Recently in sports Category

it's a well-established fact that
as an engineer
i don't have any feelings

so it vexes me when i see human error's
inescapable effect on sporting events
which is to say the temerity of officials
to make calls i disagree with

but it's somewhat more significant than that
in all seriousness

this comes to mind in the wake of the boston area's
resurgent love of basketball
and the equally significant accusations of
referee bias
as an element that shapes a game to a particular
design

and i find that last notion to be most significant
as i'll explain

first of all i should state
that i was once a huge celtics fan
bird parish mchale dj ainge and of course greg kite
but over the years i grew disillusioned with the sport as a whole
the forty-odd minutes of preamble to a thoroughly unexciting
yet decisive final few
and moreover
the inability for a game designed for no contact
to be meaningfully arbitrated
in an age where that contact is fierce
constant
and necessary

in short i think that the balance of a basketball game
rests so heavily on the shoulders of officials that it
teeters between a tightly regulated yet unwatchable slog
or a free for all
and since so many calls manifest themselves directly
on the scoreboard
basically you are in fact paying to
watch the referees

at the same time i'm remiss if i don't point out
a similar issue with soccer
another highly-evolved sport
where the participants are well-schooled in
extracting every inch of advantage
a referee's control of a match is a frequent topic of conversation
and indeed they can fuck up and fuck up big
with a rash sending-off or award of a
penalty

but it's there that the difference is most crucial
those big
awful
decisions are there for everyone to see
and there is no hiding from them
you fuck up and entire nations may hold a grudge

whereas in basketball
it's more like the get-rich-quick scheme from office space
where the ref just keeps stealing from jerry's kids
and by the time they're done
they've affected the outcome of the game for whatever reason
for their own biases
for the mob
or for the mouse
and gotten away with it clean

maybe the solution is to not write rules
you can't enforce
nfl i'm looking at you

considering the obsession with statistics and the
archival video used by teams in practicing and training
why can't leagues of all kind use their vast riches to
hire an army of tivo jockeys
[creating jobs for slovenly americans to boot]
to re-watch every game and grade every call
baseball already does it with balls and strikes

and if we're lucky maybe someday robots will do it for us
and we'll argue with them too
and then they'll rip our arms off

i played soccer again tonight as a sub for a friend’s team, at the last minute. indoor, with boards, on unforgiving vct flooring (don’t ask me why i know about flooring products). it’s been a year since i played half an hour of goal with boards, which constitutes the whole of my previous experience. i gifted the opposition two or three goals through misplaying bounces off the boards and misunderstanding the rather bizarre ground rules, and gave up five goals in the first fifteen minutes, no doubt leading the team for whom i was making a guest appearance to wonder if bad help was better than no help at all. and then only two in the last thirty-five, neither of which were my bad. i’m still not sure i’m a goalie. but i’m not not a goalie, either. i also took a ball in the junk and smashed up my heel on said flooring. worst of it all, we lost by one goal, so it’s rather obviously my fault. which sucks.

i’ve spent most of the past week in a car careening down the wrong side of the road across central england, on a train, walking block after block of neighborhoods from nice to scummy, in a pub, or at a soccer match. i’m exhausted. fortunately, work seems rather quiet, so i may as well tell my solitary reader about it.

• the highways in england utilize large signs with hugely impressive forks and circles and arrows to tell you exactly what the road is going to do. it’s superfluous in many places, but useful once you’re accustomed to it, in the same way that it’s nice to see on google maps not just that there’s an interchange, but what those onramps are going to do to you.

• speaking of google maps, it let us down big time, particularly on the drive to reading. near as i could tell, it omitted a whole street and a rotary, which was enough to put us way off-course.

• reading is a spectacularly good drinking town. it’s a college town, for one, but beyond that, there were numerous truly unique pubs there, some old, some ancient, serving excellent varieties of cask ales and bitters. one claimed to have had in excess of 5,000 guest ales in the past few years, and to prove it, took the placards from the front of the tap, and pasted them to the walls. and the ceilings. and basically every surface of its cozy, meandering hallways and alcoves.

