Tag: sports

What a bicycle shot that was by the Serbian player! Pity the goalie was right there to stop it. Interesting attack-oriented formation by Serbia, it seems to be working well against Costa Rica.

UPDATE: Massive upset of defending champions Germany by Mexico, 1-0. Mexico deserved it too; the German defense was shockingly bad and totally unable to deal with the Mexican counterattacks.

UPDATE: Great result for the Swiss, taking a point off the Brazilians. They have no scoring up front and Shaqiri is barely a net positive despite his skill due to his refusal to pass on the break, but they’re rock-solid on defense and hard to beat.

I didn’t bother watching the France-Australia game. Argentina-Iceland has been a very good game between two very different teams. I can’t believe Bjarnisson missed that sidefooted attempt at an open net, but Iceland made up for it only a few minutes later. Aguero’s goal was a nicely placed, highly technical shot which gave the goalie no chance to block it, and I thought the ref’s no-call on the inadvertant handball on the ground in the Icelandic box was an excellent one.

Argentine looked to overwhelm them for a little while after they scored, but Iceland is tough and didn’t crack. It wouldn’t shock me if they wore the Argentines down in the second half and pulled off yet another upset.

I paid no attention to the first two games, but Spain-Portugal is proving even more entertaining that expected. 2-1 Portugal at halftime, with Ronaldo scoring both goals.

WOW! Love him or hate him, Cristiano Ronaldo is simply awesome. Portugal came very close to stealing that game from a superior Spanish team.

This is an open thread to discuss il Mondiale. Russia plays Saudi Arabia today.

The Philadelphia Eagles have to go back:

President Trump on Monday abruptly rescinded an invitation to host the Eagles at the White House, citing the “smaller delegation” that was planning to attend and again stoking a national debate by insisting that players “proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart.”

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a statement released late Monday. “They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country. The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.

“These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony — one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the National Anthem. I will be there at 3:00 p.m. with the United States Marine Band and the United States Army Chorus to celebrate America.”

The Eagles were scheduled to be honored by Trump at 3 p.m. on the South Lawn. Fewer than 10 players planned to attend, a team source told the Inquirer and Daily News.

It would certainly be amusing if Trump ordered tax audits for all the Eagle players, ala Clinton. But on a more serious note, this is another demonstration that the USA is no longer a nation-state, it is a multinational, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious empire of diverse peoples battling for power and influence over their rivals.

The crumbling of the American moral code continues:

The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of New Jersey in the state’s challenge to the federal law known as The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The law barred states from legalizing gambling on sporting events with the notable exception of Nevada and less notable exceptions for sports lotteries in three other states.

The court’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional, which came by a 7-2 vote, sets the stage for states to start allowing gambling on sports. How that will be implemented from state to state remains to be seen, but the amount of money on the table will lead many of them to make risking a few bucks on your favorite team a fairly easy undertaking.

What’s next? Prostitution and sex slavery, presumably. The good news is that since gambling is essentially a tax on stupidity, the ongoing decline in average US intelligence should help maximize the revenues.

When designing a government system for the future, remember that it is the judicial branch and the concept of “interpreting the law” that proved to be the weak point.

You may recall that a few weeks ago I mentioned that I’d gotten a bit banged up and played a disappointingly bad game. Since then, I’ve been amping up my effort in practice on the theory “you play like you practice”, and it’s been having positive results. Two weeks ago, my side practiced a man down for the entire two hours – our captain’s basic theory of practice is to scrimmage until someone literally collapses, then play another 15 minutes or so – and still managed to come out on top. My shot was off, as I hit four posts or crossbars and failed to put anything in, but I made up for it on the defensive side.

In the league game, we crushed our former archrivals 10-3; we were up 7-0 before some of the defenders started getting careless and lazy. I had two assists, including one 30-meter pass that put the attacker beyond the defense just inside the box, one-on-one with the goalie. He ran on to it, hit it, and scored. I also had one decent chance from the left corner of the box, but hooked it wide.

The funny thing about the goal is that the guy who scored it hadn’t played with us this year, but had been serving as the ref at our home games. Ergo my complete thought process, as follows:

• open man long clear lane through THERE
• wait, is that M?
• isn’t he the ref?
• can’t be, we’re not at home
• KICK don’t fade don’t fade YES!

But practice this week was the best I’ve played in years. I scored six of our 13 goals, including one header, which practically never happens. I earned my third start in a row, which would have been more meaningful if we’d had more than 12 players on hand. We’ve lost four in the last three weeks to injury, which poses a problem because I simply cannot effectively cover a wing for 90 minutes at my age.

Fortunately, we got off to a fast start, which let me concentrate on controlling the defensive two-thirds of the left wing and leaving the front one-third to the attackers. I played for 20 minutes, took a 5-minute breather, then was switched to the right side, and started the attack that led to our second goal. I also made the dumbest possible clearance pass into the center instead of simply kicking the ball out of bounds when my first two passing options were blocked, but fortunately, our goalie bailed me out with a good save. It was the sort of mistake I would have benched my kiddy players for making, but our captain settled for a brief and well-deserved “WTF-FWT?” monologue in my direction at halftime and promptly put me back in on the right wing.

