Halfway down the Danube

Other than Germany none of the tradtional powerhouse teams have played well in their first game. Sweden was the worst, but England also did poorly and Argentina was hardly impressive. I am keeping separate blog post with open comments for each game I see.

I know this is spitting into the wind, but it was actually a great game. The fact that no one scored is part of why it was such a great game; Shaka Hislop made some amazing saves and T&T managed to bend but not break under intense pressure. If last year's Packers had managed to hold the Colts to a couple of field goals, would you have complained that it was a crappy game?

(And it's not like Wilhelmsson actually took a dive to pick up the second yellow card on John. It was a *little* harsh to card him, but there's no question it was a foul.)

As a (novice-in-the-world-of-football female) Trinbagonian [living in Romania btw], I must say, I was very proud of the representatives of my tiny country. Especially after that childish "display" mentioned in the post. Keep up the great work boys!
p.s.
We're not too bad at Int'l cricket too :)
Kads

Josh, you know, I was explicitly comparing it to a Colts game at the time, saying, "And Vanderjagt shanks!" at the appropriate moments. Noel can testify.

In my opinion, it would be as if the Colts, despite making it into the red zone repeatedly, never managed to rack up any points -- Manning choking, the receivers fumbling sure TDs, Vanderjagt shanking yet again, Dungy going for fourth and inches and being blocked -- while the Packers, after losing a running back in the second half, never manage to cross midfield.

(And it would have to remain scoreless, because last time I checked, a 3-0 gridiron game still counted as a W for the team with the FG.)

That wouldn't be an exciting game to me. That would have been an inept game. I've seen gridiron games like that, and yes, they were crappy.

As for the foul, how can you tell? Seriously. The logic is not apparent to someone whose penalty instincts were shaped by the gridiron.

Kads, you'll be pleased to know I watched the game with two Trinidad supporters! But that's Noel's story.

There's no question that the Swedes missed some opportunities... but they didn't miss that many, and there were a bunch of good opportunities that weren't goals simply because of great plays by T&T. (That's why I mentioned Hislop; if he hadn't had such a great game, Sweden would have scored at least twice.)

Think of it more like the Colts making it into the red zone repeatedly, and maybe one of their receivers dropping a pass in the end zone, but the Packers also making a ton of big plays to stop them. (If we're going to continue the analogy, the Packers would have scored at least one field goal, since T&T *did* have a few decent shots on goal.)

As for the foul, well, which part confuses you? Do you not understand why it was a foul, or why it was a yellow card, or why John got sent off? It was a foul because it wasn't a clean tackle; you're only supposed to get the ball when you tackle someone, and John hit the player who had possession. It was a yellow card because, in the referee's opinion, it wasn't entirely accidental that John hit both the player and the ball (it's a bit like the difference between a regular foul and a flagrant foul in basketball). It was a sending-off because John had already been carded earlier in the match.

Josh, the 'you get sent off the field for _that_? what happened? why is that man on the ground crying?' thing was the confusing part. Honestly, at first I thought he was being ejected for swearing at the referee.

The physical reality of what is penalized is not very intuitive to an outsider. I imagine soccer fans would be just as confused about, say, pass interference in gridiron.

As for exciting, I've looked at a fair number of blogs about this game, and your opinion does seem to be in the minority.

To me, it looked like a game between a team with a weak offense, and a team with a strong defense and no offense. The drama being extracted from the game seems to come from people who thought that Trinidad and Tobago's team was weak, and Sweden's strong.

To someone who hasn't internalized the pre-existing narrative, eh.

I did see two really nice defensive moves by the T&T team, one by the goalie, and one by some guy who zoomed in when I guess the goalie was out getting a cigarette. (I know that's not fair, and probably Hislop was being very cleverly and briefly faked out by cunning Swedish footwork, but that's what it looked like.)

I think we're pushing the limits of analogies to actual football, but to my eye, those brief forays of T&T onto the other side of the field were like Favre throwing a deep pass at third and long on the 35 on a bad day. Yeah, it might work.

The physical reality of what is penalized is not very intuitive to an outsider.

Perhaps, although I suspect that you'd pick it up pretty quickly if you cared to. It's actually very analogous to pass interference in gridiron: if you play the man, not the ball, it's a foul.

I'd be interested in links to those blogs. Every report I've seen on the match thinks it was a great game... have you been reading blogs by Swedish fans? (And yeah, internalizing the pre-existing narrative makes a difference, but that's the way it is in every sport. Watching a team play completely over its head is part of what makes sports so entertaining.)

