Run of Play

Thorsten & Sieglinde Explain It All

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:57:44 -0400

Over on Grantland, I have a preview of the Champions League final. Things it includes: a dramatization of the creation of the English language, a definitive guide to defending Arjen Robben, and a very lovely picture of a horse. Enjoy!

Sir Alex in 13 Paradoxes

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:24:59 -0400

What made Alex Ferguson the definitive manager of the Premier League era wasn’t only the wins; it was also the way he embodied all the contradictions of modern football. Here’s my new Grantland column.

Hi Xavi :)

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:50:00 -0400

EXCLUSIVE: Pep Guardiola’s email to Xavi following Barcelona’s 7-0 loss to Bayern in the Champions League.

Excerpt:

Seeing your future not only defeat your past, not only taunt your past, but drop your past from high above into the path of an oncoming sport-utility vehicle — try to imagine the sensation that gave me. To see your past lose all its defenses, to see it exposed as a naked, mortal, vulnerable thing. A moment ago I overheard a woman coming out of the Qdoba say to her companion, “That was one weird burrito bowl.” I have considered her words, and I have realized that, with the economy of a poet, she has described what the Champions League semifinal was for me.

It was one weird burrito bowl, Xavi.

Read the whole thing here.

Death and Information

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:04:28 -0400

It’s a grisly coincidence that the Boston Marathon bombings and the Hillsborough Stadium disaster happened on the same day. I wrote a piece about what the two tragedies have in common.

The Return of Matt Le Tissier

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:09:00 -0400

Here’s my new Grantland column on his improbable, small-scale comeback.

Matt Le Tissier is coming out of retirement, and I’m going to type that again, because it contains words that deserve to be repeated. Matt Le Tissier is coming out of retirement. If you don’t know who that is — and there’s a good chance you don’t, if you’re American, not a soccer fan, or under 25 — watch the YouTube clip of him scoring against Newcastle on October 24, 1993. This is the second season of the Premier League, all lunging tackles and signboards for Street Fighter II. Le Tissier’s playing midfield for Southampton, the team in red-and-white stripes. The ball comes flying over the left flank to the Southampton striker, Iain Dowie, who heads it down toward the middle of the pitch, where Le Tissier’s running forward at a smooth trot. It’s a bad header; the ball scuds directly behind him. The move should be over. But watch what Le Tissier does….

Read the whole thing here if that idea seems appealing to you.

Maradona, Then and Now

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:32:02 -0500

Here’s my new Grantland column.

Soccer Is #*%!ed

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:49:02 -0500

I wrote a cheerful piece about match-fixing.

I am a midlevel Hungarian gangster. You are a Finnish referee. So here’s how it works. I get a call from a lieutenant in the syndicate — not from Dan Tan himself, the boss has to be protected, but from a middle man somewhere in Asia. Maybe Singapore, where Dan Tan is based; maybe someplace else. The caller says: We need so-and-so to happen in such-and-such soccer game. So I fly to Helsinki from Budapest and take a train north to Tampere, where you’ll be officiating a match in the Ykkönen, the Finnish second division, between FC Ilves and FC Viikingit. We meet. It’s not as if I’m lugging a duffel full of cash. The money will be laundered; we have the systems in place. I want you to be comfortable, after all.

You can read the whole thing at Grantland.

GUS JOHNSON, WORLD CUP ANNOUNCER

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:25:18 -0500

OH MY GOODNESS!

Schrödinger's Coach

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:34:53 -0500

Is it time for Arsenal to part ways with Arsene Wenger? My new column at Grantland.

You Can Purchase Your Popcorn With MasterCard Or You Can Purchase Your Popcorn With Blood

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:59:33 -0500

A little late with this, but here’s my new Grantland column about Rafa Benitez and Chelsea.

Abramovich is a week removed from sacking Roberto Di Matteo, a beloved former Chelsea player who managed the club for eight months and won both the FA Cup and the Champions League. You would have to be a self-deluding megalomaniac to see coaching Chelsea as anything other than a path to a short-term payoff. And Rafa has enacted the same bighorn-sheep-in-spring routine at every club he’s managed; you would have to be a self-deluding megalomaniac to hire him thinking he’d fall in line and do whatever you asked. So, yeah. Good thing neither of these guys is a megalomaniac, right?

Read the whole thing here.

