Here’s a Shocker

Management/ownersip figure demands wage controls, guaranteed profits.

I’m too tired and busy to go over the same old arguments again and again, but three major points:

1. I watch the Bundesliga. I like the Bundesliga; it’s a fine league. But it’s been nearly a decade since a German club won the CL, and only 2 have done it in the last 25 years. The cost of unilateral wage and club financial controls is a vast drop in competitiveness.

2. Speaking of competitiveness, if Gazidis really believes in the policy he’s suggesting he should realize that he’s the last man in the world who ought to be out front advocating it. Arsenal have been borderline noncompetitive at the highest level for years now partly because they’ve chosen to unilaterally disarm in the expenditures race for players. Whether or not you believe that to be a sound policy for long term financial or timeless moral reasons, that choice means that any call from someone affiliated with the club for forced top-down restrictions on club expenditures is going to look like Arsenal trying to force themselves back into competitiveness by regulatory fiat rather than sound football management. Among the people in charge of the game in England, few if any will fail to note this and rightfully or wrongly dismiss the call on those grounds. The only people likely to be convinced are some section of fans looking for a reason to dismiss the success of other clubs, which of course may be the point of this in the end. Few clubs or franchises in Arsenal’s position have ever been above whipping up hysteria at overpaid players as a cover for their own inability or refusal to compete.

3. This needs to be said over and over and over again: salary capping without collectively bargained hard revenue-sharing agreements is unjust. It would amount to an enormous interference in the market for no discernible reason, a forced regulatory transfer of huge revenues from millionaires to billionaires, from people like Samuel Eto’o to people like, well, Alisher Usmanov. There’s no benefit or gain in that alone for fans or the sport, and if you think doing that alone is going to drop the price of your season ticket you’re dreaming- so long as the stadium stays full at current prices, the only question is when those prices will go up again. I agree that over the long term something like the general North American system would be needed- see further down our main page- and I think Gazidis is smart enough to recognize that, but when the call is for wage caps alone in a sport with much weaker unionization than, say, Major League Baseball or the NFL, I wonder. There’s a lot of money there for owners if they can convince people that players alone deserve to be blamed for the present state of affairs.

Yu Fi Careful

Artest now actually factually in LA-LA Land

Wow. BDL has a post here which I heartily endorse. And yes, this will be me learning anew to shut my big fat mouth when it comes to underestimating the questionable choices of NBA GMs after proclaiming that nothing this offseason would be as bad as Zbo-to-Memphis. This isn’t anything like a disaster of that magnitude, but it’s a huge gamble which could hobble a defending champion if it goes pear-shaped, and that’s certainly bad enough if it happens.

Look, this might work. It might work because maybe Artest kicks the Lakers up from “elite defensive unit” to “best defense in the league”, and maybe his talents as a volume scorer make him valuable as an outlet with the second unit and allow Kobe to get more rest during the regular season. He could be as close as they’ll get to a LeBron-stopper (or VC-stopper) if that’s the 2010 finals matchup. Maybe the Lakers are just so damn good that they can change a substantial piece of their team on the fly and still crush what looks to be a much stronger set of contenders next year. Maybe it’ll work because Mitch Kupchak and Phil Jackson know something we don’t- you GM a team to a title or win as many as the Zen Master has as a coach, you earn a whole lot of trust. But honestly those few possibilities up above are all I can think of off the top of my head, and they aren’t much. Bad juju surrounds this one.

Everyone knows that Ron’s crazy-go-nuts and has been forever; I knew guys who knew him back in high school and they all said to a man that he was bonkers before someone pointed a camera at him for the first time, so there’s little reason to expect that part of his resume to change much. Oddly though I don’t think the LA environment will be a particular problem for him- if Phil Jackson can handle Dennis Rodman he can handle Ron, the Lakers team environment is structured and focused which should help, and anyway Ron’s particular form of nuttybonkers isn’t so much mediated by location. If there are going to be attitude issues as such, they’ll probably be the ones which BDL pointed out here (they’ve been on a roll lately), namely Artest’s habit of becoming a play-breaking ball-hogging black hole on offense who seems determined to win a 5-on-1 game of HORSE some nights. This could go one of three ways, and will probably move through all three at one point or another in the life of this deal: 1) Phil Jackson gets Artest to buy into the team concept, use fewer possessions and act as a court-spacer, and concentrate on defense; 2) Artest plays with the second unit and soaks up shot opportunities while Pau, Kobe et al. rest; 3) team meltdown, dirty looks on the court, lots of yelling and screaming. It’s going to be a big job to manage for everyone involved.

