NFL football is gay. 

If you love this game, you are welcome here. Football is for all. Football is for everyone.

The NFL stands by the LGBTQ+ community today and every day.

That should go over super well with the black players, the Christian players, the black Christian players, and about 90 percent of the fan base.

I definitely don’t regret not watching any NFL games last season except the Super Bowl for the first time in 45 years. And you know this is definitely malice, not stupidity, because no one is stupid enough to watch how the NBA has destroyed itself and decide, “yeah, that looks like a great marketing strategy!”

The NFL has been converged and is being destroyed from the inside. The old school owners should have been a lot more careful about those whom they permitted to buy the teams.

 But I’ve seen hundreds of soccer matches, and I’ve never seen any player, at any level, simply face-plant like the Danish player in the Denmark-Finland match today:

Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen, who collapsed during the first half of the game against Finland in the Euro 2020 on Saturday, is stable in the hospital.

Danish FA confirmed Eriksen was “awake” and is being further examined at Rigshospitalet, a hospital in Copenhagen.

Around the 43rd minute, Eriksen had played a short pass when he fell face-forward onto the ground and was unconscious.

Spectators inside the stadium in Copenhagen went silent as players from both Denmark and Finland stood around Eriksen as CPR was administered. Eriksen received chest compressions for about 10 minutes after his collapse on the field.

Obviously, everyone hopes the young man is all right. And perhaps it was just an unfortunate coincidence. But let’s just say it would not be a massive surprise to learn he had been vaccinated. 

UPDATE: If it was the vaxx, this could have some very serious long-term implications for Serie A and other sports in Italy:

Dr Scott Murray, a leading NHS consultant cardiologist specialising in prevention of heart problems, claims Italy pride themselves on their record of preventing cardiac arrests in football – so the Danish player’s problems will likely spell the end of his time in Serie A.

He told the MailOnline: ‘It probably is (the end of his career) for him. The Italians stop people participating in sport if they are found to have a significant cardiac abnormality, it’s in law.

‘They’ve been doing that for a long time, beyond 20 years and they’ve reduced the death rates from cardiac arrests in sport from beyond 3 per cent down to below one per cent.’

It’s not so much that I had to spend a few hours at the hospital yesterday following a soccer practice – no worries, I’m fine – or the fact that I’m on some antibiotics as the fact that I was having a very strange, but rather aesthetically pleasing dream about driving a minitrain to a friend’s house through the snow to the strains of Celtic music that make me question the wisdom of doing a lot of posting over the next day or two.

Who wraps their Christmas presents in blue wrapping paper with red-and-green tartan ribbons lined in gold? And what was the significance of the little mouse riding on the minitrain? Why were the presents in the very large medieval fireplace instead of under the tree? And how was I controlling the speed of the train when there were only two buttons that let me switch lanes to pass the cars in the tunnels?

I did score four goals after two weeks of being shut out, though, so it’s all good. The full volley on the rebound from a teammate’s shot was particularly nice.

Forget despair. I’m not talking about that. Everyone understands that despair is worse than useless. What I’m talking about is a refusal to hope, which is entirely different. And the problem with a refusal to hope is this: you will not be in a position to act or take advantage of the situation in the event that things happen to break your way.

And the Knickerbockers of New Amsterdam caused all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the season ticket holder and the out-of-town tourist whose team is in town, to be given a mark on their right arm, and they provided that no man would be able to attend or to spectate, except the one who has the mark.

Just when we thought OutKick couldn’t be more on the money: vaccinations are now required to purchase second round Knicks tickets. The team just announced that tickets will be sold exclusively to vaccinated fans rather than sold to anyone who wants them. Ya know, how it’s been done for decades.

I here I always thought the rule was first tragedy, then farce. 

They must be pretty desperate if they think not permitting attendance by people who have already turned their backs on the NBA, and turned off their televisions as well, is going to make any difference to anyone at all.

It’s rather amusing to see one of the sporting world’s most converged organizations, the National Football League, finding itself caught between social justice and its pocketbook:

Race norming is sometimes used in medicine as a rough proxy for socioeconomic factors that can affect someone’s health. Experts in neurology said the way it’s used in the NFL settlement is too simplistic and restrictive, and has the effect of systematically discriminating against Black players.

“Because every Black retired NFL player has to perform lower on the test to qualify for an award than every white player. And that’s essentially systematic racism in determining these payouts,” said Katherine Possin, a neurology professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

In other major settlements, including those tied to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, all claimants were treated the same.

“We concluded, fairly quickly, that we would take the top compensation for the white male and everyone would get the same, the top dollar,” said lawyer Ken Feinberg, who has overseen many of the largest settlement funds. “We would cure this compensatory discrimination by having a rising tide raise all ships.”

The first lawsuits accusing the NFL of hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and brain damage were filed in 2011. A trickle soon became a deluge, and the NFL, rather than risk a trial, agreed in 2013 to pay $765 million over 65 years for certain diagnoses, including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. But as the claims poured in, Brody feared the fund would run out early and ordered the cap removed.

The NFL, which foots the bill, began challenging claims by the hundreds, according to the claims website.

In appealing one filed by Najeh Davenport, the NFL complained that his doctor had not used “full demographic norms” in the cognitive scoring. That meant factoring in age, education, gender — and race.

“I remain unsure what you are talking about. He was done using standard norms like everyone else. Using different racial standards is indeed discriminatory and illegal. We stand by our scores,” the physician said in response, according to court records….

The NFL’s dementia testing evaluates a person’s function in two dozen skills that fall under five sections: complex attention/processing speed; executive functioning; language; learning and memory; and visual perception. A player must show a marked decline in at least two of them to get an award.

In an example shared with The Associated Press, one player’s raw score of 19 for “letter-number sequencing” in the processing section was adjusted using “race-norming” and became 42 for whites and 46 for Blacks.