I'm Sick of Manchester United

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 08:28:04 -0500

And I wrote a column about it. This is the beginning:

I’m sick of Manchester United. In many ways, this is a compliment to Manchester United. When your emperor is cruel and merciless and rules from his twisted iron throne for like a million consecutive years, your pathetic longing for revolution is just proof that he’s great at oppressing you. If Manchester United weren’t permanently welded to the top or near-top of the Premier League table like the star on a Christmas tree no one throws out till May, I wouldn’t have had all this leisure time to accrue malevolent emotions toward their consistency and their stock prices and their players and their stupid face. Great job, Manchester United!

In other ways, however, this is not a compliment to Manchester United, because it is never a compliment when someone would rather see a goat, or Tottenham Hotspur, win the title over you. And the way I feel lately, if you rustled up a Siberian ibex that could score away at Stoke, I would wear its scarf every Saturday and cheer it on at the Theatre of Dreams. I would say the same thing about Tottenham Hotspur, but I’m trying to be realistic.

Read the whole thing at Grantland.

cultfootball: Football match on Antarctica, 1914 (via “The...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:08:37 -0400

cultfootball:

Football match on Antarctica, 1914

(via “The photographs of Frank Hurley: Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition gone wrong | Slate.com )

Sunset for the Golden Generation

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:59:39 -0400

Sunset for the Golden Generation:

Here’s my new Grantland column about John Terry and the saturating grossness of the age.

Surviving Laser Rain

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:09:12 -0400

I wrote a new piece for Grantland about Everton and the impossible position of the medium-sized Premier League club. Read it…if you want to.

Exclusive to the Vercelli Soccer Express

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:52:03 -0400

Here’s my new Grantland piece about Pro Vercelli and their suspiciously video-game-like rise to Serie B.

Destiny Is Ruthless

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:58:42 -0400

Here’s my new Grantland piece on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team and their controversial-but-awesome Olympic gold medal.

Tear the Roof Off

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:10:06 -0400

Here’s my new Grantland piece on Klinsmann and the USMNT at the start of World Cup qualifying.

Mad Men: A Series of Suppressed Tweets

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:22:09 -0400

TOTALLY UNRELATED TO SOCCER: I wrote a few tweets about last night’s episode of Mad Men, then realized a million DVR-people would yell at me for spoiling it, so I moved them here. Read if you care. There are spoilers, duh.

— Brian

Couple of thoughts about the form of last night’s Mad Men that I haven’t seen in the recaps. Spoilers ahoy.

So the big theme of the episode was friendship and the limits of friendship.

Formally, that meant two parallel stories about friends (Don/Joan, Harry/Paul) helping each other out of rough moments.

There was a lot of Don/Joan romance talk, for obvious reasons, but the form of the D/J story was still really similar to the H/P story.

One parallel: both stories involved trips to bars/restaurants that culminated in one friend giving the other travel money.

Both friend-outings were also a little cruel, with the “strong” friend dangling something unobtainable in front of the “weak” friend.

I.e., Don can’t give Joan the happy marriage they were playacting, any more than Harry’s fantasy-chat can make Paul a real writer.

This limit was driven home by the fact that both “strong” friends were shown to have their own weird background weaknesses.

I.e., Don’s wife actually expects things from him and won’t turn normal anger into cathartic preprandial hatesex.

And Harry is so domestically bummed that he accepts ludicrously improbable come-ons from Hare Krishna street orphans.

(In his office, no less. And how lucky is he that he doesn’t have a window now!)

Anyway, both farewells were touching and sad, because friends help, but ultimately you’re still on your own.

Friends give you cab/bus fare, but you’re still divorced in a bar or terrible at writing Trek scripts.

Friendship can’t fill in for either work or home, Mad Men’s two major settings/preoccupations.

I thought it was a good episode.

Toto v. The Wave

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:43:24 -0400

Ever been tabbed to speak at someone’s going away party?

It’s a more exigent task than you’d imagine. It necessitates an examination of your relationship with that person yet simultaneously compels you to divorce yourself from it, because if you truly care about them, it becomes impossible not feel a little sad, a little hurt, a little abandoned that they’re moving on.

As the captain of a midtable side, I imagine Antonio Di Natale is well-versed in that conflict, at least in psyche if not actual practice. From David Pizarro to Vincenzo Iaquinta, Fabio Quagliarella to Alexis Sanchez, Di Natale has watched his contemporaries at Udinese saunter out the door for better opportunities at bigger clubs, leaving him to recite staid dialogue and dutifully hand out cake before shouldering another share of club’s ballast. Somewhere along the way, he became Sam Waterston in Law & Order, perpetually standing still as his recast cohorts drift further away from his date of birth but stubbornly refusing to start over someplace else. And — as is also the case with Waterston — you invariably stumble upon at least one Udinese match per season when you weren’t even looking for one, only to find Di Natale making one of his usual imperious runs through traffic and you incredulously blurting out things like, “Wait, he’s still there?!” and, “Doesn’t he have somewhere else better to be?”

