MY VERY OWN MODERATING EDITORIAL REFLECTIVE ON THE STATE OF U.S. SOCCER IN LIEU OF THE CONFEDERATIONS CUP FINALS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Brazil, Confederations Cup, Spain, Style, US Soccer, Youth Soccer on June 30th, 2009
With its run to the Confederations Cup final the U.S. national team has inched closer to shedding its liminal status – between soccer nobody and soccer somebody. It’s closer to deserving more international respect. It’s also closer to disrupting the sine curve of results that has produced infrequent upsets against superior teams (see 1930, 1950, 1998, 2002), to which we can add Spain, 2009. The tipping point won’t come with one result, and probably won’t come for a while. But the national exposure and enthusiasm that comes with the country’s recent international success undoubtedly works toward expediting a protracted molting process.
The U.S. performance in the Confederations Cup has soccer fans and non-fans in this country buzzing, looking to compare it with the most unlikely upsets in American sporting history. The win over Spain drew comparisons to the “Miracle on Ice” when an amateur U.S. hockey team defeated the U.S.S.R. in 1980. On grass, the U.S. played with similar determination and sacrifice. The team deserved all the heart-pounding adjectives lavished on it by the media. On Sunday, the U.S. continued its attempt to upset the balance of the soccer world, like a buoy jammed underwater. The U.S. almost withstood Brazil. But it didn’t. Brazil’s second-half dominance restored the balance of the global game.
I’m not glad that the U.S. lost. But in a way it might be the right result, the most natural one. Yes, a U.S. win would have further boosted the prominence of soccer in our homeland. But it also might have made us too giddy and too expectant, made the average fan too annoyingly confident in the face of foreign superiority that demands our modesty and respect. I’m not ready for the U.S. to shed its underdog mentality yet. This mentality is unifying and powerful. And I don’t think the nation is ready for anything else.
As many of the more sober analysts have already said, the U.S.’s performance doesn’t mean that the team has “arrived!” or that we can consistently compete and win against the giants of the game. Like Spanish defender Carles Puyol suggested, if the U.S. played Spain ten times, it would lose nine. Probably true. For this reason alone, the U.S. victory over Spain deserves a resounding celebration. It also deserves a re-sounding after the media’s swooning over this team dries up until next year’s World Cup. It’s easy to get carried away. Soccer serves as one of the few sporting arenas where Americans can actually be considered underdogs, where we can still route for the grit and guts of our players instead of for the superiority of factory-produced physiques and skills. This is part of what makes the sport so attractive to me in this country. It’s still raw and unpolished compared to the real article. This is also the problem. Americans aren’t as technically trained or refined as their South American and European counterparts. This is a cruel fact. They lack the suave, the guile, the natural creativity. In short, they lack the style. Despite the U.S. success in the Confederations Cup, its lack of style still represents the team’s most glaring weakness.
The team’s heart and work-ethic might lay the foundation of a larger identity, but this identity is still barely forming. Passion and bravery can take a group far – about as far as a ragged U.S. team pushed in the Confederations Cup. But In an international sport in which every team pours forth with fully stocked wells of passion, it’s the skill-level of players that makes the difference.
Lacking such skill, the U.S. needs to hang on against better teams, to pray for the right opportunities and to pounce on them. For the majority of both the Spain and Brazil games the U.S. defense dug its nails in against a wave of relentless and flowing attacks. In those two games, the U.S. got out-shot 35-12. But it played with a remarkable understanding of its own abilities. It played with intelligent and relentless defensive pressure, with measured and swift counter-attacks that punished the best teams in the world for their over-aggressiveness. Such a backs-against-the-wall survivalist mentality might force other nations to give more respect to our bite, but it won’t necessarily give us the self-belief or self-evident expression needed to carve out space on the stage of world soccer powers.
Landon Donovan summed up a lot of this in typically political fashion in comparing an emerging U.S. team to an established Brazilian one after the U.S. loss: “We’ve got the potential to be at that level. The difference is, Brazil has been there before. A lot of their players have been in games like this, and they knew how to finish it and how to win. We still have to learn that. We have a lot of guys on our team who haven’t played a lot of national team games, haven’t played a lot of high-level club games, that were starting. You can tell there’s a difference there.”
“Look, it’s Brazil,” Donovan said. “You have to expect they’re going to get chances. They’re going to keep coming. What are you going to do? They have players that are probably worth three times as much as our whole team. There’s a reason for that.”
The American players are coming, slowly. Soccer in this country is growing, in fits and starts, only some of which we can measure. Most importantly, it continues to grow at the grassroots level, as passion for the global game fills the fissures of America’s fractured sports landscape. Participation in youth soccer continues to swell. Immigrant blood continues to boost passion for the sport while eroding the sport’s stubborn stigma as white and suburban. The sport reflects glimpses of this growth at its frothing head, measured by the commercial interest and TV ratings it attracts.
As the late great Brit-American journalist Steven Wells said it in a recent interview with Richard Whittall on EPL talk: “I’d even go as far as to say that the day that soccer really succeeds in the US isn’t when the US wins the World Cup, it’s when it becomes the default sport in the nation’s playgrounds. Which—in Darwinian terms—it really should, being far better suited to that arena (and way more fun as well as being better exercise) than all the alternatives. Way to go yet though…”
I agree with Wells. I just suspect, or at least hope, that the two measurements of success that he suggests will coincide.◊
OF COURSE! THE U.S. BEATS SPAIN AND AN OIL COMPANY HELPS ANALYZE PLAYER PERFORMANCE!
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Confederations Cup, FIFA, Feet, Spain, Statistics, Style, US Soccer on June 24th, 2009
Castrol GTX May Not Let Your Engine Break Down, But They Know How to Break Down A Game
In case you weren’t aware, the ever-prescient governing body of soccer has partnered with Castrol GTX to develop the “definitive system” to rate player performance. Not only does it rate performance, but it rates performance objectively! According to a clarifying explanation on the Fifa.com website, the infinitely complex system “tracks every move on the field and assesses whether it has a positive or negative impact on a team’s ability to score or concede a goal.”
Why even watch games anymore when watching games won’t even tell you which players “truly deserve to grab all the headlines”? If you’re as much of a soccer enthusiast as I am, then you simply need to know which players these are! I mean Fernando Torres, David Villa and Kaka in the top three? Who would have thought? Now I look at them in a newly edifying light. They’re so … technologically advanced.
