cklablog

Jason Gay, for the Wall Street Journal, sums it up:

It was done. Biggest United States soccer victory ever. After all, the score was 2-0. No one comes back from 2-0 in soccer, just like no one ever leaves a Michael Bay movie without tinnitus. It was a safer bet than a lousy Knicks draft.

But then Brazil became, well, Brazil. It was cruel and mesmerizing to watch. The yellow-and-green soccer juggernaut scored early in the second half and relentlessly pounded U.S. goalie Tim Howard until they finally prevailed 3-2. When it was over the American players were crestfallen. They’d come within one half of a Wheaties box. Now they had to watch Brazil celebrate a title, which is like watching Derek Jeter celebrate getting a phone number.

My Wizards got their asses kicked this weekend, too. Turns out that what every Wizards fan believes is true after all — without Jimmy Conrad, we’re not going to win much.

Luckily for my general levels of bile this morning, Em and I missed this game, as we were at a party for a friend deploying this week to go fight some of the worst people in the world. Therefore, I’m giving him my man-of-the-match award for doing the real hard work.

Of all the ways you can end up at 3-2, going up 2-0 and taking that lead into the halftime break has to be the most painful.

Landon Donovan has been my man of the tournament — for me, he’s been the only player to play well in all of our matches, even the horrible opening two. After the game, asked that same old question about progress and the growth of the game in the United States blah blah blah (officially over that entire topic, thanks), Landon said that he felt we were at a level where it wasn’t enough to compete, we want to win. Well said.

Clint Dempsey had tears in his eyes as he accepted the second-place medal, a mark of pride in my opinion. He clearly wanted it badly, played accordingly, and had a legendary victory in his grasp before watching Brazil reassert itself and prove that the much-ballyhooed talent-gap was no media fiction.

When it mattered, they had much more than we did on both sides of the ball (save for in goal), and nobody who watches this sport could really be surprised by the result. But for it to come after such a hope-filled first half was torture. We’d rode our luck against Spain, but the same by-the-skin-of-our-teeth defending wasn’t going to keep Brazil out of the net.

When Luis Fabiano’s first goal went in, the belief fizzed out of me with a trickle. For that goal to come so early in the half, and leave them essentially 45 minutes to get the second? Gutted.

Rocket Love

Fearless US Braced for Brazil

I’m almost but not quite peeing my pants right about now.  I think we need a respectable showing, and after the emotional uplift from the last couple games, I really hope our guys don’t crash.  Hopefully our American sticktuitiveness, grit, determination, hustle, etc. will be enough to keep it close.

South Africa kept Brazil off the score-sheet for 85+ minutes, and we’ve a bit more quality about us than they do, so you have to think, “miracles can happen!*”

*Statement not intended to tempt fate by expressing any expectation of miraculous victory.

From The Forever War, Dexter Filkins’ set of essays about his experiences as a reporter covering the War Formerly Known As GWOT:

For seven months, Fallujah had been controlled by jihadis who had held the city in a Medieval thrall. And now the Marines were taking it back, six thousand of them, on foot in the middle of a November night

Gunfire rang out, and we scrambled for the walls on the sides of the street. The insurgents knew what they were doing, they were bracketing us with their shells, dropping them to the left and the right. They were getting close now.

Four men stepped from the darkness. They were not part of Bravo Company; I hadn’t seen them before. They wore flight suits that shimmered in the night and tennis shoes and hoods that made them look like executioners. The four men wore goggles that shrouded their eyes and gave off lime-green penumbras that lightened their faces. With the shells exploding I got off the wall and rejoined the captain in the street, shaking in the knees, and I listened to him tell the executioners the location of the snipers. Up ahead, he said. One of the four men mumbled something but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see their eyes through the green glowing but one of them was on the balls of his feet, bouncing, like a football player on the sidelines. Coach, he seemed to be saying, put me in the game.

The four men peeled off into the blackness without a sound. Moments passed and the shelling stopped. And then the sniper fire stopped. We never saw the men again.

From my new favorite website.

This kind of thing helps me understand my pie.

I’m a fan of Argentine football — I would love to see Boca Juniors vs. River Plate before I die, call it a dream.  And, as a fan (from afar) of criminal consipracies, I thought this was pretty interesting.