• finding a pub to eat dinner at was all but impossible for us outside of london; but the lunch was practically drinking nirvana. pint after pint of ale, a yummy steak pie, a comfy wooden bench, and football highlights in the background.

• liverpool is an eerily quiet city; you can tell that a bunch of people live there, but they move about like ghosts when outside; they’re there, but there’s no commotion, no bustle. plenty of cars on the street, but a lack of real traffic. row after row of houses that are occupied, but don’t look terribly lived-in. and plenty of bombed out, boarded, or even bricked-up neighborhoods. don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly lovely place, with plenty of stuff to do; the pubs are mellow, and the few people we did talk to (a lot of bartenders, go figure) were fairly friendly. but in retrospect, something about it just seemed somewhat off.

• the exception to that, of course, is around goodison park, which was roaring with life on wednesday night for the everton-tottenham hotspur match. skinny entrances (every soccer stadium i’ve been to has a very narrow entry passage and turnstile, less than half the width of a normal doorway) directly upon the sidewalk and street, with the stands rising vertically, with tens of thousands crammed into an ancient structure that has the same kind of load-bearing paint that fenway park does, only it’s blue and white. the corridors are crammed with people before the match (you can’t drink beer in the stands) drinking their beer, eating their meat pies, and placing their bets. walking up the ramp into the seats is every bit as electric as you’d expect, the more so since our seats were in the second row. their side was depleted, but the everton fans gave a pretty good show, with ample singing, shouting, swearing, and a really brilliant flipping off of a spurs player readying for a corner kick.

• dmitar berbatov is amazing to watch in person.

• the night before, we’d seen fulham at bolton wanderers; it was probably a letdown, for my dad’s first premiership match. i was all in favor of trekking up to bolton to see a top-flight match rather than seeing charlton play stoke down in london, but neither of those two teams played like they really deserved or cared to escape relegation. we did have great seats, and talk to some really friendly bolton supporters, though. they’re a really nice bunch, even if they’re not terribly boisterous. one thing that was cool was to see a match wherein an american (our boy clint dempsey, whose notoriously elbow-y behavior i jokingly apologized for to our new friends) was far and away the best player on the pitch. bolton’s stadium is new and nice, but much smaller than it looks on television, and stranger still, is in the middle of what is basically a big-box store mall. on the other hand, so is gillette, now.

• interestingly, the premiership does not permit cameras into stadiums. nobody searches you, but you wouldn’t be able to hide an slr. so i didn’t try. my old casio is mostly dead, leaving me with my iphone. which actually did an okay job with some of them. amusingly enough, while using it as a camera, i got a useless voicemail from my landlord and an interesting text message. i wonder what the charge for that’ll be.

• instead of basketball courts or tennis courts, public parks have 6-on-6 soccer courts. awesome.

• we didn’t spend a lot of time in manchester, but it seemed to live up to its reputation, in that people were seen lined up outside of clubs at midnight on a tuesday, and that the residential areas outside the downtown were not terribly appealing. it was smaller than i expected, but the architecture was kinda cool.

• reading’s madjeski stadium is 2 miles outside of the city in an industrial park. it’s small, modern, and comfortable, insofar as any english soccer stadiums are comfortable (the seats appear to all be of the same manufacture, of thin, cheap plastic that i suspect wouldn’t support your stereotypical fan of american football, much less fit them); it’s a very suburban experience. we saw a bunch of american flags draped over the stands at the end of the game (some with the reading logo superimposed—the english love to write their football team across the flag, something which we don’t do so much here), saluting their longtime keeper, marcus hahnemann, who had a good match in a losing effort.

• when we arrived at craven cottage on sunday, we knew that we’d be in for a treat, given the number of aston villa supporters we saw on the way in. we were sitting near the away stand, at the end of the field. filled with probably 5000 singing, stomping, shouting villa fans in great voice. somewhere in the middle of the match came a hissing noise, as they ceased their singing and said shhhhhhhh. the stadium was strangely silent, and it was damned obvious that fulham’s support was fucking shit, at least on that day.