The secret to the revealing analysis lies in the carefully calibrated zones into which the Castrol Index has divided the field. Passes completed into higher-rated zones are worth more “Castrol points.” The same is true for tackles or interceptions in the most advanced or dangerous zones. In other words, Castrol points are brilliantly simple and complex at the same time, kind of like the internal combustion engine.
Why didn’t I think if the Castrol Index? Probably for the same reason I don’t know how to engineer a high-mileage motor oil with “magnetic properties” and “57% better sludge protection than competitive oil.” I wouldn’t even know how to begin measuring that. Science is amazing.
Now that such a system exists, I won’t even bother trying to analyze the U.S.-Spain game because I’d probably get it all wrong. Somehow, though, I’ve been lucky enough to get one of the developers of the revolutionary system to be a guest commentator on the semifinal match. So the esteemed Dr. Sludge, who has degrees in both synthetic engineering and soccer statistics, is going to take over from here. You might want to get out your protractors and calculators, though, because Dr. Sludge can get awfully mathematical. Just kidding! Dr. Sludge makes even complex algorithms so easy to digest that he doesn’t even need to explain them because you just know they’re true. Go ahead Dr. Sludge!
Thank you, Thank you. Really, thanks Cyrus for letting me speak with such an adroit and influential soccer audience. Hello Footsmoke.com!
Can I get some epic classical music in the background? Do you have any Brahms? OK. Actually, something a little slower? Heavier? That’s the stuff. Dim the lights. Nice …. Ahem…
“It’s not easy to repel blistering speed. It’s not easy to take on bone-freezing passes. It’s not easy to defy the physical laws of international soccer….
But team U…S…A was not an easy team to develop…
Its synthetic-odometric-enduroefficiency-coverage ensures that it keeps going, even in the 90th minute. Especially in the 90th minute. Because we all know 90th minutes can last lifetimes. And in pressurized conditions like this they can cost games, even lives.
The U.S.’s anti-sludge-combustication-rating ensured that Spain’s pressure couldn’t break its defense down. Stuck together in magnetized-globulated-adhesion (TM), the U.S. defense didn’t crack under even the most extreme Spanish pressure. Its thermo-activated-appendages got between hot Spanish shots and a cracked goalmouth.
Most importantly, the U.S. blocked Spain’s anti-hydro-viscosity-passing-completion-rating from getting too high. And anti-hydro-viscosity-passing-completion-ratings can kill. Obviously.
Also the U.S. had Oguchi Onweyu and Tim Howard.
Thank you.”
◊
WHAT? THE U.S. EMERGES OUT OF GROUP OF WORLD CUP CLASS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Bob Bradley, Brazil, Confederations Cup, Hejduk, Style, US Soccer on June 22nd, 2009
No Heart? I’m All Heart Mother…
*As the U.S. National Team attempts to qualify for the World Cup in 2010, I will write a series of pieces concentrating on the style, or lack of it, of American soccer. See the other three here and here and here.
Lucky? Yeah. Holy shit, yeah. The U.S. got a waist-high boost from Brazil’s 3-0 thrashing of Italy to advance to the semifinal round of the Confederations Cup. But after the grit and determination it showed on Sunday, the team deserves some apologies, some reconsideration.
Before Sunday, most critics wrote the team off as over-classed and under-talented when compared with any good international team. Maybe this is true. But for me watching the U.S. was more disillusioning than revealing. Following the Brazil game, it looked like the tournament was a lost cause, both in determining a more consistent lineup and in spurring any team or individual confidence. While the U.S. showed that it could frustrate good teams, at least for spells, it looked incapable of producing anything like a functional attack. In one of the more hopeless throes of fandom in recent memory, I just hoped for a few linked passes – a shot on goal.
After Sunday’s performance against Egypt, we can all take a breath from the thick criticism and humming African air. When it needs to, when it has all eleven players on the field at once, the U.S. can attack. As Paul Gardner said in his pro-attacking reaction to the game: “The straightforward lust for goals is something new for this team, a Bob Bradley team. The usual caution had to be abandoned, and many a risk had to be taken.” Risk produced goals.
In addition to risk, the U.S. showed some of the characteristics that have been most persistent and true to the team’s identity over the years – namely perseverance and energy and grit – all of which the U.S. left behind inexplicably in its first two games. These are some of the principles on which the good ole U.S.A was founded, or so I’ve heard. And in the sports realm they are obvious and unifying. In large part, they represent one reason why I like watching the U.S. play. Usually I know that whichever team the U.S. plays, it will play that opponent hard – maybe too hard – with so much feist and defensive spirit that its opponent won’t have the time or space to work any of its exotic magic. At its best, the U.S. energy creates a different game, one that must be played a faster-than-normal pace, which forces its opponent to raise the magic of its game to a higher level if it is to succeed.
At the very least, this is the legacy of U.S. players like Frankie Hejduk. While he might not be as talented as anyone he lines up against on the wing, he will grind them into the lime of the sidelines with his energy. And in his absence, I hope we can have more talented U.S. defenders play with half his spirit.
Although characteristics like energy and perseverance don’t always win games at the highest level, they don’t lose them either. And as the U.S. proved against Egypt, such characteristics can be as invaluable on attack as on defense. For example, Charlie Davies produced the game’s first goal with more grit than talent. And his effort was emblematic of the U.S. style as a whole. Although it lacked guile, it had a straightforward urgency and speed that necessarily put Egypt under pressure. The other two goals came from purposeful offensive surges. Although hardly flowing or dazzling, they came from clean and efficient attacks that put Egypt at the mercy of American strengths – speed and power.
It was also encouraging to see the personalities of American stars come through their shells in this game. Oguchi Onweyu dominated the air and the box. Landon Donovan attacked with tireless pace and pointed guile. And Michael Bradley put in another performance that worked towards cementing his place in the center of the midfield. A refreshing American talent, he is as gritty as he is technical. The second goal, a quick and precise combination with Donovan that ended with Bradley tucking a sliding pass into the corner of the goal, presented these attributes in one fluid play.
Lastly, Clint Dempsey. For all his too-cool-for-school-and-defense attitude, he often appeared the most creative player in white, unlocking Egypt with a few incisive passes in the first half. And after all the criticism Dempsey endured from commentator John Harkes, some of which was deserved but much of which got comically egregious in the second half as Harkes vented biases about individual players instead of watching the game, Dempsey won the game for the U.S.. His snapping header in traffic displayed exactly the leftover determination that Harkes criticized him for lacking. It left Harkes and all the other critics struggling to capture their surprise and the improbability of the result, to revise the harshness of their reactions to the first two games.