At 34, he’s evolved into the curator role that seems to be ubiquitous among strikers at smaller clubs, each goal a defiant lash against the eternal wave of change that, with every whim of the transfer window, erodes the foundation of the place he worked to preserve. Some seasons, like last year’s fourth-place finish and Champions League berth, he succeeds in disrupting its path; other times it bests him, as it did in the nerve-racking 15^th place finish from two years ago that left Udinese mere points from the drop. But, by casting his lot with this club, Di Natale’s battles never are not about that Wave. The stated objective for him and players of his ilk may be avoiding relegation or qualifying for Europe, but the undercurrent is one of preservation, and of tirelessly punching the clock toward that aim until their aging legs no longer cooperate.

There is, however, a mitigating factor that distinguishes the man they call Toto from his counterparts within that archetype: choice. He isn’t Sergio Pellisier, whose limited talent never lent itself toward ambitions much grander than staying the course at Chievo, nor is he Marco Di Vaio, whose convalescence at Bologna only came about after repeated failures at larger clubs pressed him into servitude a la Jon Snow getting banished to the Wall. He isn’t even Fabrizio Miccoli, whose similarly pint-sized stature marooned him at Palermo. Di Natale, with his 36 caps for the Italian national team and his consecutive Capocannoniere titles, had options; namely Juventus, who two years ago inquired over him swapping the black-and-white stripes of his present outfit for a set with considerably more luster. And despite the only impediment between him and a starting job at the most successful side in Italy being a preponderance of mediocrity in Iaquinta, Amauri, and Alessandro Del Piero, he turned them down.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that this is unusual. Athletes tend to be predisposed to upward mobility. Competition is hardwired into their brain stems, and the logical conclusion is to pursue that aim to be the best at what they do as far as they can take it, climbing the ladder as high as possible until they hit their ceiling — which, for the exceedingly vast majority of soccer players, is well below the fairly universal ambition of starring at [insert big club here]. They forsake dreams for security, ambition for comfort, desire for necessity like people in every profession, but it comes with a different sort of value judgment; compromise, in the unbending arena of sport, almost always equates to some measure of failure.

I’m pretty certain Antonio Di Natale is cognizant of all of that; he just doesn’t appear to have any use for it, which is what makes his career arc so peculiar. He isn’t compromising his dream, because nothing has ever forced him to reconcile his vision of what his career should be with what it wound up being; you can’t experience failure if you never take a shot at something to begin with — and with all due respect to Serie A’s second-oldest club, there is no conceivable reason why Di Natale, who grew up on the other side of Italy, would ever envision Udinese, which hasn’t a single domestic league or cup trophy to its name in over a century of competition, to be his greatest aspiration. What we’re left with, then, is someone who goes beyond merely accepting the fact that he won’t reach the heights he once saw for himself. He actively embraces it.

It’s easy to point to loyalty as the reason behind all of this, and certainly it plays a part; by Di Natale’s own admission, both the club and the city have treated him well over the years, plus you don’t say no to Juventus unless you’re awfully fond of your current digs. But I wonder if those factors manifest in self-awareness more than simple allegiance. Di Natale borders on divinity in Udine, the man who miraculously brought Champions League soccer to a town with a shade over 100,000 residents twice in the past six years. Even if he went to Juventus and snatched up goals and trophies by the truckload, none of it would have mattered more to the fans than toiling against the Wave at Udinese. Oh, he’d accomplish things of significance and shine on a grander stage, but Toto was never going to transcend time so much as become a footnote among a certain generation of fans, a secret handshake exchanged some two decades from now when you want to find out who cared about the sport as much as you did in the time when Messi and Ronaldo were at their apex.

Make that move to the Old Lady and the best case-scenario becomes Hernan Crespo at Inter, a standout player who’d decide matches for a couple of seasons before being painted over by a more significant figure in the club’s fresco soon thereafter. Worst case, he’s Iaquinta or Pizarro, his former compatriots who faded into irrelevance and rotted on the bench respectively after the moves to the big time; had it happened to him, Di Natale’s sole escape would have been to an outpost no more glamorous than the one he’d forsaken, only without the added dynamic of his role as the center of Udine’s universe that made him special in the first place.