• second best moment of that game was when fulham’s mascot had to get shoved off the field by the referee. the english don’t stage that sort of thing, it actually happened.

• unexpectedly enough, fulham actually pulled out a win. it’s important for american soccer for them to do well, as they have five americans on their roster, and right now they’re fighting to climb out of the drop zone. they’re not a good team (and it’s the supporting cast that’s the problem, say i, quite biased), but they might survive.

• people kept trying to get us to sign up for credit cards and cell phone service everywhere, for some reason.

• i did not try prawn-flavored potato chips, but they have many other innovative flavors there that we enjoyed while watching the day’s highlights after being shooed out of the pubs at closing.

• watching the super bowl in england is weird. i can’t tell whether the english care about american football or not; goodness knows i didn’t stay up for the end of it.

• suz and i took a field trip to islington to go stop and see emirates stadium so she could pick up some arsenal stuff. after that she indulged me a trip out to floyd road to go pick up a new charlton jersey.

• two hours after landing, i was playing soccer. had a good game, actually. perhaps i was literally full of piss and vinegar, given my diet over the previous week.

there’s a recent article on a national website that uses the upcoming super bowl as a pretext to extol the virtues of new york city, chiefly by way of saying that boston sucks.

i won’t link to this article, because it’s dumb, mostly, and doesn’t deserve the hits, but more because i’d rather link to the brilliant fire joe morgan’s takedown of it. i really couldn’t have said it better, but to it i’ll take the opportunity to point out that most bostonians seemed to outgrow these kinds of articles sometime in 2004, and the shoe truly is on the other foot now. for only dimly being aware of any rivalry, some of our friends to the south seem to be taking it pretty seriously.

more than a few words have been spent lamenting the extent to which fenway park has gotten quieter, less rowdy, and more corporate over the past ten years. the best example i can think of is this year’s alcs against cleveland, where there was this sinking feeling during game two (even before eric gagne came into the game), and a palpable malaise, none of the ability to rise to a roar with two strikes or three balls, or with a man on, threatening to steal. it was easier to notice in retrospect after the sox survived the trip to cleveland, and returned for game six with the old ballyard in a full-throated roar.

the causes are obvious. tickets are scarcer, more expensive, or both, and different people are at the games. so it was really interesting to read this bbc article about how the same kind of thing is happening to premiership soccer. since i’m planning a trip to see some games, i note how hard it is to get tickets, how you have to have a membership to even have a chance to buy tickets for some clubs, and i can see the red sox becoming the same way.

it’s almost as if we’re loving them to death.

random linkage from the past few days for good little girls and boys, and my two readers, too.

• romney, you better fucking talk about magic underpants, says wonkette. it’s all fun and games to poke fun at mormonism, but what i found more disturbing about the substance of the speech was the emphasis on freedom of religion—so long as you have one. i take issue with this: “Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” suggesting that absence of religion as an influence on government is the same as a ‘religion of secularism’ is disingenuous at best; he’s equating neutrality with opposition. just because the government should want nothing to do with religion does not in any way, shape, or form serve to impinge upon one’s own enjoyment of it. not that i find this surprising, and neither is he the first to imply this, but i still find it repellent. i’d still like a pair of magic underpants, though.

• in other news, here’s a cogent explanation of why the revs are so easily perceived as being cheap (oh, and they are, don’t get me wrong), and at the same time why rumors of them signing someone like shevchenko are that and nothing more. not that i wouldn’t like to be surprised, but at the same time, it’s worthwhile perspective to bear in mind next time i get frustrated at the lack of quality players on the bench or uncle bob’s refusal to build us a soccer stadium.

• what can be helped, however, is how the mls is marketed. going to a dozen or more matches over the summer, one can see this in action, as i’ve no doubt mentioned; my dad and i have nearly ideal seats, but are surrounded by as many parents wrangling hyperactive kids as we are by soccer fans. it certainly doesn’t have to be this way, and while it is improving, there’s still more that can be done.