The critics, however (including myself) weren’t necessarily wrong. This is only one win. Many questions about players and tactics persist.
But this game served to remind the critics, and the team itself, that grit or passion (or whatever other cliche you want to use) represents the one fundamental trait that the team needs to survive. All the team’s best players have it. Some could use more of it. It can serve as a baseline from which everything good springs.
Maybe all good teams need such a baseline. But somehow effort seems more crucial to the U.S., maybe because we have little else to rely on. It’s sewn into the fabric of American sports lore. It’s “Miracle” and “Rocky.” It’s a lot of elbow-grease, or maybe knee-grease in soccer’s case, and it’s lung-bursting sprints after the ball. Of course we crave flare and fluidity, more touch and guile, but as long as we have effort we know that other teams will still fear and respect us. And this is crucial to forging any sort of meaningful identity.
As Micheal Bradley said after the game:
“All the f—— experts in America, everybody who thinks they know about soccer, they can all look at the score tonight and let’s see what they have to say now. Nobody has any respect for what we do, for what goes on on the inside, so let them all talk now.” ◊
THE U.S. NATIONAL TEAM: THE ‘MAGIC ELEVEN BALL’
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Bob Bradley, Confederations Cup, US Soccer on June 18th, 2009
How do you rate a team that hasn’t really played so far? Bob Bradley is probably dealing with this himself after two hopeless games against Italy and Brazil. Touted as a tournament that would provide answers to persistent lineup questions for the U.S., the Confederations Cup has provided more of the opposite: questions – some about tactics and most about individuals. I imagine that for Bob Bradley, who hasn’t impressed with his decisions, watching the Confederations Cup has been as unrevealing and unhelpful as shaking a magic eight ball.
Does DeMarcus Beasley deserve another chance after one of worst performances of his career? Looks doubtful.
Will I give him another one if he promises to do better? Outlook good.
Does Sacha Kljestan deserve another chance after a completely ineffective first half and a rash challenge early in the second that saw him sent off and once again put added pressure on the U.S. to defend when that was the last thing the team needed? Maybe.
Ricardo Clarke? Maybe.
Jermaine Jones? No.
Jermaine Jones? Yes.
Why didn’t I play Jose Francisco Torres? Yes. Definitely.
Did Jonathan Bornstein play well enough to cement a place at left back, at least for a few more games? Concentrate, and try again.
Has Clint Dempsey really been bad enough to lose a starting position? My sources say no.
Do other players resent me for playing my son without question? Doubtful.
Is that why they’re not trying anymore? Or is it because they don’t respect me? Or believe in me? We went over this Bob. You can only ask yes or no questions so that I can give you a meaningless answer.
Is Jozy Altidore really the 19-year-old phenom that can solve our striker problems? Nice one. Try again.
Has the U.S been bad enough on the attack to warrant giving other young Americans like Freddy Adu and Robbie Rogers and even Stewart Holden a chance? Bubbles fizzing around. Indicator stuck.
Bradley stares in shock and confusion, pretending like he doesn’t want to break the thing against a wall, like he he’s seen this before, like he knows what the answers and he’s not afraid.
Alright, enough, before I get sick. What does this U.S. team look like when it plays well? Aside from solid spells against Mexico in the first qualifying leg, I have no freakin idea.
USA VS ITALY: SO PREDICTABLY PAINFUL IT DIDN’T HURT
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Bob Bradley, Confederations Cup, Italy, Style, US Soccer on June 16th, 2009
Part Three of a Series on American Style
*As the U.S. National Team attempts to qualify for the World Cup in 2010, I will write a series of pieces concentrating on the style, or lack of it, of American soccer. See the other two here and here.
Watching the U.S. play Italy in the Confederations Cup made glaring all the differences we already knew existed between the two teams. Where Italian touches were deft and calm, the Americans’ were heavy and hurried. The U.S. booted the ball out of the back to nobody. It coughed the ball up in midfield. It couldn’t hold it on attack for long enough to get any meaningful numbers going forward.
Italy is style incarnate. Describing the nature of this style seems redundant because it plays with a style so pure that it’s self-evident. It’s obsidian glass, as natural and clear as it is mysterious, as delicate as it is lethal when sharpened.
Andrea Pirlo gave a snapshot of Italy’s class when he created its third and final goal. A pirouette along the sideline eluded Jay DeMerit before Pirlo glided to the endline and floated a left-footed chip over the American defense to an onrushing Guiseppe Rossi, who spiked the ball into the net.
The U.S. showed flashes of its ability, making a few penetrating counterattacks while frustrating Italy with defensive pressure when the two teams played with equal men. And it had a good excuse for playing defensively after losing Ricardo Clarke to a red card. But too much of the team’s play seemed forced and desperate, squirming underneath the approaching shadow of Italy’s refined point. For fans of U.S. soccer, all of this is expected. We swallow it like we do our morning medications, out of habit and necessity. What else can we do?
The U.S. is a “build-it-yourself” rocket dad ordered for us when we were eight. Despite what we imagine, the parts don’t have the right hinges and bends to fit together like they do in the pamphlet. We have too many of one screw, not enough of another. Plastic snaps under pressure. Still, we hold out hope that this rocket will fly before the summer’s out, no matter how many replacement parts we need to order and how much duct tape we need. It’d better, goddammit. But when? How? How much can we guard our hope before it crumbles along with our expectations?
What’s getting better – not just with the current crop of American players but in the last twenty years? We can attribute much of the team’s stagnation to Bob Bradley’s experimenting with personnel and tactics. He’s still looking for the right mixture. This takes time to sort out; there are lots of combinations to try. But I’m starting to worry that the team is too volatile, with too many question marks and too much repair required, for it to turn into anything solid and functional a year from now.
Meantime, the South African vuvuzelas make the stadiums sound fuller than they really are. They create a hum like a giant hornet’s nest, the gathering pressure of frustration and nervousness and fear. These are the last motivators that the U.S. team needs, the last emotions that create a useful and powerful style. But the team is right in the middle of it. What is it made of?◊
WHEN DO THE HEADS START EATING EACHOTHER?