Also, one of the big things to understand about soccer is that even a *good* scoring chance is usually a "yeah, that *might* work" kind of a thing. Scoring goals is *hard*.

As an impartial observer, this was a great game indeed.

The T&T guy was sent off because he fouled an attacking player, on the edge of the penalty box no less. Granted, the Swedish player acted worthy of an Oscar, but it was a foul. Usually, the guy would've played on, but it was his second yellow card of the match, which means an automatic banishment.

Now in a ten vs. eleven players situation you have little choice but to lock down defensively, keep the other team away from the penalty area and hope for a lucky counter.

What T&T did well in the first twenty minutes or so was keeping Sweden off their game, even getting to attack several times. But after a while the numerical superiority ground them down; they were constantly a man short, hence needed to work harder to keep the Swedish away, which in turn meant the Swedish side had more time and space to set up an attack.

So at the end of the game, the Swedish had gotten the T&T side pinned down around their penalty area: it's a testimony to Trinibad's defence that they could not score (though sheer bad luck also played a part)

This one of the things I like about proper football, the way in which a team can "conquer" another team's half and the dynamic way in which fortunes can change.

Josh, the only Swedish blogging of the game I've read before you asked was David Weman's over at A Fistful of Euros, who went through Kubler-Ross's five stages during the second half. (Unfortunately the links to his comments didn't work when I tried posting this.)

Let me clarify a bit: I didn't find anyone who thought that Sweden had an exciting offensive performance, which was denied by T&T's exciting defensive performance. I only found people who were excited about T&T's defensive performance, the great majority of whom were disappointed in the level of Swedish play.

So it really looks to me as though the underdog narrative made this exciting.

(If this were the regular season, and these weren't national teams, wouldn't the story be, "Seasoned goalkeeper keeps listless offense at bay despite penalties"?)

An aside: goddam, the English soccer blogs are so encoded they're almost unreadable. And British soccer journalism has a breathless, Village Voice record review quality about it that makes everything I dislike about Nick Hornby click into place. It's as if all the leftover hippies in the U.S. became baseball columnists.

Oh, it *wasn't* a great performance on offense by the Swedes; their fans should be upset by that. But what I think you're missing is that even as poorly as they performed, they still should have scored at least one and probably two goals. And yes, the underdog narrative did make the game exciting, but I really don't think you can come up with a sport in which that wouldn't be the case.

And I'm not sure why you think the narrative would have been different if this had been a regular-season league game. All the elements would still be there: one team expected to do well, one expected to largely play out the string, and an aging goalkeeper nobody expected to play.

An aside: goddam, the English soccer blogs are so encoded they're almost unreadable.

Would you expect a Brit to start reading a gridiron blog right before the playoffs and be able to follow along?

I may change my mind if it can be explained to me why allowing smash-ups like that one to happen would make the game even less eventful.

Well, if every time your opponent has the ball you can get it back just by smacking him, you're going to see even fewer plays get made. (And if the foul doesn't make a difference to the run of play -- if the fouled team keeps the advantage -- the referee isn't likely to call it unless it's really gratuitous.) Should a basketball referee not call a foul just 'cause the fouled player didn't get hurt?

In theory, Josh, that makes sense. In practice, it just looked like the two guys ran into each other, even on the replay. I didn't see anyone get smacked. So what am I missing?

Um, Josh, you're still talking about the tension the game made against the narrative. Eliminate the narrative. Would a Martian interested in the Platonic ideal of soccer find this an interesting game?

(I don't deny the power of narrative. I'm a Packer fan. A lot of bad football has been tarted up with narrative over the years in Titletown. Some years the narrative is all we have. But we also know there's something more to the game than the story.)

Would you expect a Brit to start reading a gridiron blog right before the playoffs and be able to follow along?

If it's through a gateway site for non-American new viewers, yes.

So what am I missing?

I don't recall the play well enough to explain it in detail, unfortunately. I wish I'd Tivo'd the game so I could draw it out for you. But you'll note that none of the announcers complained about the call, and there hasn't been any outrage about how the Soca Warriors got jobbed.

Would a Martian interested in the Platonic ideal of soccer find this an interesting game?

I think so, yes. Not as interesting as it becomes once you know about the narrative, but there was still something very impressive about Hislop's goaltending, and about the way T&T was able, every time the Swedes built up an attack towards the end, to just poke the ball away and stay alive. And the fact that they actually did go on the attack a bit after John got sent off... yeah, I think the Martian would have enjoyed the game.