What really concerns me about this one however are the things which surround it. There’s no good metric to point to for this, but by common consent Ron’s not the defender he was 3-4 years ago and he’s about to enter his athletic decline phase after 30 with a 3 or 5 year guaranteed money contract depending on how this gets finalized. His defense may not be as big a boost over Ariza and Odom as anticipated, his offense won’t really carry him in the context of LA, and even at the $6 million per figure quoted which is a very good price, his reputation may make it very hard to move him for anything like fair value if he doesn’t work out. It’s a gamble which, once made, pretty much has to be stuck with for the duration. So far as we know he’s not all that familiar with the triangle. His PER fell substantially last year from 19.27 to 15.64. Moreover, and most importantly, he essentially is going to be asked to do the work of both Lamar Odom and Trevor Ariza next year, it appears. Most favorable takes on this trade, like John Hollinger’s, seem to be focusing on the direct comparison to Ariza since those players were effectively traded for each other, and that’s fair enough if the Lakers decide to go over the top and sign Odom as well. But I really doubt that’s going to happen, and there’s a good case to be made that Odom was one of the key factors in last year’s title winner. Hollinger suggests this was a good way to ward off post-title complacency, but it’s hard to see that as ever a major worry on a team whose head coach and best player have both been parts of 3-peat champions in the past. It seems a much larger risk to me to replace two of the most important cogs on a title winner with one of the biggest question marks in the league.

All in all you can see why the Lakers did this, and they’ll have 82 games to get this new version of their team running smoothly before the acid test in the playoffs. But this could end up as one of those pivotal trades which opens enough of a crack in the defending champion to let one of the contenders get over the hump- especially now, with next year shaping up to be one of the all time most competitive in league history. Time will tell. If Odom returns most of my worries about this would dissipate, and the major issues left would be whether Artest can limit his shots, raise his efficiency and stay mentally cool. Without Odom- either you’re substantially changing a defending champion, or you’re asking Artest to be a different player than he’s been for the last several years.

Forum Blue and Gold is the source for more specific Lakers-centric insights. Quality comments there too.

On a side note, this takes Ariza and Artest off the market and leaves Hedo Turkoglu and Lamar Odom out there among SFs- two fairly similar players. That’s not going to help the negotiating leverage much for either of them, and perhaps makes Odom marginally cheaper for the Lakers.

EDIT: I should add, there’s potentially one major mental advantage which Artest has over Ariza as it relates to fitting into the Lakers- age and where he is in his career. For all the other stuff which surrounds him, Ron Artest wants to be a winner. His offensive blackholing for instance isn’t pure selfishness so much as it is misguided certainty that it represents the best way to win, I think. If he can be convinced that doing something else is the best way then he may yet prove very amenable to changing things up and sacrificing shots in return for wins. Ariza by contrast is a young player who still has a lot to prove individually in the league, and who’s already reached the pinnacle of team-level success. In a lot of ways, both men are now in more suitable situations- Artest where he can snag a career-validating championship as a veteran sacrificing his individual game, and Ariza on an injury-depleted team which can use more of everything, including athletic wings who need shots to showcase their developing offensive game. It’s a pair of good fits.

I have to say, I started writing this post really down on this move and the more I think and write about it, the more I’m talking myself into it. I should really get some sleep….

Captain Clownshoes and the Bozo Brigade

“Gee er’rybody, let’s chant “Fedor” at UFC wun hunnerd!”

Yes, you go ahead and do that- pay $1000 or so to get in the door at one of the biggest MMA shows of all time, and then amuse yourselves by disrespecting the fighters in the main event who you just paid to see by chanting for someone else who DIDN’T just get punched in the face a bunch for your amusement. Good show, very classy. Here’s another idea: next, chase Fedor through the streets chanting “UFC!” at him, and see what happens.