By staying at Udinese, he guaranteed his immortality in the one place he ever had a shot at it. Di Natale isn’t emblematic of the club’s success so much as he is symbiotic with it, the lifeblood of its triumphs; remove him from its history books and you’re left to parcel through an Intertoto Cup win, a couple of youth team awards, and a Coppa Italia runner-up finish as the contenders for its greatest conquest. It might not be ten years before his name is forgotten in most corners of the world but in a town where the stadium can house nearly half the population, his legacy is built to endure.

With the final hours of the season having ticked away, rumors are percolating that this campaign could be Toto’s last. The annual gauntlet with the Wave has gone in his favor; with the win against Catania last Sunday, Udinese finished third in the table and secured its place in the Champions League for the second consecutive season. If this truly is the end, there are much worse ways to go out.

Whenever it does happen, though, there will be a going away party and people will be tabbed to speak at it. They’ll tell funny stories; they’ll congratulate him on his accomplishments; they’ll wish him well in his future endeavors. The town near the Slovenian border will flood its streets for to celebrate the man who never left them, even though they’ll feel a little sad, a little hurt, and a little abandoned that his time there has come to an end.

But more than any of those things, they’ll be grateful for the man whose last name means Christmas, and the many gifts he gave them — including the ones he gave himself, too.

— Mike Piellucci

Turkish Football's Dirty War

Sat, 12 May 2012 09:50:08 -0400

Do you know what hate, in its essence and heart-wrenching ugliness, truly is? Not only the concept of genuinely disliking something with every fibre of your being, but the sensation of slowly falling into a black hole filled to its brink with unhealthy, dirty thoughts? It is a feeling that, when activated deep below our day-to-day, unextraordinary consciousness, completely robs us of our humanity and compassion. It brings out the worst in us. Basically, hatred is what keeps Turkish football in 2011-2012 alive.

Today, my newfound and football-crazed friends, we have reached the proverbial impasse. Regardless of what happens tonight at the Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium in Kadıköy, Turkish football has lost its vigour. Papers were definitely pushed, Lira in great quantities were definitely suddenly found in sports bags where they did not quite belong, and the Turkish Football Federation has made a complete and utter mess of the proceedings and an even bigger ass of themselves. 10 people have been given jail sentences for bribing players, staff members, club officials in order to fix scores (“bought matches”, in layman terms). All the criminals acted, in one way or another, to give a certain club a certain edge, and yet said club has remained without judgement or penalty. So, in this final week of Turkish football in what will forever be known as a truly tainted season, quelle surprise, as Platini would say: It’s all about Fenerbahçe again, standing as ever in the spotlight and on their very own stage this time around, with Galatasaray trucking along on the ride in a supporting role.

Something extremely vile, and frankly wrong in every meaning of the word, happened to Turkey and its unofficial main religion last year, and while the gory details and injustices have been laughed at and denounced by a worldwide audience, the truth has yet to be dragged out into the light to be dealt with. Most likely, nothing will change during the summer, and the ever-present vultures of modern-day Turkish journalism will continue stirring the pot and pushing out their own agendas. This war is their saviour in a time of digitalization in Western media, but it is also in many ways their creation. This Federation-approved and sloppily concocted “Süper Final” malarky couldn’t turn the tides from drowning the few good men struggling to keep the fire of Turkish football burning. Instead, the same fire became one of discontent, replacing the art and elegance that sometimes showed itself in these country-shaking derbies with anger and malice and loathing.

Tonight, then, Fenerbahçe take on their eternal rivals Galatasaray, at their own fortress with the support of 50509 members of the “Fenerbahçe Republic,” and not a single soul other than the members of the opposing team will be wearing the yellow and red of the scholars from Galata. Nobody wants them to win. And, nobody wants to know what will happen if Fatih Terim manages to steal a point (like Galatasaray Great Greame Souness did), and became immortal and become a champion behind enemy lines. Galatasaray haven’t won here in over a decade, but a single point is enough. And Fenerbahçe fans…they remember, they will never forget what happened last when they lost a point in the final fixture of the season.

The old “Welcome To Hell” banner that used to greet countless European teams attempting to beat Galatasaray in their continental heyday at Ali Sami Yen would fit in perfectly tonight, even if the stands for tonight are already bathing in yellow and navy blue. Doomsday is here, ladies and gentleman. All bets are off, and the guns are loaded. For Fenerbahçe, losing has been proved not to be an option. For Galatasaray, this could be the biggest middle finger they could ever possibly imagine to stick in the face of their nemesis. After all, this is about one thing and one thing only: hatred, managing to out-hate the opponent, hoping that it’ll lead to a hollow trophy at the end. Let’s hope Turkish football survives past these 90 minutes.

— Özgür Kurtoglu