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Owners, Premiership, capitalism on June 9th, 2009
When More Billionaires Own More Teams
I view billionaires from kind of the same curious perspective I view species of mysterious origin and function, like tapir or rare slime molds. I have lots of questions: How did they get there? And what do they do? If I see one, will I know it? Generally, these questions don’t have easy answers.
A few billionaires grabbed headlines recently for buying complete control of English Premier League clubs. Real estate tycoon Dr. Sulaiman Al-Fahim bought out Portsmouth, and Texas investor Ellis Short bought Sunderland. I’d like to ask both of these fat cats lots of questions. More than questioning their history, I’d like to know why they wanted to buy a club. Why wouldn’t you is the obvious and appropriately pimp answer, but why? Do you like soccer? Is it really an investment? Is it a game? Is it because other billionaires are doing it? I want to know. Sadly, we never will. Rich men have too much at stake to be too transparent.
As we know professional players from the images that they project, so it is with owners. And these two magnates project very different public images. Ellis Short, well – in short – he doesn’t really have one. Try googling him. Last year, EPL Talk published an article entitled, “Who is Ellis Short?” that rehashes his bio on Wikipedia. After getting his start at General Electric, he made his billions through private equity and hedge funds etc. etc., the same way so many other Americans have minted fortunes that will never get truly revealed or investigated. Then he popped up sporadically in the news when his wife “threatened to have her gamekeeper shoot the dogs” belonging to a couple trespassing on the grounds of the hallowed Skibo castle, in Scotland, which the Short’s own. Essentially, though, Short is a ghost to the general public – flitting behind the pixels of stock tickers or around you on the ninth green of a course you only dream about.
Dr. Al-Fahim cultivates much more of a “personality,” as Jamie Jackson of The Guardian puts it. Bursting into the limelight last year, the Dr. brokered the deal that saw the Abu Dhabi investor group take over Manchester City. He followed this with comical pronouncements about prying Fernando Torres from Liverpool and Ronaldo away from Manchester United.
“Ronaldo has said he wants to play for the biggest club in the world, so we will see in January if he is serious,” he said, suggesting an appropriate fee of around $240m, a drop in the bucket for the financiers.
Al-Fahim is an interesting case. At 31, he appears a pretty much a self-made billionaire, although it’s hard to tell where the money came from that he started investing in property at “age 14 under his mother’s name,” as Wikipedia states. A child chess prodigy, he currently heads the UAE chess association. He also has his hands in some monumental projects. He is a high-profile ambassador of the Intergovernmental Institution for the Use of Micro-Algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition (IIMSAM), an organization working to end world malnutrition. He’s also as a big player in the construction of Al Reem island, an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi that “offers you the unique amalgamation of the ‘vibrancy of a chic, urban metropolitan’ and the ‘rejuvenating tranquil that only a secluded island can provide,’” says its website over music I imagine accompanies the city’s maternity wards. A “city within a city,” it’s the “perfect place to live, work, and relax.” Apparently the Dr. is dedicated equally to enhancing the lives of the poor and the rich, as long as it enhances his own reputation.
A la Donald Trump, the Dr. knows how to sell himself as equal parts goodwill and gangster. Like Trump, he has his own reality TV show, the Hydra Executives. An Arab spin-off of The Apprentice, the Dr. plays the Trump/God role – providing the contestants with tests of their business acumen to help him decide who gets fired. Despite the lower budget and production quality of this show vs. The Apprentice, the characters play for higher stakes. A British team of dimwits competes against an American team of douche bags until one winner earns a one-million-dollar-partnership with the Dr. in his new real estate venture, Hydra Properties, one of the “fastest growing real estate companies in the world.
I thought watching the Hydra Executives might give me a glimpse into Al-Fahim’s personality and the way he conducts business. But the Dr. remains a turbaned mystery for most of the show. The show does, however, reinforce his dual role as benevolent god and ruthless grim reaper. At the beginning of each episode he enters an airy boardroom, wearing a white headdress and a black headband, to give the contestants absurd missions. With deadpan gravity, he says, “You have to generate cash. You can do whatever you want to do as long as you’re using your vehicles. Americans you have the Denalis. British you have the Range Rovers. You have till tomorrow 5 pm. The team with the most cash wins.” After the characters bungle through the tasks and the Dr.’s associates determine the winner, the Dr. emerges from fogged darkness in a stretch limo to give the axe, or a pink slip, to one contestant.
Like most reality TV I’ve ever watched, this show revealed next to nothing about its supposed topic (the real estate business), depressed me about humanity, and made frustratingly little sense (see below, 1.). But although the Dr. might get some criticism for being a part of such garbage television or for acting like a poor man’s Donald Trump, his part in the show is still genius for the way he leverages the show as a marketing device. The Hydra Executives primarily functions to promote the dazzling resources and reach of Hydra Properties in the UAE, one of the richest real estate markets in the world. The Dr. has the contestants working for the company for free – creating ads and securing contracts, but mostly name-dropping the company and generating buzz in front of however many millions watch or hear about the show.
What does all this mean? The Premier League, arguably more than any other sports league in the world, serves increasingly as a fantastical battleground for modern world magnates. And as more individual billionaires – as opposed to conglomerates – grab complete ownership of more clubs, as more so-called “swinging dicks” go head to head in an arena that is becoming a bigger and bigger business, I imagine that the personal characteristics of these owners will play an increasing role in the success and direction of their teams. Business style and clout will come to the fore more than ever. It will become Ambramovich vs. Al-Fahim as much as Chelsea vs. Portsmouth. I’m not sure if such battles have the charge to overturn the balance of the league, but we appear to be approaching that point.
Another big question is this: What does success mean to these owners? Is it staying in the black? Or is it winning championships? Because in the cutthroat world of modern soccer you can’t do both. The league’s ruthlessly capitalistic structure doesn’t allow it. Clubs need to win to make money. But clubs can’t win without spending themselves into debt. Something has to give.
Notes
1). Here’s the premise of the second episode of Hydra Executives, as delivered by the Dr.: “Each team will have to create a 30 second TV commercial for Hydra. You must create the storyboard and you have to star in it. I’m going to give you 15 thousand for your expenses. And you have to complete your mission in two days. The team with the best commercial wins.”
