Soccer

So I recently got into a pretty big soccer phase. Not that I’m playing, which is probably the basis for all of this, but I’m reading and watching much more than usual. I just finished Seeing Red by Graham Poll and am currently working through the veritable tome called The Ball is Round.

The former is a memoir/autobiography of sorts by the recently retired English referee who famously awarded three yellow cards before sending a player off in the 2006 World Cup. It deals with this along with much of his career in England and Europe, the players he met, the coaches he dealt with, and so on. Pretty interesting. Since we’re all over here and not there, and it’s pretty tough to get any sort of consistent coverage on European soccer, I don’t really know much about the personalities of the clubs and players. I’ve seen most of them play, but don’t really know much else. As a comparison, I know that Ron Artest sometimes drives his kids to school in an Indy car, that Pablo Sandoval’s nickname is Kung Fu Panda, and that Kevin Garnett is insane about peanut butter and jelly man.

The latter book is one of the major histories of the sport. I just now got into the 1900s in England and Scotland. The last chapter has been about the professionalization of soccer, the Irish Question, and the labor struggles of the emerging working class. I’m about 8 chapters in, which Kindle tells me is about 7%. Long, long way to go.

Besides all that, I’ve been digging deeper into Aston Villa (the English team I’ve been doing my best to follow the last four years), trying to get into the Spanish league with Villareal, and watching clips from the last World Cup on youtube. Seriously, how unreal was Donovan?

A few important notes:

-First of the English league will from here out be referred to as the EPL.

-The EPL uses a relegation system which is eminently entertaining. The three worst teams in the league get dropped down to what is essentially the minor league and the top three of those teams are bumped up. Would add a little more urgency to some of the owners here when they realized how much less money the Timberwolves would be making if they got dropped to the D-League.

-It’s interesting that timekeeping in soccer is basically a secret. The major US sports all have scoreboards with clocks. Soccer has only the referees watch to go by.

-The book I’m reading points out something pretty interesting, “The rarity of not only goals, but clear scoring opportunities, is anathema not merely because it appears, at first sight, tedious, but more profoundly because it allocates such a large role to chance in determining the outcome of the game. The enormous number of scoring chances in basketball and the immense length of the baseball season are two devices that ensure, over both individual games and entire seasons, that luck evens out and other factors prevail.” I do enjoy this.

-In fact, one of the biggest arguments I hear for March Madness fits the same idea. Since it’s a one and done tournament rather than best of seven series, you get upsets and upsets are exciting.

-Some day I will not only get cable, but cable that includes the EPL. It is super frustrating to be this excited about a league you can’t really follow.

Anyway, I need to start playing again. I think that’s the moral here. I’ll do my best to keep it limited, but I’ve been pretty starved to talk to somebody about soccer and I may end up posting more things that are basically just for me.

Sorry for the rambling.