• since this was written, the santana-to-the-sox action has calmed down, but i thought eric wilbur had a really interesting take on the divide between the haves and the have-nots. on the other hand, maybe this is what yankee fans say to themselves too, in justifying their own juggernaut. some have noted that prospects are a renewable resource, that of course you give them up, even in mass quantities for a santana. i’m not saying that i don’t make that deal, but let’s be fair here. these aren’t the prospects that you acquire a dozen of every year, these are the best of that bunch, culled, ripened, aged; the wheat, not the chaff. their value mustn’t be underestimated, particularly given the emerging culture in the red sox’ farm system, wherein these kids are groomed to understand exactly what’s going to happen when they get to the big leagues in boston, things that free-agent signings and traded players don’t always have.

• finally, a big fuck you to people who eschew sidewalks to walk or run in the street. this becomes extremely evident when the snow piles up. sidewalks can be unevenly shoveled or icy, the roads, less so. it’s tempting, and let’s be fair, i do my share of it, too. but the big difference is, when i’m walking or running on the street, and a car comes, i hop up onto the curb. because unlike everyone else, i’m making it my responsibility to keep myself safe, not the oncoming car’s. and frankly, beyond being an obnoxious thing to do (especially when one brazenly claims several feet of the road), it’s just fucking stupid to put your life in someone else’s hands like that. listen, i’m tall enough that overhanging branches are a constant obstacle even in the summer, i don’t like running on ice or uneven snowpack, or up and down ramps and curbs, but the road ain’t mine to use. it’s mine to borrow if no one else is using it. others would do well to remember that.

i first moved to the boston area in 1986, and got hooked on the red sox on one warm october day. i’d been to see them at fenway once, my first game being the one where they clinched the division title. on this day, we’d walked up over the hill to the beach in the early afternoon, then came back to watch the rest of the game; the dave henderson home run game. ridiculous. not so long later came game 6, and a sizable number of brain cells were from then on devoted to something that generally made me dumber, but has always been a lot of fun.

so too has it gone with the revolution. now i’m stuck with ‘em. last year sucked. this year’s mls cup match felt even worse, even though it was, i suppose, a more deserved loss. they played a lousy second half, mostly. sure, the officiating seemed one-sided, and they had a great many near misses. hell, it was probably a great game to watch if you had no stake in it. but they weren’t the better side for a crucial portion of yesterday’s match. and that was that. and it doesn’t make any sense, but damn if i ain’t a little pissed off and just plain disappointed.

it wasn’t ‘cause we drove down there; you know that going into a road trip on this kind of pretense. your team might lose. the concert you’re going to see might suck. it’s the stuff that happens around it. we still had a good time. drove a while, saw strange and amusing things, had a few beers. suz says i have monkey arms. nevertheless, there was a reason for being there.

it was really great, for one, sitting in a big crowd of supporters, standing for the whole match. the organizers handed out song sheets; it was hilarious to see them handed out to school-age children, who eagerly read them, profanities and all (some with lyrics like “…shit on the bastards below!”). i was hoarse by the end of the game, and a little shell-shocked, just like the rest, but regardless, you had to yell on, just to show that the rest of the crowd wasn’t going to get you down.

and it’s really priceless to have the players (and the owner) come over and applaud their fans for the support; it’s such a rare gesture in other sports, but de rigeur in soccer.

of course it wasn’t fun to take shit from the houston and dc fans on the way out. it definitely was not cool for the jackass to run over with his orange flag to interrupt the aformentioned salute from the players.

but there you go. like i said, now i’m stuck with ‘em. and another formerly useful part of my brain has been tasked to follow the exploits of people being paid well (okay, somewhat well) to play a game.

i’m fine with that, really.

i’m not entirely sure why i’ve spent such a logarithmically increasing amount of time in the past two years on watching and playing soccer, all of a sudden. i think the latter part has had a pretty big effect on the former, though. the other part of it, though, is the communal nature of the experience which serves to draw you in.