Which site are you finding these blogs through, BTW? I've looked at the BBC's site, and the Guardian's, and I'm not seeing what you're seeing.

I'm looking through the BBC's blog site. The Guardian prints its attacks of the vapors.

Josh, the fact that T&T fans haven't complained isn't relevant to this discussion. I'm not disputing that the call was made within the rules. I'm expressing perplexity at the rules themselves.

That said, I think you're right about that Martian --- but only for the second half of the game. After all, I'm about as good as a Martian, right? In fact, we had the perfect test: did my attention wander to the Yankees-Oakland game, or did I keep watching the soccer match?

The first half of the T&T-Sweden game was dull. The second half was extremely exciting. Wasn't the second half a bit unusual, however?

I dunno. As part of the cheesehead colony on Syrtis Major, I saw a dull first half and an unbalanced second half. I found the imbalance a major turn-off. And unlike you, I didn't have a hook.

It's true, Carlos, you do need to care about the team. But you can say that about most sports --- I rarely watch baseball games (at least on TV), for example, where I don't care about either side.

Here's a link you may appreciate, sent to me by an American suffering through World Cup fever in the D.F.:

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/04/07/093520.php

I'm puzzled, Carlos. You've emphasized the American absence of care and interest in soccer and pronounced how dull and uninteresting you personally found the game between Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago.

Nothing wrong with that. I couldn't care less of soccer myself. But this amount of bandwidth that you still keep dedicating to the sport seems a bit contradictory with those expressions.

I'm having this mental vision of a person who's standing at the edge of the field, shouting "I don't care! God, this is boring!" - and still coming back the next day, to do the same drill over again.

Must be an American thing, I guess.

Cheers,
Jalonen

Jussi, I'm procrastinating and lonely. A terrible combination.

To be fair, we dragged Carlos to the game. Without Amma and myself, he would not have been there. We also suggested that he blog about it. Nossa culpa.

"Nossa culpa"? Is that right?

I'm not disputing that the call was made within the rules. I'm expressing perplexity at the rules themselves.

Ah, okay, I misread you.

Wasn't the second half a bit unusual, however?

In what sense?

"Unusual" in the sense that T&T's team lacked a player, which meant that the second half was played almost entirely right in front of their goal. Most games, I think, don't have that sudden-death element to them.

Sort of like imagining Game 5 of a baseball division series in which one of the teams is up by one run, and the other team not only fails to score, but manages to end the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth innings leaving at least two men stranded on base . Someone who doesn't generally like baseball still might find that game exciting.

Alternatively, imagine that a key division series game goes into extra innings, and someone who was mildly bored by the first nine innings finds the subsequent six to be rather exciting. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have begun to like baseball, only that they enjoyed the tension involved in having a key game go into extra innings.

FWIW, that last more-or-less describes the experience of a Mexican friend of mine during Game 3 of the 2000 NLDS between the Mets and San Francisco. (Even I would have been bored by the way Oakland crushed the Yankees that same day, had not the humiliation served to keep me glued to the tube.) He did not become a baseball fan, although he did enjoy that game.

Gentlemen, I give you the "world's premier soccer hater." Or so the German press calls him.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2006/06/americas_most_prominent_soccer.html

Now, the reason I hope that all readers of this blog immediately link to that piece and read it carefully is not because of the critique of soccer, most of which independently echoes Carlos's points. Rather, it is the way it explains the attractiveness of baseball in a short and succinct manner that has nothing to do with misplaced pastoralism or weird-ass nostalgia.

Enjoy. Comment. And then start playing, so that the WBC can expand past 16 countries.

Then again, even without China (and not counting the odd additions of Australia, the Netherlands, and Italy, but including Nicaragua, which mysteriously failed to send a team), those nations have a population of 697 million, considerably more than the entire European Union.

But more is better. Why didn't baseball resonate in Germany? It seems like there's an ecological space for it (AFAIK, basketball and hockey are the only serious competitors, and both of those are very very far behind) and there was plenty of Americanophilism after the war, not to mention thousands of Yankee and Canuck soldiers.

Oy. That article makes my brain hurt... and I'm a baseball fan. The bit about comparing statistics across a century in particular rubs me the wrong way. And I'd really like to take that guy to a Raiders-Broncos game at the Coliseum.

Kads wrote:

We're not too bad at Int'l cricket too :)

Too right! Back in the '70s and '80s Trinidad and Tabago, with a bit of help from the neighbours, could take on and beat any other team in the world.