The raw score of 15 for naming animals in the language section became a 35 for whites and 41 for Blacks. And the raw score of 51 for “block design” in the visual perception section became a 53 for whites but 60 for Blacks.

Taking the 24 scores together, either a white or Black player would have scored low enough to reach the settlement’s 1.5-level of early dementia in “processing speed.” However, in the language section, the scores would have qualified a white man for a 2.0-level, or moderate, dementia finding — but shown no impairment for Blacks.

Overall, the scores would result in a 1.5-level dementia award for whites — but nothing for Blacks. Those awards average more than $400,000 but can reach $1.5 million for men under 45, while 2.0-level dementia yields an average payout of more than $600,000 but can reach $3 million.

The problem is that since blacks who play in the NFL have lower average IQs than whites who play in the NFL – which is clearly established through the league’s use of the Wonderlic test for all of its draftees – they don’t need to show as much cognitive decline to register as impaired. Indeed, there are probably a few very low-IQ players who would have registered as impaired before they played a single NFL game.

So, the average white player has to take more damage in order to reach the same level of “impairment” as the average black player, but proving this on a case-by-case basis is impossible without having an initial baseline for each player. Hence the need to race-norm, which of course flies in the face of the league’s official position on equality and therefore renders the NFL unable to utilize science or reason to defend itself.

It’s always nice to see the converged hoist on their own petard, and if there is an organization that deserves to be, it is the NFL.

A female advocate of the WNBA lectures people on why their reasons for not watching a terrible parody of a men’s sport are not acceptable:

This friend played sports at a high level, and he asked me, tentatively, whether he could explain why he doesn’t watch women’s sports. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” I wanted nothing more than to understand why someone like him—an athlete, a millennial, a feminist—had never turned on a women’s basketball game. Or, more precisely, I wanted to hear why he believes he hasn’t.

“I’ve actually thought about this a lot over the years,” he said. “Because I often feel some level of guilt about it, but when it comes down to it, I just think that if I’m going to take the time to watch sports, I want to be watching them at the peak of how they can be played—speed, strength, all of it. And to me, that pinnacle is happening on the men’s side.”

I nodded as my friend spoke. He hit all the expected notes. I don’t watch because they can’t dunk; I don’t watch because they’re like a good boy’s high school team; I don’t watch because, you know, I could probably beat them one-on-one.

Perhaps you even saw your own reasoning reflected in his. At its heart, this reasoning insists that people don’t watch the WNBA because men run faster and jump higher. That is, in fact, true. Most men do run faster and jump higher. And, yes, it’s incredibly exciting when one of those men runs fast and jumps high and we watch, in awe.

It’s a soothing rationale, this little story we tell ourselves about our insatiable appetite for windmill jams. It’s foolproof, too, because this reasoning doesn’t just absolve sports fans of any further introspection, but more important it absolves the marketers, the TV networks and the sports apparel companies. Hell, it even seems to pardon the women themselves: It’s not your fault; sports fans crave something you just can’t give them. This reasoning presents itself as more than logical; it’s biological.

Actually, it’s pathological. It’s chronic, and irrational, and it’s been stalking the WNBA since its founding. In the U.S., this lie is the serial killer of women’s professional leagues. To name a few: the American Basketball League (1996–98), the Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–03), the Women’s Professional Softball League (’97–01) and Women’s Professional Soccer (’07–12).

The WNBA, though, is resilient. When launched in 1996, the league was ahead of its time—in almost every way. Long before Big Business saw the value, the players of the W stood against racial injustice, and for equality, and took the hits—“Every direction we turned, we were walking into a wall,” says WNBA legend Sue Bird—for representing the folks at society’s margins. “People think you’re supposed to look and talk and be a certain way, but the WNBA blasts all of those things out of the water,” says A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces. “And you should want that. We are standing on the shoulders of women who didn’t back down just because casual sports fans didn’t think they were worthy. That’s what makes our league better, because we have faced those hurdles. I can’t think of another league that gets hit with every single last knock, and I don’t see that going away, but we’re not going to let that stop us.”

Understanding why we watch sports isn’t just a thought experiment. It has practical implications. Rather than passively believing the WNBA is biologically inferior, we can actively recognize that no athletes in modern history have faced more cultural obstacles than the players of the W. Not only are comparisons to the men ubiquitous—and the differences rendered clearer because of the unique intimacy of the sport—but also, more important, no women’s league has a higher percentage of Black athletes, meaning that for nearly a quarter century the WNBA has been rowing against the headwinds of racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment.

What a deeply stupid article! The amusing thing is that this idiot woman is trying to sell the WNBA on the very same basis that has most – not many, but most – former NBA fans turning off the men’s game, thereby offering additional support for my hypothesis that SJWs are both evil and stupid.

Most women’s sports are not an alternative or a variant of the similar men’s sport. They are parodies. And they harbor absolutely no appeal for any actual fan of the sport itself, unless one happens to find entertainment in the comedic aspect of watching sustained incompetence.

There are some women’s sports that are superior to the men’s versions. For example, women’s tennis is better in the rare circumstances that it is competitive for the same reason that men’s tennis was better when the players used smaller wooden rackets. It’s boring to watch two 6’6″ men using oversized titanium weaponry to launch rocket serves at each other that neither of them can return. And women’s soccer actually makes for relatively interesting viewing now that no top-level male player not named Ronaldo or Messi is capable of beating a defender one-on-one anymore.

(I think the men’s game could use bigger fields or two less players per side to open up more space, but that’s a tangent for another day.)

In general, women’s sports are tedious, parodistic, and parasitical on the male versions. Which is why the WNBA will collapse, sooner rather than later, as a consequence of the NBA’s vanishing audience.