I recognize this is somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s one of those ha-ha-I’m-joking-but-I’m-really-not deals. The MMA internet is often untouchable when it comes to the ability to take a business dispute between two parties and turn it into a good guy-bad guy deal for no discernible reason. Throw in a towering sense of entitlement, and this sort of thing results. There are times when I really think the MMA blogosphere consists of 98% e-thuggery and sub-4Chan-level trolling (seriously- read those comments) from people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year supporting the thing they complain so much about. A baffling state of affairs.

Ickle Mickel at Man U

Soccer’s Zbo in Memphis

He’ll do better, it should be recognized: he’ll get much better service in Manchester and he’ll give a care for the first time in years, which can’t hurt. He and Berbatov could potentially be a solid combination with Berbatov laying off balls and finding Owen with short passes in the box, taking advantage of Owen’s remaining finishing ability. But good goodness: United have turned Carlos Tevez and Christiano Ronaldo into Antonio Valencia and what’s left of Michael Owen this offseason. There’s no way to spin that as a positive- there’s going to have to be a hell of an effort by their veterans to pick up the slack, or they’re going to finish 3rd next year; and after all their success in recent years, it’s anyone’s guess how hungry they still are.

Meanwhile, Newcastle fans get to watch a player who visibly didn’t care about their club, team or season saunter off to Manchester to make 100,000 a week as a third choice striker. That has to feel good.

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me (Pt. 2)

Check it out kids, it’s the Isiah Thomas Memorial Bone-Stupid Trade of the Offseason!*

Arnovitz hits some of the generalities of this pretty well. I’m too amused to think coherently about this, so I’m just going to go with mocking bullet points:

- First off, my condolences again to QRich, a nice guy who tries hard. No one really deserves to play for the Clippers, let alone twice; let’s hope his karma’s better in the next go-round.

- Possessed of an extremely young team full of impressionable young players largely regarded as upstanding citizens like Mike Conley, Rudy Gay, Hasheem Thabeet, Darrell Arthur, OJ Mayo, etc., and needing to maintain every possible positive link with their community in order to ensure continued support for a lousy squad, the Grizzlies trade for Zach Fucking Randolph. Zach Randolph, who burned bridges and got run out of town for the last three teams he played for, two of them in consecutive years. Zach Randolph, who’s been arrested a bunch of times, including outside a strip club and last year for drunk driving. Zack Randolph, renowned for giving perhaps the least effort of any player in the league. Zach Randolph, who’s not even in a contract year, so is neither an expiring deal nor likely to be motivated by the need to earn a new one. Zach Randolph, who got as much publicity as a Clipper can last year for punching a guy during a game and who had previously punched a teammate in practice while he was with Portland. Zach Randolph, responsible for this. Zach Randolph, who I could go on about for days. This is the guy they chose. Has there been any move more representative of the utter historical futility of this inept botch-up of a basketball organization than this one? I vote that this beats out the Pau Gasol trade and even Big Country Bryant Reeves. That guy sucked on his own; Zbo might take five or six guys down with him. I need Bill Simmons to write a column about this, because really no one else can do it justice. It’s not even a basketball move, it’s a fucking social sciences experiment-meets-reality-TV. Real World Memphis, with Zach as the housemate everyone hates. He’s gonna be sticking his dick in the peanut butter and wiping his nose on the drapes by Christmas, metaphorically speaking.

- Be serious now. As a Knicks fan, can there be any more clear sign of how far the team has come than to watch the Grizzle and the Clippers make the same mistakes our team did the last few years? The Knicks won’t make the playoffs next year and they’re still very, very much a work in progress, but it’s damn nice to be able to laugh at other teams for once. A clear sign of separation from that level of team. Tastes like victory, however small.

- I gotta be honest, I don’t really care about either team, but I’d pay $50 right now to be able to watch the Grizzlies practice whenever I wanted next year. Guaranteed it’s better than 90% of the professional comedies on TV.

- Clippers management sucks and they don’t know what they’re doing, but I’ll give them this: at least they were willing to admit they were wrong and make a nothing-for-something trade to get Zbo out of town after one year and the fuck away from Blake Griffin. They’ll still be terrible next year, but there’s a pretty decent chance their win total goes up from 19. Think about that, if it happens: replacing Zbo, a 20-10 guy in his theoretical prime at age 27, with a rookie considered the weakest on-paper #1 overall in a decade, might make the Clips better. Lots of lessons in that one.

- And if that doesn’t work out, with a few injuries the Clips might be the worst team ever, which is always fun to watch if you’re not a fan of that team.