Both teams immediately hire professional production companies, which seem to make the entire commercial, although the producers of “Hydra Executives” try their best to make it look like the contestants themselves maintain creative control. The British team calls in a bigger gun, a NY Film Academy director named John Sammon, to make their ad. This, I assume, is the same John Sammon listed in the credits as the “Producer” of the entire show. And at the end of the episode the British team unveils a commercial that looks suspiciously like the opening montage to the show itself. Maybe this is a brilliant budget-saving device by the producer. It’s also ridiculous; the contestants “hire” the producer of the show to make an “ad” for the show he’s already producing. The American team takes more creative control of their ad, produce a laughable one that involves a woman on the team walking into the sunset, lose to the British team, and then have their doucheiest member defend the ad by saying “sometimes art is hard for common people to understand.”◊
BEFORE IT’S GONE
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Barcelona, Champions League, La Liga, Manchester United, Messi, Paul Gardner, Premiership, Style, globalization on May 29th, 2009
Maybe soccer games can never truly live up to their hype. The whirring factory of the sport won’t let that happen. Before a game with weeks of buildup can settle in our memory, we have more championships to follow, transfer rumors to process, and international competitions to prepare for. The momentum of the sport turns with the globe.
The Barcelona – Manchester United Champions League final, however, came as close as any to stopping the inertia, to folding the game in on itself. It wasn’t a great game. But it was an example of the game played to perfection. In its afterglow I considered not watching more soccer for the rest of the summer for fear of dulling this game’s impact. OK, I said the next day, for the rest of the week. Then I relapsed and watched a testy encounter between MLS conference leaders Chivas and Chicago. No harm done. Good game.
But I still have a strange need to preserve the final Barcelona performance in my mind. I want to tuck its intricate carapace under my pillow, to preserve it for myself and humanity.
As much as I hope that Barcelona’s success will revolutionize the way the game is played – by ushering in a freer, more dynamic, attacking brand of soccer – I know that this probably won’t happen. Teams like this don’t come around very often. They’re too fragile. You need all the right players.
Still, I wonder if Barcelona have given everyone else out there a style to emulate, the perfection of the sport to date. Did their artistry trump every national style so emphatically as to say, “This is it. Any questions?”
In this age of globalization, it’s possible. This year’s Champions League final reached more homes than ever before. With double the worldwide viewership of the Super Bowl, it represents the number one annual sporting event in the world. In the U.S., ESPN’s broadcast reached over one million homes, over 30% more viewers than last year’s record breaking final. The sport grows every year. More of its magic pours into new realms of the globe. In this way, soccer acts as one of the great accelerators of globalization. This is a fact that makes even the title of Franklin Foer’s book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, frustrating. Simply, soccer produces some of the most likely scenes of globalization anywhere. Kids around the world watch highlights of Messi and Nakamura while eating whatever type of cereal puffs their county produces. Clubs have foreign owners, foreign coaches, and players from ten different nations. Elite club teams send scouts to every continent.
But, as is part of Foer’s point, different countries treat soccer as part of the cultural glue that preserves and forms unique national identities. Here, Foer digs into some of the rich and politicizing pulp of the game. The sport informs society and society informs the sport. Nations use, and relate to, soccer in unique ways.
National leagues play with unique styles. I’m often amazed at how different La Liga can be stylistically from the Premiership and Serie A. But how long can this last? How long should it last when Barcelona hang an archetypal style like a starburst in the sky at which everyone else can gaze and wonder?
As everyone has already said, they play beautiful attacking soccer – maybe the most beautiful soccer I’ve ever seen. They feed on possession, starving the opposition of ball and opportunity. But it’s easy to forget about the defensive energy of this team. As playful as they often appear with the ball, they can also be frantic without it, as they were against Manchester United, swarming in bunches to blind Carrick and Anderson before they could even turn upfield. Experts will call such defense a tactic, and it is in that it was probably premeditated. But it’s more of a spirit. Barcelona run with the enthusiasm and instincts of a child playing tag. When “It” they chase the ball into corners, looking desperately to unload the burden, the embarrassment. Then they turn the ball over. And they’re free to breath and laugh again. Like Paul Gardner said in his recap of the game, “It was a pleasure, and a privilege, to watch Barcelona at work. By which I mean -Barcelona at play.”
I hope that in a world where everyone can hear and see the laughter that it might be contagious.◊
REFEREES: GODS PLAYING THE FOOLS OR FOOLS PLAYING THE GODS?
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Barcelona, Eduardo Galeano, FIFA, Referees on May 22nd, 2009
Or, A Post Kind of Like The Last One, With Different Words
“The losers owe their loss to him and the winners triumph in spite of him. Scapegoat for every error, cause of every misfortune, the fans would have to invent him if he didn’t already exist. The more they hate him, the more they need him.”
- Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun and Shadow
Referees lie at the center of the game’s most cruel paradoxes. They are the only true gods of the field. And they get harassed like goobers. They exist to uphold justice. And they get booed like villains. This is true in almost any sport. But soccer refs get unusually harsh treatment. In a Times Online article, one of the more poignant pieces written this past week amidst grapeshot attacks on referees around the soccer world, Simon Barnes describes how “It’s simply not in football’s nature to respect referees.” He puts refs under the same category of ‘necessary evils’ as taxation and traffic cops. We need them, but ideally they wouldn’t exist. Barnes implies that we don’t need to respect refs, just accept them and the imperfect reality they represent. I agree, sort of.
While Barnes touches on the central paradox of the refs’ place in sports, which Eduardo Galeano nails in a vignette in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, dismissing these brave soul as “unrespectable” provides too black and white a framework to gain a sensitive understanding of their place in the game. ‘Necessary evils’ shouldn’t be dismissed or simply accepted, but understood and harassed and improved. As we might care about the way government spends our taxes, we need to examine the way refs impose their powers. In addition to considering referees buffoons, we need to consider how we might, in a more perfect world, respect their work. In other words, we don’t need to respect them, but we need to understand how we could. This might seem like a meaningless or nitpicky distinction, and maybe it is. But I believe it’s crucial to the integrity and force of the game.
