Tag: sports

Well, starting the Bills defense against Jacksonville looked a lot better on paper than it has in London. This is your weekly NFL open thread.

This would be it. And if you wanted to discuss the incredible end to the Michigan-Michigan State game, that would be understandable. While I have no doubt Harbaugh will somehow be blamed for not winning the game, I very much doubt the punter was instructed to do anything other than fall on the ball in case of a bad snap.

Football is not the only activity where trying to fix a problem that doesn’t need to be fixed is the best way to ensure complete disaster.

A bit late on this one, but I just fired up the Vikings game. I didn’t see the early games, so discuss amongst yourselves.

This is your weekly NFL open thread. I have to confess that I’m a little disappointed that Philip Rivers broke Dan Fouts’s San Diego record last week; I know the game has changed, but when I think Chargers, I still think first of Air Coryell and Fouts.

Sure, they don’t grasp either sportsmanship or emotional continence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t offer considerable entertainment in their own right:

By the side of the green, Hull could clearly be seen walking towards the next tee in a gesture that golfers the world over will recognize as the tacit concession of a tiny putt. Lee duly scooped her ball up, only to be met by Pettersen’s fiery insistence that no such concession had been made. ‘Europe one up,’ declared the referee, who had no choice but to apply the dictum: rules are rules.

Cue pandemonium. Down the 18th hole the European coterie of captains and assistant captains debated what had happened. Surely one of them could see it drove a coach and horses through the idea that the spirit of the game is a vital part of the integrity of these matches?

Under the rules they had the opportunity to offer a concession of the final hole and make things right. It cried out for strong leadership – or just common sporting decency, for that matter – but sadly none was forthcoming from the captain, Carin Koch.

It says everything about the grotesqueness of it all that Hull had taken her record to four wins out of four – and yet still ended the match in floods of tears.

Awesome. Frankly, I think women’s sports would be a lot more popular if they stopped trying to imitate the men and just embraced the full extent of cattiness and head games that women are capable of bringing to intra-sexual relations.

This will serve as your NFL open thread.

This is your weekly open NFL thread. I’m disappointed the Vikes aren’t playing until tomorrow night, but it will be good to see some football again anyhow, Roger Goodell notwithstanding.

Less politics, more football. How hard is that?

And if you don’t like football, that’s nice. No one asked for your opinion. Go talk about how much you don’t like it somewhere else. We don’t care.

I have to say, I haven’t seen my team this confident since we were the two-time league champions. Our second game was against the other new team in the league, and although they’d lost 4-2 to our arch-rivals, last year’s second-place team, the word was that it was only because they’d played all 19 players and the weaker substitutes let them down in the second half.

Somewhat to my surprise, I started at attacker, although I came out after 20 minutes with us up 1-0. At halftime, we were up 3-0 and in control of the game, so much so that after losing two of their players to injury, they asked if they could borrow a player. Since I’d already played, our captain offered me, and they put me in at left midfield, where I promptly intercepted a pass and very nearly scored against my own team.

To illustrate the gap in talent between the two teams, I am the worst starter on my team, but I was the second-best player on their team. Their only attack was me combining with their center mid, and if I hadn’t been defending on the left side, we would have had at least three more goals. I have no idea what happened to their left defender, but at several points I found myself defending our right defender, our right mid, and a striker by myself. We won 7-1, but it could have easily been 14-1.

The third game was against our neighbors, who are always overmatched but nevertheless play us surprisingly tough. They even beat us at their place 2-1 last year thanks to some poor substitutions on our part combined with a pair of late corner kicks. They are old, fat, and slow, but highly skilled, and their slow pace has tended to disrupt our game the last two years. We had all three of the younger strikers present and our captain elected to start at striker, so I figured I’d play in the second half, but instead I found myself starting at right mid.

(This is why it is important to show that you can play different positions, as you’ll always get plenty of playing time if you are willing and able to play wherever the team needs you. The only four positions I can’t play at this level are the two center mids and the two central defenders; I can play goalie and once even stopped a penalty shot in a game.)

The first 15 minutes were much the same as in previous years. We controlled the ball but couldn’t do anything with it. The right defender was the guy who is usually the substitute and he put us in danger once by charging forward at the wrong time without telling me; a quick reversal would have given their left midfielder a very good chance if the cross hadn’t been too long. But not long after that our captain got a through ball, and for once I remembered to chase after him, knowing that he’s lately shown a tendency to drill the ball directly at the keeper. He did, and the ball rebounded right where I anticipated, but too high to volley. It was also too low to head, so I hit it with my knee just inside the box and somehow managed to put it in the upper right corner. 1-0 and the dam was broken.

I took myself out about five minutes later, as we had plenty of substitutes and I was winded from controlling the left side. By the time I went back in at striker around the middle of the second half, it was already 5-1. We blew about 10 more opportunities, two of them my fault, as my shots beat the goalie twice but curved wide left of the post. Even so, we ended up winning 7-1, giving us nine points to start the season and a three-game goal difference of 19. We haven’t faced any real tests yet, but our confidence is sky-high and I’m quite looking forward to our game against last year’s champions. We beat them and tied them in our two games last year, so I’ll be very disappointed if we can’t beat them twice this year.

The secret of our success this year appears to be a combination of our strikers being able to capitalize on their chances and our midfielders’ ability to control the wings. I don’t think there has been a single chance created from either the left side or the right so far this season; the biggest change is that we now have four outside midfielders who are capable of attacking, then getting back on defense.