- Memphis management though…what the heck is going on here, then? When they were cutting costs and spending little, I understood that; they’re in a weak market with a young team, no reason to overspend or overcommit before you know what the mature version of your roster may be lacking in a few years. But to move away from that strategy for the sake of Zach Randolph, perhaps the most universally loathed player in the league, defies belief. Why? How can professional people have such a total inability to learn from the mistakes of their peers? This same thing was tried in New York where Zeke got Zbo for pennies on the dollar, and it failed in every possible respect, in the largest media market in the country. So then Zbo gets traded out West, again for pennies on the dollar, to the second largest media market in the country where he again fails catastrophically both on court and off. How much warning do you need? If there were some sort of cost savings for the Grizzlies I could maybe sort of understand it, but they’re taking on MORE MONEY for the sake of ZACH RANDOLPH. I don’t even care what happens from this point, this is hands down the single worst move any NBA team will make this offseason: it brings in a bad player, it costs millions more in cash, it’s hard to get out of (in theory at least; there’s apparently a lot of suckers in this league), it’s likely to piss off and demoralize fans especially the more passionate and better informed ones, and there’s a pretty decent chance that it will be a horrible influence on a young and promising team. Absolutely zero buys.

What on earth is even the theoretical upside? Even if Zbo is a positive influence on a team which he’s probably not (2 year Adj. +/- of -0.65), even if you need a 4 which you probably do, why THIS guy? 3 Shades of Blue just had a post evaluating David Lee and Paul Millsap for the role. Either one might well be gettable given Utah and the Knicks’ cap/tax situations, and either one of them is 3 times the player Zbo is, and not a quarter of the headache. But hey, why wait and try to get someone who’s actually contributed to a winner or has a good statistical profile or is liked by fans and teammates, when you can throw big money at ZACH RANDOLPH. What the shit? YOU ARE SIGNING ZACH RANDOLPH. STOP. If it were ever possible to take a very young team guaranteed to be maturing into higher levels of production and which only won 24 games last year, and make them win fewer games the next season by ADDING a player, this would be the move to do it. Doomed is too nice a word for this one; it leaves too much hope out there. Taking all relevant factors into account, this is one of the very worst personnel moves I have seen in all my 20 years or so as a basketball fan, and with any luck it’ll be a long time before we see anything quite this bad again. What a fucking clown show.

*I know he’s not dead. But his career sure is.

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me (Pt. 1)

Marian Gaborik, 5 years, $7.5 per

I don’t blog much on the Rangers here since even though I’ve been a fan of them as long as I’ve been a fan of any of my teams, my hockey knowledge has never been anywhere near what I’d say was good enough to need to be shared. They’re also the team I tend to be least rational about, mostly because they drive me fucking insane. So on that basis, let me confirm: even people like me know that this is a fucking terrible deal. TERRIBLE. Barely days after the team finally got out of cap hell by moving Scott Gomez, they’ve leaped right back into it by signing yet another overrated “skill player” to the same level of deal for a similar time span. What on earth is the plan here, to keep chopping and changing finesse guys with reputations for gutlessness cast off by more successful teams until one of them magically fits?

Gaborik is only 27 and will be 32 when this deal expires; in theory these should be his prime years. But he’s missed an average of 19 games a season in his career, played only 17 total last year, and has rapidly gained a reputation as a soft player, a malingerer, a self-involved type who alienated himself from his teammates. So of course the Rangers signed him to a contract no one else in the league would match and which is guaranteed to sap whatever motivation he ever had to fight through injuries in order to stick him in a locker room with Sean Fucking Avery. This should end well. I fully expect Chris Drury to demand a trade by midseason, because no serious hockey player who’s won at the highest level could possibly be expected to deal with this shit in good humor. The only thing which might prevent it is if John Tortorella takes one for the team and deals with Gaborik himself the first time Marian tells the coach he’s sitting out in solidarity with a friend’s having a hangnail. Gaborik is going to get torn apart in the press around here as well, and it’ll be for good reason as this is likely going to be remembered as the signing which did more to tear down the recent semi-success the Rangers have enjoyed than any other, which is saying something. It’s Petr Nedved all over again as Sean put it, except that Nedved was at least likable. With the exception of disgusting thugs like Chris Pronger, Gaborik from afar seems like one of the least likable players in the league. And for all his vaunted skills, Gaborik’s best season is 83 points- and he’s never had another one above 67. Scott Gomez, who everyone was so happy to see the back of at the same price, had his best at 84 and three others in 2nd place at 70. Gaborik has better points per game numbers to be sure, but what exactly is that worth if you miss half the season because you’ve got pins and needles or your leg fell asleep or you’re possessed by evil spirits or whatever the fuck else has gone wrong with this guy? It’s impossible to escape the sense that the Rangers signed him because he had that 5 goal game against them, which is among the stupidest of all reasons to sign a player.