Too often refs bear the blame, from players and coaches and fans, for clubs’ failings. They also too often get granted immunity, from the organizations and associations that employ them. Both sides are equally right and wrong. As Galeano says, refs get treated unfairly as the “scapegoat for every error.” But they do decide games. They award decisive penalties and free kicks. They waive off goals. Their whistles collide with the game’s weather patterns to create fateful winds that can upend a ship or carry it to safety. Although refs can act like “outsiders” to the natural rhythms of the game, like Simon Barnes suggests, they are just as embroiled in the drama as the players, and sometimes just as responsible for the way it plays out. They try their best to preserve the game’s natural rhythm, but they also have a duty to control that rhythm, which in ref-speak involves “feeling the game” and “pulling in the reigns” if it threatens chaos. The main problem for the ref is that, in soccer, determining the right decision, or the right pull of the reigns so to speak, can be next to impossible. Everybody, from players to managers to fans, knows this – even if they refuse to admit it to protect their own biases or the sanctity of the game in which they invest so much. As Fredorrarci made me believe in a recent post on The Run of Play, justice loses its clarity in an environment that encourages players to do anything to survive, to claim cheating honorable. Players will seek any advantage that the laws of the game allow. They cheat. They dive. They deceive. And all the while they scream bloody righteousness. The ref, meanwhile, tries to cling to some higher ideal of Justice by enforcing the Laws of The Game, which in theory exist to let the players determine the game’s result. But when players willfully undermine these laws, the ref has the impossible duty of damage control, of separating cheating from cheating more, false from falser.
If refs don’t deserve our respect, they at least deserve our pity. But we don’t see much of this either. The only thing we hate more than the cheating player is the ref who allows the player to cheat, the one who misses the call. “Why can’t they see what we see?” we wonder in smug congratulation of our keen observatory skills, watching a botched offside call from a birds-eye view in our recliners, or rewinding a slow-motion replay of Fletcher’s leg bending like a proboscis to nectar around Fabregas’ knee. We swear and shake our heads and blame the ref for “ruining the game.” And he does, in that he fails to uphold the rules.
At the same time, though, the ref’s fallibility springs from the purity of the same game he supposedly tarnishes. Namely, the dramatic heart of soccer depends on the mysteriousness of its own laws. A ninety-minute passion play, the game runs via rules that reasonable men consistently interpret in contradictory ways, even if they’re sitting in the same bar watching the same replay and wearing the same jersey. This drives the bloodletting tensions of the sport. Many sports suffer from such uncertainty, but soccer’s low score-line and harsh penalties lend immense weight to ref’s decisions. Games can, and often do, come down to one soul-crushing call. This happens in sports like basketball and baseball too, but a few extra free throws or an extra strike call seem inconsequential when compared to a game-deciding penalty kick. And one could easily argue that soccer’s rulebook leaves more up to interpretation than any other sport. Its language invites uncertainty. Did the hand “move toward the ball” or the “ball toward hand?” Did the attacking player “interfere with the play” or “gain an advantage” enough to be called offside? Did the player make an “attempt to play the ball?”
The deep-running uncertainties of the game buoy the central arguments both for and against using technology to aid refs in their decisions. Instant replay, which would allow refs the same birds-eye view we’re afforded on our couches, would undoubtedly correct some bad calls. That it could do so in a relative instant, with one quick look at a monitor – at least regarding offside calls – gives it wide appeal. But using replays would also magnify the game’s indeterminate core. Take the Chelsea-Barcelona second leg alone as a model. Would seeing instant replays help you call a handball on Eto’o? On Pique? Was either intentional? Does it depend on the circumstance of the game, the nature of the singular game under scrutiny? Do you want refs to stop the game while vacillating over replays to make an ultimately arbitrary decision that they made adamantly within the run of play?
Preserving the game’s flow seems as true to the game’s laws as getting the laws right. In the spirit of the game, we want the players, and the ref, to determine results on the field and in the fervor of the moment and not after-the-fact. And so we accept the natural human fallibility of the game – that refs make false decisions, and also that players’ duplicities con refs into making false decisions. The weakness of the game’s rules lets actors rule the game. If players are savvy enough actors to fool the refs then more power to them. When refs pretend that they know the call then they have a much tougher audience to fool: everyone else.
The game’s flaws give it an overwhelming humanity that creates real drama. It gives us entertaining battles between cowardice and bravery, villainy and heroics, ignorance and insight, and everything in between. Tangled inextricably in this drama, the ref is somewhere between an actor and a director. He is the head stagehand for a performance that he doesn’t know. The sport benefits immensely from those refs best able to interpret the drama as it unfolds, to untangle the game’s angles in a way that gets them wrong the least. The best refs are the ones that truly let the players win or lose, the ones who erect the lights and walls in the right places, to let the players express themselves in the cleanest and most uninhibited way.
Maybe I’ve been hoaxed by the media or I haven’t been around long enough, but it seems like refs have been getting more criticism this year than I ever remember from players, coaches and fans alike. Are the voices simply louder now? Or is it possible that a rift has developed between the development of top class players and the development of top class refs? Maybe it was always there. Refs always sucked, and always will suck. Or maybe developing top class refs has proved a more difficult process than we’ve ever cared to admit given the resources and the measurements of success we currently use.
I don’t know how rigorously FIFA and other associations train referees, but we need to set standards that compare more favorably with those required to play professional soccer. Soccer’s governing bodies should poor money into referee development like they do into player development. And refs should make millions more than they do now if they can prove the worthiness of their performances by measurable standards like post-game video reviews (when possible). This is problematic both because of the slippery rules of the game and because few people want to go into officiating. Simply, the job just seems like a bitch. Simon Barnes is probably right that we will never truly respect or cheer refs, but we need to try to make them more respectable. Otherwise the game that we love will lose a crucial element of believability and meaning at the most competitive level. We don’t necessarily need to believe the ref, but we should believe in his purpose. We don’t need to respect the ref personally, but we need to respect his job.
How? We need to make the job more respectable, however possible. For starters, by using better training standards. Refs should have the eyesight of fighter pilots. They should have the fitness of marathoners. They should be much younger, on average, then they are now. And lets not stop there if we want to be serious about this. Refs should receive rigorous training in physics, physiology, and psychology so they can better tell the difference between a dive and a foul, hear the difference between cleat-ball and cleat-shin. Linesmen should have advanced conceptions of time and space so that they have the ability to see two events happening simultaneously and forty yards apart from one another – the ball getting struck and a striker darting behind an offside trap.
I’m only half kidding. If refs deserve to play on the same field as world-class athletic specimens then their performances deserve to be held to the same rigorous standards. Where are these standards? Who is setting them? Where are the computer programs that can set the curve for humans to outdo? We have turned star athletes into superheroes, who can dodge and dive so quickly and skillfully that slow-motion cameras can’t catch them. Now how can we create better superheroes, or supervillains, to police them?