Note to players – don’t ever let in-game comments from other players who are not the captain influence your subsequent actions. My decision was stupid, but it only came up because I had just previously been warned by another midfielder about the danger of bringing the ball up myself out of the box instead of passing it. The thing is, I KNEW I could safely beat the opposing wing, no problem, which I had just done, and which I could have easily done again. But with that admonition freshly in my mind, I looked to pass it instead of simply blowing past the guy, and this time, both pass options were completely blocked. So, with the thought “must pass the ball” on my mind rather than “in deep, play safe”, I looked inside, saw the right color, and made the stupid and dangerous pass into the middle, where my teammate received the ball, and was promptly knocked off it by an opposing player. I should have simply done what I did the previous time, take the ball outside, beat the opposing wing, then look up before looking in.

We didn’t score again, but we kept control of the ball and the game despite being unable to substitute after one of our attackers was taken down hard early in the second half and banged up too much to run. We won 2-0 and moved up to second place, with a game against the first-place team next week. Despite the injuries, we’re 3-1 in our last four games and we should be getting our best defender back in a week or two.

This is an open thread to discuss Day One of the NFL Draft. And just to get the conversation started, if I was the GM of the Cleveland Browns, I’d take Barkley, then Mayfield, with Allen as my fallback unless Darnold was still available and Mayfield wasn’t.

I don’t think that is what they will do, however. I think they’ll take a quarterback at 1, then the Giants will take Barkley, as they should.

This season has been a difficult one for me so far. Four games (including two friendlies), two starts, no goals. I had a horrible game last week, which was of some concern to me because it’s the first time I felt as if I was playing like a fragile old man afraid to go in and win a contested ball. One thing I’ve noticed with age is that it’s harder to play in cold weather and that one tends to become more contact-avoidant for fear of injury. Then again, the last time we played our most recent opponent, one of our defenders snapped the leg of an attacker like a twig with a late tackle, so it could be argued that this is more late-onset wisdom than cowardice. It also doesn’t help that I’m now playing at 180 instead of 190, which helps with the speed and endurance, but puts you at a distinct disadvantage when going shoulder-to-shoulder with a 200-pound defender.

Anyhow, I had a distressingly bad game last week. Even when I am overmatched in terms of speed or fitness I can usually keep at least the defensive half of my wing under control, but the left defender and I were completely out of sync and allowed two crosses that led to goals, at least one of which should have never happened. We both stood there, waiting for the other to close on the guy with the ball, and gave him the opening he needed to cross it. In fairness, I probably shouldn’t have been playing at that point, as I’d already taken myself out of the game earlier after receiving a hard knee to the thigh that left me limping for three days afterward. But still, I had told the captain I was okay to go back in, so that was entirely on me.

The problem was that the bruise slowed me down just enough to inhibit me from trying to move the ball forward myself, and we had changed our stopper from an attack-minded player to a defensive-minded one, so when I received the ball on the wing, I looked to pass it in to the middle right away rather than pushing it up myself. This would normally have been all right, but with our new stopper, instead of advancing the ball he invariably passed it back to one of the other defenders. More than once, I ended up with the ball again, which meant our attacks were going precisely nowhere.

It was probably one of the worst games I’ve ever played, and my on-field plus-minus was uncharacteristically negative at net -1, but fortunately we were playing a weak team so we ended up winning 5-3 anyhow. The problem was that our next game was against the second-best team in the league, and one which we have always had to be on our game in order to beat. And, of course, at my age, there is always the looming possibility that one simply can’t play anymore.

At practice, I played hard for more than two hours despite the bruised thigh, finished fourth in the team penalty kick competition, and that served to get my mindset back to normal, more or less. However, on game night I knew we were in trouble when two of our three best players showed up but did not suit up due to injury, and was even more alarmed when the captain started me at attacker despite last week’s debacle. I like playing up front, but not when both our starting wings are more inclined to push forward and assist the attack than getting back to help out the defense. Sure enough, despite controlling the ball for most of the first 10 minutes, we went down 1-0 on their first serious attack coming from the wing. We produced little in the way of chances, except for a header on a corner that just missed and one cross that I put just inches too deep in front of our other striker. At halftime were down 2-0 on a beautiful free kick that struck the underside of the far corner and banked in. It wasn’t even one of their best players taking it either; these guys are really good. Not even Buffon at his best could have saved that one.

I was out for a while, and we went down another goal, but they were starting to wear down a bit, and I went back in on the left wing, which helped us start putting pressure on both wings. I burned the defender on the side once, but my pull-back pass into the box was too fast for our captain to put in the net, although he scored a beautiful goal on the following post-corner chaos. The ball came low and hard, bounced off my shins on the far side, and ricocheted off a defender. As they pushed forward on the clearance, our captain retrieved it, turned, and shot high just as the goalie was moving up, catching him completely off-guard. 3-1.

We kept attacking, but that was all we managed and that’s how it ended. It was a good game, all in all, and they deserved to win. We get along with them well despite last season’s unfortunate incident, and there were two or three amusing “here, it’s your ball – no, really, it’s your ball” situations after someone went down and both sides called for a halt in play. It was a festive evening, as Ender’s team was playing on our other field and won their game 5-2. It was fun to introduce him afterwards to one of the former pros who plays for the team that beat us, as Ender has a lot of respect for the retired pros and internationals, and they are always pleased to be recognized by the younger generation of players.

So, false alarm on the age front. The former pro and I were talking about the challenges our years pose, as we are of an age, and he figures we can both play until at least 55. My original goal was to make it to 50, but I am happy to revise that in view of his professional opinion.

I was watching these Saquon Barkley highlights, and they really reminded me of Adrian Peterson, except for the fact that Barkley also catches the ball very well.