One Valeri Kamensky was enough. Does my head in, just does my head in. We’ve signed hockey’s Tomas Rosicky.

Farewell to a Legend

Alexis Arguello found dead today, age 57

Alexis Arguello was one of the greatest living legends of boxing, a man respected by all for his skills and heart and loved by nearly as many for his humanity and character. I wish I could go some way towards putting his life into context, but my active time as a boxing fan only marginally overlapped with his career and my knowledge of Nicaraguan politics is nowhere near sufficient for me to say anything about his political career. I became familiar with him through catching old fights when and where I could on ESPN Classic and Youtube, and all I can advise you to do is the same. Watch the man and how he fought, listen to others describe how he carried himself in and out of the ring. He was everything you could wish a fighter to be, a hero to many of the people of Nicaragua, and an object of the greatest respect for others all around the world.

Here is his boxing record. Here is a Youtube search for him, which includes apparently the entirety of his famous- or infamous- first fight against Aaron Pryor, which was hailed as the fight of the decade by Ring Magazine.

And one last thing about the Confederations Cup…

Seriously, can we declare a fucking moratorium forever on the endless bickering back and forth of “OMGZ sawker iz goings to catch on likes the NFL!!!one!” and “ZOMG sawker will never be populars in the USA!”. It’s beyond mindless, and both sides are like a shorthanded basketball team – they’re missing the point.

On one hand, you have the old sportswriter guard who insists that it’ll never make any kind of impact at all. To them, I invite them to look on message boards or go to one of the many pubs showing a game on Saturday afternoons. Sure, if you only factor in MLS, the sport is solidly behind 5th placed-ice hockey in the American sports pecking order (assuming it goes: NFL, NASCAR, NBA, MLB and then NHL in that order). But, I would argue that even with the minor revitalization of the NHL this past season, soccer would eclipse it comfortably if you include consumption of the main European leagues and the ex-pats folllowing the action in Latin America.

Meanwhile, to the ones insisting that soccer will someday possess the one ring to rule them all…well, that’s just the kind of institutional lunacy that barely requires a rebuttal.

It’s amazing to me how the discussion of soccer’s place in this country (as told through the lens of most of the MSM) is either “Can soccer be the number one sport in the country”, or “You soccer fans are all idiots for thinking it can be the number one sport in the country”. THERE’S 300 FUCKING MILLION FUCKING PEOPLE HERE, YOU DICKS! All sorts of niche sports survive and thrive here – indoor lacrosse, pro wrestling (not a sport, but it definitely has a hardcore audience), tractor pulls, rodeo, arena football, bowling, and on and on and on and on. Why can’t everyone just accept that soccer is casually followed by (x) amount of the populace and has a hardcore base of (y) of the populace, and leave it at that?

Why is it that a sport only matters if it’s the most-followed sport in the country? If 10,000 people are willing to pay to get in the door to watch something and if another 700,000 or so watch it on TV, then it matters to that 710,000 people. Why is this so difficult to comprehend? You can’t please all of the people all the time, and if the PTI crowd and the Jim Rome crowd and the whatever-else crowd don’t care about soccer, WHO FUCKING CARES? It’s at the level it’s at, and considering what earlier eras were like, that is still a positive achievement!

In closing, I leave you with Jim Cornette’s explanation of the four types of wrestling audiences. Substitute soccer for wrestling, and it’s the same idea!!!

The First Group: “There are this many people who come to see anything in a wrestling ring. They’re going to come to see anybody in boots and tights in a wrestling ring no matter what. They’re hardcore. They are on the internet. They want to come because either they can’t get enough wrestling or they want to bitch and complain about something and say how they could do it better.”