Although I started last season well, scoring six goals in the fall half, I missed nearly half our games in the spring and didn’t score at all, missing far too many good opportunities. Scoring is funny for an attacker; when it comes easily it comes effortlessly, but the more you think about it, the harder it gets. Some of it is bad luck, some of it is nerves, and some of it is poor decision-making.

We started the season this weekend and I figured I’d get less playing time because we’ve got two new attackers in their early thirties who have moved up from the first team due to losing their starting positions to younger, better players. Along with a pair of new midfielders, they are much-needed reinforcements that should see us back in competition for the league title that we used to own. Rather to my surprise, I ended up starting at left wing, although only because the usual starter was arriving late since he was coaching one of the kid’s teams on one of our other fields.

We needed a referee, but our captain turned down Ender when he volunteered because the team we were playing is an all-Albanian team new to the league. Albanians are famous throughout Europe for their volatility, even in comparison with Italians, and it was easy to understand why a teenage referee would be a suboptimal choice. The guys were pretty pessimistic about the game in general, as apparently the Albanians had one former second-league player and at least two former third-league players, which was three more high-level players than we had.

However, I tended to like our chances a little better after the Albanians arrived and five of them turned out to be former teammates, two of whom I particularly like. The atmosphere was the exact opposite of heated, as everyone was visibly glad to see each other, many handshake-hugs were exchanged, and I realized that three of their players were technically skilled players who made our team worse two years ago because they seldom pass the ball and never, ever look outside. Better yet, the really good striker who played two games with us two seasons ago and is a serious scoring machine (5 goals in those two games), was injured and had come only along to watch, so that left the guy who had been my favorite partner up top being the only serious cause for concern among the known quantities.

We got off to a bad start, however, and it was partly my fault. The captain told me to play with a defensive orientation, as Sylvan, the defender behind me, was the weak link in the back four, being short and the only player on the team older than me. (It’s generally not a good sign when the average age of your left side is 47 and their attackers and center mids are all in their early 30s.) But despite our age, both of us are in very good condition, and for the most part, we managed to control the left… except for the one time – the ONE time – I didn’t hang back and attacked.

By that point, I knew I could beat my man, their right wing, whenever I wanted, so when we had the ball in their half and I saw the left defender follow an attacker inside, I waved at our center mid and broke hard. The timing was perfect and I was onside with a clear path to goal, but Sandro mishit the ball and it curved well behind me. Their right wing intercepted it and passed it immediately up the field to Vallon, a former teammate who doesn’t pass, but is strong, fast, and formidable on the ball. Sylvan did his best and fought him the whole way, but was overpowered and outrun, and Vallon beat Giuseppe, our keeper, without any trouble.

Despite being down, we were starting to control the action and just missed on two half-chances. The regular left wing showed up not too long after the second one, so I came out just before we started scoring. Their left wing just couldn’t cope with our right wing, who sent over a pair of crosses that both ended up in the net. Then a missed offsides call gave us a one-on-one break that one of our new attackers finished in a clinical manner, so it was 3-1 at the half.

A penalty kick and another headed cross made it 5-1 before I finally went back in, this time as an attacker. I beat the defenders on the left and had a great chance, but shot the ball a little too high, at waist-level, which let the diving goalie get his arm on it. Our left wing followed me in and should have scored on the rebound, but he tried to play around with it before shooting and was promptly shut down. My second chance was much the same, a weak left-footed shot that was blocked, but it was worse because I somehow missed seeing a wide-open Sandro in the center. (In fairness, he didn’t call for the ball, so I had no idea he was there.)

Sandro didn’t hold it against me, though, when later he dribbled around both defenders on the right, drew the goalie out to meet him, then slipped the ball backwards to me as I trailed. I probably should have driven hard to the left to clear the keeper then passed the ball into the empty net, but instead I hit it on the first touch from outside the box, putting it in a nice high arc that cleared the goalie before abruptly dipping down into the upper right corner. Thus was the duck broken. Our captain put in one more to close out the game, and we ended up winning 7-1 against the team everyone had expected to beat us.

The lesson: a team that runs and plays well together will easily beat better players who don’t run well. Losing both wings killed them, because for all their ball skills, that meant they were forced to attack straight down the clogged center, then deal with our wings and outside defenders collapsing on them if they managed to break through the two center mids and the two central defenders. At times, their wings were 20 or 30 meters behind ours, so they were consistently reduced to trying to attack 3 or 4 on 8 in limited space. It was a testimony to their skill that they managed any pressure on us at all.

Tactics + athletics beat skill. The two least-skilled starters of the 22 men on the field were our right-wing and me, and the normal starter who replaced me on the left wing isn’t much better, although at least he is left-footed. But all three of us can run, and it doesn’t matter how good your ball skills are when you’re consistently 15 meters behind the ball. And if your worst players can contribute two assists and one goal, plus control both sides of the field between them, then your team is probably in pretty good shape.

The guy who had been their keeper in the second half was my former attacking partner; he’d gone into the net at halftime. He came up to me after the game and gave me a hard time about getting stuffed on the two easier chances, then hitting on the difficult shot. I explained that I am a football artist and scoring in easy and obvious ways only bores me. He laughed, but I don’t think he bought it.