However, Australia has just beaten Japan 3-1 so I now have to pretend I care about Football[TM] when conversing in the tea room.

Noel wrote:

Gentlemen, I give you the "world's premier soccer hater."

The first comment in particular was interesting, with the complaint about 'continuous play'. Is this why all the world sports - Football, Rugby, Hockey and F1 - are unpopular in the US; the lack of ad breaks?

Hm. Noel, while I agree with the sentiments in the earlier link, it wasn't that funny.

If I had to write the thing, I would mock soccer journalism: the crude ethnic stereotyping, the cod-nationalist Eurovision Song Contest narrative, the loving descriptions of plays that had no effect on the game, and the barren wasteland of soccer statistics with the concurrent emphasis on what the commentator had for breakfast that day.

(I mean, no amount of mockery will affect a sport that can seriously proclaim a game "one of the ten greatest 0-0 games EVAR" a day after the event. At least at first. You have to worry the prey before you can bring it down.)

"Coming up in Round L, the Songheti team versus Ruritania. This should be an exciting match! the heavy-hung Songhetis versus the methodical, repressed Ruperts in lovely historic Burgstadtdorf. Isn't that right, Nigel?"

"Yes, Colin. I spoke with the Songheti striker Jean-Bedel Mokele-Mbembe earlier today, and asked him if his 'third leg' would affect his performance."

"'Why are you asking me that, man? My God, I have an MBA!'"

"Mokele-Mbembe grew up in the slums of Bidonville, where he learned to play the beautiful game using a shrunked head wrapped in rags."

"'That is not true. My father was a schoolteacher! Look, I have a university degree!'"

"I'm sorry, we'll have to cut away. Looks like the Lions are a little excitable today! Going to Iain with the Ruritanian coach, Olaf von Svengali..."

et cetera.

I mean, no amount of mockery will affect a sport that can seriously proclaim a game "one of the ten greatest 0-0 games EVAR" a day after the event.

Counterpoint: ESPN and the "Instant Classic".

Also, if you cut soccer recaps down to only plays that had no effect on the game (by which I suppose you mean scoring plays or players getting sent off), they'd be about three lines long. A lot of those plays that don't ultimately affect the outcome of the match are why people watch.

Also, if you cut soccer recaps down to only plays that had no effect on the game (by which I suppose you mean scoring plays or players getting sent off), they'd be about three lines long.

... I really have nothing to add to that.

Don't say I never did anything nice for you!

""Unusual" in the sense that T&T's team lacked a player, which meant that the second half was played almost entirely right in front of their goal. Most games, I think, don't have that sudden-death element to them."

Well...

Teams having to play with ten men for part of a game are not unusual, what was unusual was a) how long they had to and b) that they managed so well, even staying on the attack for the first fifteen-twenty minutes.

Noel: the reason baseball is relatively popular in the Netherlands is ironically the same reason why football has gained popularity in the US: kids learn to play it (though as "softball") at school because it's a cheap and cheerful outdoors sport and some of them keep at it. So there are flourishing amateur leagues and enough talent to put together not that bad a national side.

"'That is not true. My father was a schoolteacher! Look, I have a university degree!'"

LOL! Nicely done, painted a beautiful picture.

Martin, I did not know that, although I should have --- I have cousins in the Netherlands, and one of them was seriously injured when hit by a baseball. (It aggravated an existing injury.) At the time, I didn't think about it.

So baseball (in its weekend version) is to the Netherlands as soccer is to the U.S.? Fascinating. I will root more seriously for the Dutch team in 2009 now that I know that.

Not attempting to bring the conversation back to something as dreary as soccer but what to make this

I read that as meaning that soccer is completely doomed in the U.S.

Gosh, fellows, I'm turning into a bit of a fan, here.

Those French fellows, they remind me of the New York Yankees of 1995-2001. What's not to like?

And don't talk to me about watching Portugal beat England. Much fun! Or Germany beating Argentina. Serious pain.

I know what it is, too. Two damn hours, and you can't relax for a minute. Once you learn to love the cortisol flowing through your veins, you'll understand the attraction of the game.

Oh, and like I said, that French squad. Something about their style is just perfectly understandable for an American. They're a machine, man, a machine, and short on the drama.

Anyhoo. Game still has a way to run, so I'm outtie.

Those French fellows, they remind me of the New York Yankees of 1995-2001. What's not to like?

I'd reply but first I'd need to wash the ashes out of my mouth