The Second Group: “This crowd likes good wrestling. Not old wrestling, not new wrestling, just good wrestling. There’s two kinds of wrestling: good wrestling and bad wrestling. I don’t care who presents it or what it is, that’s this crowd, that’s the second crowd. They want to see good wrestling and if you present a good product for an extended period of time to where it gets the point across, they will come to see you.

The Third Group: This crowd comes to see the star, comes to the see the big event. The Rock, The Steve Austin. Either somebody really gets hot like Hulk Hogan two decades ago or The Rock and Austin in the late 90’s or whatever. Or Wrestlemania is hot. That’s the crowd where no matter what you do they aren’t going to come all the time, and they’re not going to watch every week, but they know it is around. That’s the third group, the people who will come for the big shows or the big stars.

Everybody else in the world is in the fourth group. They don’t give two flying fucks. You could put a flying elephant in the ring, they don’t give a shit because it’s wrestling and they don’t want to see it. They want to see ballet, fly fishing and I don’t give a shit what else. You ain’t going to get them.

So you’ve always got these people [group one] right. And I’m not saying you should shit on them because they are your ticket purchasing patrons, but you have always got these people. If you’ve got a good product, you’ve got group number two so concentrate on that. There’s really no way that you control group number three because how do you just say ‘Ok, this guy is going to be the next Rock. Or the next Steve Austin or Hulk Hogan’. You can’t do that, they’ve got to come along. That’s when you get the really big house, record gates, whatever.

And the fourth group, who gives a flying fuck what you people want to see, if you people are going to god damn ballet, fuck you! Because we’re doing wrestling. And the people who try to say ‘Well, we’re going to give people who don’t like wrestling something to watch’. They’ve got something to watch, it’s on all the other fucking stations while your program is on you dumb son of a bitch! So why do you do shit that’s not related in any way to wrestling on a wrestling program. They don’t stop Saturday Night Live to have Curt Gowdy give the god damn Olympic freestyle skating report. The people watching Saturday Night Live don’t give two flying fucks about the god damn Olympic freestyle skating. So WHY DO IT is all I am saying?

You’ve got group one. If you’re good you get group two. When you’re lucky you get group three, and the rest of them it don’t make a fucking difference because they’re not coming anyway.”

Yet Another Midget

The Canadiens traded Chris Higgins and some prospects to the Rangers for Scott Gomez. I really can’t put it any better than Four Habs Fans did…they stated: “Finally, the overpaid undersized center we’ve all been waiting for!”

And, he’s hideously-expensive on top of it, to the tune of 8M per until 2014. He’s 29 now, so he’ll be 35 when that deal expires. With the cap slowly inching downwards though, I can’t help but wonder if this is the guy we really needed. His last three seasons have seen these lines:

2006-07: 13-47-60   +7
2007-08:  16-54-70  +3
2008-09:  16-42-58   -2

Really? We’re paying 8 million per until the end of time for a guy who doesn’t get 20 goals a season, and has had some variation of the above-mentioned lines his whole career except for one fluke year in 2005-06 (33-51-84)? In contrast, the Canucks just re-signed BOTH Sedin twins for a total of 12.2M per year for the next 5 years, according to TSN. They both finished with 82 points last season, so that totals to 12.2M for 164 points. Using a points-per-dollar ratio (and assuming similar production – I’ll even be charitable and assume a slight increase to 65 points for Gomez), we’re paying 1M for every 8.125 points, while Vancouver is getting 13.443 points per 1M. Great work, Bob.

Of course, the Ranger offense last year was spectacularly punchless…so the possibility does exist that playing with someone like Alex Kovalev will increase Gomez’s scoring. But, that is building a foundation on a potential quagmire – it looks like Kovy is going to re-sign with us, but what about Alex Tanguay? Will Robert Lang still be able to produce after his season-ending injury last season? What if we don’t sign any decent UFAs and can’t swing any more deals? Seriously, is Gomez going to do any better with the likes of Tomas Plekanec than he did with what he had on Broadway?

Speaking of Plekanec, Gomez won 52.4% of his faceoffs…or, a whole 1.8% more than Pleks (though, in fairness, Pleks’ hideous 20-19-39 line isn’t anywhere near Gomez’s modest scoring levels).   

The point is, this seems remarkably like going all-in with a middle set when there’s four to a flush on the board. Maybe it’ll end up paying off, but it’s a risky gamble that can end up costing us huge in the end. For now, no buys.