i went to watch a game at the valley last year, but when i met tons of people in germany, just ‘cause i was wearing a charlton athletic shirt, i was hooked. i’ve been going to revolution games for years, but having season tickets and talking to the same folks for most of the year, it’s a much more involved experience. the crowd on weekend mornings is great fun, even if i don’t care who wins.

which is what made last night’s game so much more satisfying.

first and foremost, if you haven’t seen it yet, you really need to watch taylor twellman’s goal.

sure, just barely over 10k people were at the match; it was cold, and played on short notice, but it wasn’t the families and kids and $75 worth of food crowd; this was a soccer crowd. sure, it wasn’t easy to make a lot of noise in the cavernous bowl of gillette stadium, but what struck me as different was the number of times the crowd got to their feet to watch a threat on the goal. the boos for cuautehmoc blanco when he took a throw, or more frequently, a dive. the marching of the loony supporters with their drums and banners down the ramps. the crazy bastards funneling beer in the parking lot.

it’s a well-known fact that soccer fans in the us can be annoyingly evangelical about it, so i’ll try to steer somewhat clear of that; goodness knows i was an annoying mac guy, back in the day (on the other hand, i was also right). but at the same time, particularly as far as the mls is concerned, it’s fun to feel like you’re in on the ground floor of something cool and new and fun. and who knows, maybe someday kids will go to the games to learn new swear words instead of chowing down on concessions. now that’s a future worth supporting.

part of the fun of following the red sox for a whole season is the rich tapestry of a story that unfolds, most of which is generated by the events of real life and on the field, in the broadcast booth, and in the stands. the cast of characters including the players, the management, the media, dating show contestants, poorly-dressed fans, idiots throwing pizza, and julian tavarez. you’d think that with the vast array of weirdos in baseball, and on this team in particular, that that would be enough. but the other part of the story is the one that we make up. like how brian daubach was actually a pirate, and how manny ramirez is having a conversation with imaginary cartoon characters, and trot nixon was making mudpies in in the outfield. it’s like fan fiction, but you know, not creepy. having said that, my own imagination is nothing compared to the author(s) of basegirl, with their latest being a classic example.

there was a tradeshow that i could’ve gone to downtown today, and say, maybe taken a long lunch, but alas, it wasn’t really a well-received idea and i didn’t push it. sigh.

it didn’t start out so great.

after getting in from new jersey at 0200, i was awakened from a (not-so) sound slumber by multiple cars leaning on their horns. after about five minutes of this, i got up to take a look. there was someone directing traffic, who mostly had it stopped, which people were objecting to. loudly. it’s a friggin’ sunday morning. some free advice: ease up people, or you’ll probably die.

me? i got up and read the paper. it takes about half an hour these days to plow through the globe’s sox coverage, coupled with the usual assortment of other outlets. not that i’m complaining. i don’t have anything intelligent to add about it right now, really, other than to say i’m disoriented by the good fortune, and of the confidence this team inspires in everybody. it’s not without reason, either—they’ve been wholly bad-ass lately. but at the same time, they are still identifiably the red sox—between the infield buying dinner for the people waiting in line for tickets, to the pirates in the bullpen, to the fact that a solid handful of them are plainly just batshit crazy. so no matter how many articles suggest that success has changed everything, i strenuously disagree, and can’t really blame the new fans across the country—they’re a fun team to root for, and i’m fine with being spoiled.

so anyway, thus awakened, i was more than ready to head to the phoenix landing for arsenal-liverpool.

and it just turned into one of those perfect mornings. my bike was perfectly tuned; i pedaled noiselessly, almost effortlessly into the city; got to central square in under half an hour. watched a brilliant match with friends and singing strangers, breakfast and a pint. a pretty girl smiled at me while i unlocked my bike. i sat on the mass. ave bridge watching the sailboats. i barreled up steep back streets on beacon hill to enjoy the blistering speed down, and hit every light through the back bay.

so you know, somewhere there’s another shoe poised to drop.