At the same time, this won’t help at all. Creating better refs, even half-cyborgs with radar-enhanced-zoom-lenses for eyes, won’t save them from the limitations and blame that they have always faced. While we still have human referees acting in the topsy-turvy drama that is soccer, and I hope we always do, then we can only try to understand them as men, as humans performing an impossible task. We should make it a civic duty to pay attention to refs’ performances, to criticize their failures but also to praise their best moments, giving them the feedback necessary to improve, to stay modest. Media and leagues do this, but not enough. Too often leagues defend their employees while everyone else lashes them. Lets try to gain a mutual understanding of the issues, about which we all have biases. For me, when a ref lets play carry on after a dive we should all raise our glasses, kiss the screen, and voice our pleasure with this adroit fellow all over Referee Rating websites. Just like when we see a player shrug off a tackle that he could have easily leveraged into a free kick. These are true acts of heroism.
They might never happen in the same game. But I hope. I hope. And when they do please wake me up so I can pay my respects.◊
TRAGEDY OF CHELSEA [ACT IV. SCENE III]
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Barcelona, Champions League, Chelsea, Feet on May 11th, 2009
KING GUUS, DROGBA, TERRY, LAMPARD, CECH, ESSIEN gather in locker room after loss to Barcelona.
DROGBA
Disgraced! Disgraced! Whofore will set it right?
Fouled more than Ceasar, bloodied more than Prometheus!
Pilloried by the dark lord Ovrebo.
I bear lashes of a whipped horse’s hide.
KING GUUS
Perchance I err, but I fail to see them.
DROGBA
You would butfore the toughness of mine own.
KING
Quiet fool. Even toughness betrays its husk.
Twill ripen then decay with time, like fruit
Devoured by yellow maggots, frenzy fed
On the honey of purpose and desire.
TERRY
But King, you speak as if we bear the blame!
But for this loss I’ll not the burden take.
Evils beyond time did undo our game.
Ovrebo shall taste my boot’s rapier!
We will have our destiny again to steer.
LAMPARD
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves!
KING
Then perchance you should watch how you hold it.
The Spaniards cradled the orb like a golden child.
You kicked her as if a ragged bastard.
LAMPARD
All that glitters is not gold.
KING
That thought less aligns than Overbo’s calls.
Do we house a traitor amongst our ranks?
I know no more right from seems, sense from dreams.
Day from night, earth from hell. Oh, stuck am I
Betwixt deity of dowry and of death.
[Enter BALLACK brandishing FIFA Rulebook in hand.]
BALLACK
Betrayal! Our case as clear as the Rhine.
[Reading]
“Penalty: When hand moves toward the ball, not ball towards hand.”
Ha! My strike had eyes for goal if not deflected.
A rank official this sacred ground infected.
To lop his arm would not our justice serve.
We must appeal to law for vengeance true!
DROGBA
Oh! No longer will I play this game so cruel.
Its laws more disloyal than the wrankest whore.
Crueler too, as losing any beauty
Could never your heart so painfully kill.
Is there nothing in this world to ease my pain?
No drug, nor food, nor death, nor dream, nor love.
LAMPARD
Love is the most beautiful of dreams
And the worst of nightmares.
ESSIEN
[Sharpening spear]
[Aside]. King is right. I cannot tell women from men.
BALLACK
Comrades! Join me, with the power of your pens.
We shall march to the battlefield of paper and gavels.
Who shall come swift to the Swiss office tonight?
We need to act swift or rust our edge.
I shall type an appeal so sharp as to give Gods fright!
[Ballack exits]
TERRY
Laws be damned; they strip us our will.
Tis time we drown the rat with our own hands.
ESSIEN
[brandishing spear].
Arise! Follow me with the spirit of fire
Swirling wind-blown o’er the dry prairie
To choke them fore breath, blind them fore sight.
Hasten we must to Ovrebo’s domecile,
Like the West winds we chase the dawn. To Norway!
KING
Calm. Haste your reason doth burn to dust.
Be patient as we wait for the strike,
Cool snake coiled in grass with poisoned tooth.
Fans talk of doing the deed in our place.
Perchance we should wait to see how this plays.
TERRY
Patience! We tried this gainst even ten men!
Watched our house burn whilst we swept the pantry.
Methinks our King’s will wilts like the grass you love.
No longer will I wait. Brave Essien!
Into the fire I follow your lead!
What say you Cech, Lampard, Drogba?
LAMPARD
Smoke on the water, fire in the sky!
TERRY
Soothe mate. We should travel not as the Blues
But in disguise as peasants, hooligans.
CECH
Is fire more dangerous than soccer?
DROGBA
Yes. Yes. I shall fight for all that is right.
But who will stop the game when I fall?
[Exeunt Essien, Terry, Lampard, Cech, Drogba].◊
WHAT BARCELONA – CHELSEA MEANS
Posted by Cyrus Philbrick in Arsenal, Barcelona, Champions League, Chelsea, Manchester United, Premiership, Style on May 5th, 2009
Language and Contradictions in The Beautiful Game
The Barcelona – Chelsea game tomorrow is one of monumental implications. It might affect our conceptions of the game’s aesthetics, morality, and function. Don’t believe me? Check out all the philosophizing, pontificating and aggrandizing going on about the game in columns, soccer-culture blogs, and chat rooms the world over. In every imaginable language, fans are quoting Shelley to Garcia Marquez to Galileo in desperate attempts to place this game within an appropriately abstract and meaningful context. However trifling or hyperbolic, though, the narrative of this debate touches the core of the contradictions that drive the Beautiful Game.
Barcelona, a team steeped in vibrant Catalan culture and a history of stylish soccer, have understandably staked claim to an abstract moral high ground over Chelsea and the cowardly/negative tactics the Blues employed last week in the team’s first Champions League clash. As compared to the more mutable and calculating identity of Chelsea, Barcelona represent a heroic form of beauty. They cling to a form so pure that after the draw in the first leg many have questioned whether Barcelona falter by focusing more on achieving this ideal of the game than on the game’s purpose, ie. winning.
This notion has caused some serious discussion about the tensions between form and function central to the Beautiful Game. The main tension is this: As a competitive game, soccer functions via the one utilitarian goal of winning, but the game attracts us and resonates with us not because of results but because of its form. This can be true of any sport, but especially soccer for reasons that books have been written about. Brian Phillips probably hit the root of the matter when in a second post on the topic he said this: “The two words in the term ‘beautiful game’ are always struggling against each other in some ways, but they have to coexist. That’s why, for me, the necessary dream is to find a team that resolves the tension, that plays beautifully and coherently and defeats both the chaos of the game and all the studs-up, 10-men-behind-the-ball bullies who try to stop it.”