Forever on the cusp

Swagger is a funny thing – the aura of invincibility that can surround a person or a team can make them fearsome to oppose…it can take a person or group of modest means and transform them into a force of nature. Unfortunately for the USMNT, they discovered that those auras can be remarkably fragile when contested by a determined and fearless opponent…of course, it also helps if said opponent fields a team worth more than the GDP of most mid-sized countries.

I watched the Confederations Cup final in my usual watering hole during the Premier League season, a fine place called Nevada Smith’s. I got there an hour before kickoff – any later, and I likely would not have gotten in the door. It was almost an entirely pro-USA crowd, much of whom were the usual lot that support the New York Red Bulls (I went to one NYRB game at Nevada’s at a friend’s insistence – it was this season’s opener, and it was the only time anything serious has ever kicked off at Nevada’s in my presence…suffice to say that they have an element among them that I don’t care for…let’s just agree to blame it on New Jersey and move on), and they were as boisterous as always. The “Yes We Can” chant was probably inevitable, in retrospect.

In the end, yesterday’s game had striking parallels to the 2002 World Cup as a whole, and the opener against Portugal in particular. You may remember that in that match, the USA blitzkrieged Portugal for three quick goals before clinging on to dear life for the 3-2 win. Unlike in that game though, the Yanks made it to the halftime interval with the 2-0 lead (it’s too bad it wasn’t three – none of the reports mention this, but we did have some chances to make it so in the first half). In 2002, the Portuguese pulled one back almost immediately after going down 3-1, but the States held and held until the 71st, and then held some more until the final whistle. Let’s face it, though…as good as Portugal are, they are not Brazil.

More tellingly, though, the US in 2002 played Portugal, South Korea, Poland and Mexic0 to get to the quarterfinals. Portugal was a win, Korea a draw, and Poland an absolutely hideous 3-0 loss. They of course beat Mexico in the round of 16, only to valiantly lose to Germany in a match they could and likely should have won. Hmm…a valiant loss to a soccer superpower in a match they should have won…why, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

When the nuclear winter comes and the only matches to be played are between teams of mutant cockroaches, the epitaph of our national soccer program will be “Forever on the cusp of greatness, but never to grasp it.” Admittedly, it’s a damn sight better than being aggressively awful (read as: 1950-1989). It’s certainly an improvement on barely qualifying for Italia 90 and then getting steamrollered in three straight punchless losses in the first round. But, in another sense, it’s almost worse to have a glimpse of Eden and not be allowed in. If you support Malta for example, even scoring a goal against a bigger soccer nation (read as: everyone) counts as a glorious triumph…the Maltese supporter will never know a feeling like yesterday’s galling conclusion.

To be fair, though, that supporter will also never know a feeling like the first half. It was like the Portugal game, only better. Looking at the teamsheets before the game, this was on paper a potential embarrassment (you know, like the one the same opponents inflicted on us in the group stage). However, while I will never be confused with Landon Donovan’s Biggest Fan, you have to tip your cap to him – his workrate in this tournament has been immense, his heart and desire beyond reproach. As for Clint Dempsey (of whom I may indeed be the Biggest Fan), he’s ghosted through long stretches of almost every game, only to come up aces when an opportunity comes along. There was always at least a small chance with them out there, and the US counter-attacked brilliantly on two occasions to make those chances happen.

Jonathan Spector (who also had a great tournament before being overwhelmed by an ocean of yellow shirts in the second half of the final) sent a raking ball into the area, and Dempsey’s volley was nothing short of majestic.

Seriously, if a space alien came down to Earth for the first time and you asked it to point out the player in white who plays in the world’s top league, it wouldn’t have a hard time doing so. I (heart) Clint Dempsey.

Anyway, Donovan’s goal may have been even better – an imperious and opportunistic bit of smash-and-grab forward play culminating in a wonderful finish against the grain of Julio Cesar’s net.

I’d be lying if I said I remember large stretches of the match…but I do know that both goals resulted in a crazed hysteria of spilled beer, pogoing up and down like lunatics, and throat-rending screams. The singing was filled with bravado, the air already that of a celebration rather than a job half-finished. I was of two minds, even in the boozy haze – most of me felt that the Yanks would hold on, but the nagging voice in my head told me that the Brazilians would likely make tactical changes at halftime (say what you will about their manager, Dunga…but you can’t say that he is a stupid man) and that Bob Bradley would have to make the right counter-moves.