The supporters groups (Barra Brava) have long since strong-armed their way into the club’s pockets, demanding free tickets, a percentage of concessions, even skimming off the top of gate sales and player transfers.  But as the money in the game gets bigger, the tension changes focus from rival Barra Brava competing against one another (the English hooligan paradigm), into internecine fighting over the slice of pie various gang factions are getting.  And as we see anywhere else in the world, once the money gets big enough, the weapons come out and the killing starts.

There is a lot of discussion going on in England right now about the recent transfers of Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo (who went for a staggering $112 million) and how this level of spending might have inflated the player market — but what isn’t getting discussed is how that inflation, the big, big money is trickling down into places like Argentina or Brazil — nations that function as de-facto “feeder nations” for the top European clubs.

If C. Ronaldo is worth $112m, and a player like Gremio’s young starlet Douglas Costa is worth $25m, the question then becomes, what is that amount of money worth . . . to the gangsters and extortion artists who plague South American football?

It’s worth your ass, you can bet that.  If I were a club chairman at Gremio, or Palmerias, or Newell’s Old Boys, or Colo Colo for that matter, I’d be seriously thinking about retirement.

Or about hiring some ninjas.

From the Guardian:

The New York Times called it “a miracle on grass”. It was a very deliberate allusion to the legendary Miracle On Ice, when the USA’s band of amateur and collegiate ice hockey players beat the fearsomely omnipotent Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics. That spectacle is fondly regarded as perhaps the greatest day of the underdog in the history of US sport. And what Bob Bradley’s footballers achieved at Spain’s expense at the Confederations Cup is not far behind.

They are already calling it the greatest US victory ever. An over-matched US side defeated Spain 2-0 in the Confederations Cup, using disciplined, physical play and resolute defending to shock the best team in the world. In so doing, they snapped Spain’s 15-game winning streak (a freakishly long streak in football), and prevented them from setting the world record for matches without a loss (35).

I’ve been immersed in the media frenzy this morning, reading the (richly deserved) plaudits and basking in the after-glow.

The victory was made all the sweeter coming on the heels of an even less probable result, wherein the US beat Egypt 3-0, and needed Brazil to beat Italy by the same score to get through to the semifinal. To put that miracle into context, the bookmakers odds of it happening were 9,000-1. Had you put down $20.00 on the US getting through to the semis, you’d be $180,000.00 richer today.

And that near-impossibility was required because of the dispirited, disinterested, clumsy and naive performances against Brazil and Italy that had US fans calling for Coach Bradley’s head, and had experts all over the world calling this the worst US side since the dark days of the mid-90s (which is essentially like saying “ever”).

So for that side to turn around and make a miracle, then make another? Damn.

And it’s not like we’re really all that good. Losing 3 matches against technically superior sides before slinking home with the only condolence being that American sports fans probably care more about John Calipari’s twitter feed than your performance is par for the course. Hell, it was par for last week.

But the victory over Spain, champions of Europe and best in the world was big enough to make the front page of the New York Times , and while the NYT article covers a lot of the same ground as the other more football-friendly outlets (coughanywhereelseintheworldcough), it had this interesting snippet to offer:

Nobody in the American soccer federation will dare to claim that this was the day the country came of age in the world’s most important sport. Not until American boys and girls play feral soccer on their own, for the love of the sport, will the nation develop its own Jordan, its own Pujols, its own Crosby or Malkin, its own Maradona.

“Feral soccer.” What a great term, and it’s absolutely right. With our current structure, with the development of our best players coming through a pay-for-play youth system of “elite teams” and “travelling teams,” we’ll continue to knock out enough athletic journeymen to dominate CONCACAF, but we won’t break into the ranks of the elite. We now know we have players who can (on their day) shut down Xavi, but we don’t have any Xavis of our own.

My wife and I have a running joke: “So long as our best players are named Landon*, Chase or Taylor, we’re not winning a world cup.”

We need feral players, players who develop their on-the-ball sensibilities and vision miles away from any well-meaning youth team technocrat, who don’t think of themselves as a position, or a set of tactical responsibilities, but as a person with a ball and a chance to express themselves.

*Disclaimer: We could actually use a whole lot more Landons.

Human neural misfire + video camera + ‘concept’ = a little something for your WTF collection.

I found this guy by clicking through some really bizarre comments left on youtube videos — the more you watch, the more surreal they become. I’m ok with the idea of a lone tinfoil hat guy making videos and posting them to his “network,” but the fact somebody else was running the camera sends my fill-in-the-blanks-brain racing.

To summarize, whiskey tango foxtrot, over.