I think this is the dream for most of us (except maybe Chelsea fans and stubborn fans of the Premiership who, given circumstances, might not be able to admit it). We want a team’s function to grow out of its form, or vice versa. We want surreal and fluid soccer over calculated tactical positioning that stifles the organic nature of the game. This isn’t to say that defensive soccer cannot be beautiful, or that the tearing pace and sharp angles of the Premiership do not give it a form. But its form, both sleek and powerful, is somehow too real, too adaptable, too logical in the way it works to have the same kind of soul-lifting warmth as Barcelona’s. Barcelona plays like a dream. And us romantics want our dreams to bloom, to become more real. We want them to mean something. Right now, for those who pray to the lyrical Gods of the game, Barcelona represent a team on the trembling verge of a clarifying coherence between both form and function. For this reason, Barcelona’s season has taken on much more significance than results. They are playing for immortality, to uphold a form that fans might remember as it: the most beautiful soccer ever.
A team in the truest sense, this year’s Barcelona team plays a game so deft and connected that you don’t want to touch it. Their goals hang like dewy webs, too fragile and perfect and mysterious to replicate. Then you see another one, and another. They play whole games that hang together like the most illuminating prose of this, or any, language. As Phillips suggests, their artistry eschews the way most teams rely on, and adapt to, the game’s inherent elements of chaos and entropy. While big-money Premiership teams tend to employ negative defensive schemes, while they openly commit fouls to break up attacks, while they hammer the ball over-the-top to over-priced strikers in the hopes that one defensive mistake will change the game, Barcelona weave every stitch in time and space. They score despite perfect defenses. Not only do they control the game’s order, they create it.
Barcelona have scored a stunning number of goals this season by passing the ball into the net, as if they knew the result before it happened. They know where they want the ball to go and how to put it there, eventually and exactly. As Joao Jorge suggests in a recent response to Brian Phillips’ posts, Barcelona present “the possibility of truth in the random and chaotic world of a game.” I agree.
Jorge also suggests that Barcelona are “attempting to create a new paradigm of football. To create a dominant team from the front. Their success may force a rupture in the interpretation of the rules of success in football.” While I agree that in winning Barcelona might change the way we view success in modern soccer, the underlying force beneath such a change doesn’t represent anything new. It stems from an old faith in attacking soccer that not only deserves to re-emerge in the modern game, but needs to triumph for the game’s sanctity and progress. Soccer America’s Paul Gardner has been preaching such faith for a long time.
For the faithful, attacking with the right blend of touch, guile and pace produces at once both the most entertaining and effective version of the game. Jorge himself points to the way older Barcelona sides played inspired offensive styles. For example, see their 2006 team or the team in the 70’s led by Cruyff and Guardiola. There was also Arsenal earlier this decade, and the many incarnations of Brazilian and Dutch sides throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 90s. Some won. Some didn’t. These teams had flaws (not all of which were defensive, which I’ll attempt to address in a future post) but they all honorably strived for some immortal truth in union between form and function. Like all of us hopeless soccer-romantics, I hope Barcelona can win in a way that will help us more fully realize these truths. As Jorge suggests, although Barcelona are riding the wave of an old idea, they offer the possibility of changing the way we look at the game.
The only right way for Barcelona to achieve immortality would be to win. As Jorge suggests, “Barcelona is trapped in its own rhetoric of moral cause.” The truth behind their style is as important as winning; But you can’t achieve the first without the latter. This points back to the central paradox of the form/function relationship. As much as we pray the two work together, they can’t, in any perfect sense. This is because no matter how much Barcelona illuminates the game, no truth can overthrow the game’s fundamental entropic nature, the element of chance that ultimately determines wins and losses, the flawed and contradictory black and white terms that give the game definition and weight. In this sense, soccer creates a paradox much like the paradox of language that so many postmodernist authors point to. Soccer, caught in reflexive web similar to language itself, allows us to create order and beauty and even truth out of chaos – if only for fleeting moments. But such order can never transcend the laws of the game. Rather, it depends on the game, the rules and chaos it provides and allows, to mean anything. Truth means nothing without nothingness.
I’m not calling Chelsea evil or the equivalent of the Dark Side or anything. Their winning just means a less beautiful future, even if we can never know this future’s meaning.◊
Afterthoughts
Maybe each league, each team, is a different form of language. As Brian Phillips suggests, Barcelona could easily represent some effusive romantic poetry. Like Shelley or Keats, they are at once visual and sensual and mysterious. If this is true, then what are the Big Four Premiership teams? Against the gushing narrative of Barcelona’s intricate passing game, they appear more results-driven and fractured modern art forms, whether visual or literary. Maybe Liverpool are the blockbuster movie of a bloodied heroine down but never out, guns taped behind its sweaty back. Chelsea are the serial TV drama, with a revolving cast of actors and writers and interweaving plotlines. They will stoop to any level for ratings, as long as they deliver enough juicy drama to make us believe in the promise of more. Manchester United are somehow the Avant Garde flick that succeeded in the box office, a Coen Brothers film, safe form the snobby criticism of the other two, more powerful in effect but possibly no more brilliant. Or maybe each of these teams has a counterpart in modern literature and I’ll have to do some soul searching to see if Cormac McCarthy really writes most like United play.
All I know is that watching Chelsea refuse to play against Barcelona in the first leg was like trying to read poetry in a movie theatre, through blinding strobes of explosions while buttered popcorn and Coke spilled onto the pages. It was like trying to complete a word jumble for a non-existent word. It was like looking at stars from underwater. It made me wonder: is hoping for Barcelona to win like hoping younger generations of children retain a love for reading, for the playful but deeper truths of words? Or is this over-dramatic and absurd? Hopefully, I’ve ballooned the meaning of this game too far out of proportion and reality for anyone to say anything else of any meaning.
It’s fucking huge.
I could probably explain all this a little better. For those interested, Brian Phillips’ posts on these matters are pretty damn illuminating. And Don Delillo wrote a twisted book largely about the above topic called End Zone, except it uses American Football, instead of soccer, as a vehicle to explore the paradoxes of language and a whole lot of other apocalyptic and ascetic and head-bending shit.
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