Dunga vs. Bob Bradley is a mismatch on the level of…well…Brazil vs. the United States.

Anyway, as mentioned, I will have to leave it up to other commentators to break down the X’s and O’s of what Brazil did differently. I’ve read some who claim that they used the wings more and that our guys didn’t close down their fullbacks effectively enough. The only trouble with that is that we didn’t close down the wide players in the first half, either…or against Spain for that matter. Bradley ended up specifically telling the press that they deliberately conceded the wide areas to Spain and let them hit in as many crosses as they wanted (in the belief that Oguchi Onyweu and Jay DeMerit would clear them out). That worked against Spain, and it worked in the first half of this game…I don’t think that was the issue.

The truth is that the backline started getting beat with more regularity on attacks that they quelled earlier on. I believe it to be some combination of fatigue and lack of experience in playing this many high-profile games back to back. Besides that, the Brazilians passed and moved more intelligently – they surely took our guys lightly in the first half (and after the abortion of a game in the group stage, why wouldn’t they?).

The other problem, of course, was momentum. If the Yanks had gone 10 minutes of the second half without conceding, I don’t believe the 2-0 scoreline would have ever changed. It was obvious that Brazil’s plan was to storm out of the gates, get a quick one, and then use that momentum to carry them on to the 2nd and 3rd goals. Sure enough, DeMerit was just a tad too slow to close down Luis Fabiano, and his brilliant turn-and-shoot was perfectly placed in the corner. Tim Howard had no chance…and after that, neither did our boys. The game was over, and we were a dead team walking.

I wasn’t the only one to know it, too. It’d be too far to say Nevada’s was a morgue, but the noise level plummeted after the goal. There were some defiant attempts later to keep it going, but not for a good 5 minutes after the goal at least. It was the ultimate in sucker punches, and the team never recovered.

From there, it was one-way traffic on Howard’s goal. As good as Brad Friedel is, as good as Kasey Keller was, neither of them are in Howard’s league. Bruce Arena’s decision to play the ancient Keller instead of Howard in the 2006 World Cup is one that causes a homicidal rage in me to this day. IT WAS SO FUCKING OBVIOUS, BRUCE. *sigh* Anyway, he proved his stature as a world-class goalkeeper with that performance. There will be those who will disagree because Alex Ferguson gave up on him way too soon, and others because he had the gall to be born American. Whatever. Howard is one of the top 5-10 goalkeepers in the world today, and you can’t tell me otherwise. He was magnificent, and it was sad that his efforts didn’t get the reward they deserved.

Of course, we all know what happened from there. It’s still too soon, and I really don’t feel like talking about the game itself any longer.

That said, the most heartening thing to me was the interviews that Donovan gave after the game. Instead of playing it off as a wonderful effort and “anyone could have won on the day”, he made it clear that no one on our side felt that this was good enough, and he stated that these are the games that they have to win if they are to make it to the next level. He’s right. The other thing that has to happen is Bob Bradley has to be fired. Right now.

Actually, that’s one of the worst things to come out of the Yanks’ strong showing in this tournament – it probably saved his job. He is a fine coach at the MLS level, but he is far out of his depth here. On the face of it, a casual observer would look at his results and think he was doing a good job. In reality, the 0-0 with Argentina, the win over Spain and many of the qualifying wins of our region have more to do with heroic individual displays from Howard, Donovan and Dempsey more than anything else.

Right now, the USA has the deepest talent pool in its history (and would be even deeper if the clowns at the US Soccer Federation hadn’t chased away Neven Subotic, who now plays for Serbia, and blown it with Jersey-born Guiseppe Rossi, who plays for Italy). The ability is there, but someone has to be able to teach this team how to play together, how to pass and move and actually keep possession of the ball when up against top-level sides. Bradley is a nice guy, but he’s not that guy. If this defeat has taught us anything, it’s that we will never grasp that promise of greatness without someone who’s done it all before leading the way. For the love of god, PLEASE HIRE JURGEN KLINSMANN. I don’t care how much money it takes, the guy lives in California and is currently unemployed…MAKE IT HAPPEN.