Timing Is Everything. Especially in Pyongyang

Watching the World Cup, my buddy and I were rooting for North Korea. Yes. North Korea.

And why?

Well, we kept joking that if they lost, Kim Jong-Il would be ten kinds of pissed off and "re-purpose them." Probably making them work in some sort of munitions plant and most certainly would pack them off to the North Korean equivalent of a Siberian gulag.

And yet, I didn't post that at the time. As always, a day late and few thousand won short.

Newsweek reports that the North Korean soccer team was in fact publicly berated for their failure. And the coach has been made a construction worker or something.

"The players were then asked to step up in turn and publicly criticize manager Kim Jong-hun, who had apparently been singled out for punishment. He has been forced into a construction job because, it is thought, his team's failure is seen as a personal betrayal of Kim Jong-un, the son of current leader Kim Jong-il."

Sure. That's the official story. I think it went more like this:

"Um, but I don't know anything about construction? I coach soccer. Yes. Soccer. You know that game with a ball and no scoring and stuff like that.

"Oh, I see. I'm going to working as the ditch digger in Kusong. In Kusong!? Don't they manufacture deadly weapons there? What kinds of ditches? Hey, wait a minu.......Aaahhhhhrrrrghhhg."

2010 World Cup Wrap Up

From True/Slant on July 12, 2010:

Vuvuzelas, Penalty Kicks and Landon Donovan.

This year, I set myself to the ridiculous task of watching all the World Cup soccer I could fit into my schedule. The idea was to, once and for all, settle the matter of whether or not I could tolerate soccer, and maybe, hopefully, even like it. I admit, I didn’t see every match. Sadly, I did have other obligations that tore me away from my television from time to time, the kinds of obligations that required I actually changed out of my jammies for the day, which is annoying no matter how you cut it. Turns out, I liked the soccer. I didn’t love it, but at the end of the day, the more I watched, I had to admit I kind of enjoyed it. I liked it enough that I expect I’ll remember this World Cup for a long time. These are the things I’ll remember most.

1. Rhapsody of the Vuvuzelas. These sounded like a swarm of killer bees, hopped up on angel dust, attempting a dissonant Mahler composition. It was so bad that even antidiluvian old FIFA considered banning them. (They wisely did not.) The strangest part of the Vuvuzelas (aside from the strident buzzing noise) was that they were blown continuously throughout, with no discernible relationship to the action on the field. They didn’t get louder or softer, didn’t change with a scoring opportunity or amazing defensive play. They just were. Like it or not, nobody will ever forget the Vuvuzelas.

2. FIFA Idiocy. There is something to be said for tradition, for learning the old ways, so that we can understand where we come from and how we got here. That said, the tradition, the acceptance and the bizarre near pride in horror show officiating is not tradition or venerating those who came before. It is stupid.

I accept that officials make mistakes. They do. And you know what? That’s fine by me, because players make mistakes and coaches make mistakes. It happens. But any player as bad as the officials we watched would be benched immediately. Any coach that bad would be fired via a Twitter feed. So what would be wrong with weeding out the worst officials or holding all of them to a high standard of performance? FIFA operates in extremes: either we have to suffer the inadequate, primeval buffoonery we saw in South Africa, or we will be beset by a horrible dystopian technological future, with malevolent computers running the game. I have seen hundreds of high school games – basketball, football, baseball and softball – all of which were officiated better then the World Cup, none of which had the benefit of instant replay. Competence is not technology dependent. If the officials at a Division III women’s college basketball game in East Bejeebers, Western Pennsylvania are better then the FIFA officials at the World Freaking Cup, then FIFA needs better officials. Period.

3. USA! USA! USA! Yeah, they bowed out in the first game of the elimination round, but Landon Donovan’s rebound goal in extra time is the kind of sports moment that those who were watching will always, always remember. I’ll remember for a long time where I was, who I was with and what it felt like. That may not be enough to turn soccer into a big time sport in America (I have a buddy who says that soccer is the sport of the future -- and it always will be), but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what happens in the future. This was one of those great moments, like Carlton Fisk’s homer, or The Catch, or Jordan’s Shot.

4. Down goes Ghana. Even when they beat the USA, I enjoyed watching Ghana. I admired their speed. They were fast and they were fun. And their uniforms were snazzy. And did I mention how freaking fast these guys were? Now, I have nothing against Uruguay (and their uniforms are snazzy, too), but there was something very endearing about team Ghana. I like underdogs and I did want to see an African team advance just because. Because South American teams are always around in the semi-finals, to say nothing of the ubiquitous Eurotrash. Then Ghana’s normally deadly penalty kicker, Asamoah Gyan booted the penalty kick off the crossbar, giving the Uruguayans new life. Remember that old “Wide World of Sports” opener, with the agony of defeat? If they ever resurect that show, they can use the footage of Gyan after the loss to Uruguay. It was painful to watch, no matter who you had been rooting for.

5. Hamtastic. What I’ll remember most about Spain’s run was the beatdown they put on Germany. Before this World Cup, had you told me that a game with a 1-0 final score was a blow out, I would have laughed in your face. And then probably said something both rude and crass. And maybe a little bit funny. Maybe. But certainly rude. No way around it though, Spain’s semi-final victory was nothing short of an epic smackdown. And it was a beautiful sight. My sincerest congrats to the fans of the Ham Capital of the World.

All of that said, as much as I enjoyed this World Cup for reals, I don’t expect I’ll be going off in search of a soccer bar to watch the English Premiere League any time soon (although Wayne Rooney was in my dream last night, he really was). So, for now, I’ll say goodbye to my new buddy (or at least casual acquaintance) soccer. So long, and thanks for all the Vuvuzela Etudes. I expect that buzzing sound will leave my head by the time the NFL season kicks off.

Team USA Advances Past the Group Round in 2010 World Cup

From True/Slant on June 23, 2010:

Team USA Saves Best for Last.

I admit it. I had my first, honest to goodness, moment of pure soccer elation when Landon Donovan scored the winning goal for Team USA in extra time. It was legit. I was jumping and screaming and hugging. It was as joyous as it was unexpected.

I set myself to a task – to watch every game of World Cup action – to see if I could embrace, or at least understand what all the vuvuzela honking was about. I learned that soccer is a slow burn. I was skeptical. I was bored. I was restless. But the more I watched, the more I didn’t mind watching. It was okay, I thought. Not great, but okay.

And then a weird thing happened. I started to look forward to matches. I was reading about different teams and watching the highlights to learn what I could from the commentary. I emailed a soccer expert buddy of mine to have her explain the ever slippery soccer off-sides rule. (So much more convoluted that off-sides in hockey, let me just say.)

Last night, I was twitchy in anticipation of the game this morning. Who the hell was I? I didn’t know. I didn’t even care. It was fun. I gave into it.

Yeah, yeah. I know. New to the sport. Bandwagon jumper. Neophyte. All of those dubious honorifics probably apply to me. I’ll own that. And yet … when Donovan netted the winner, it was genuinely euphoric, ecstatic and, yes, karmic payback, you FIFA officiating beeyotches.

It’s not just us annoying Yanks who have been complaining about the officiating. It is everywhere. Try doing a google search of “world cup officiating controversies” and you get about 30 pages of hits in as many languages. Handballs have been missed, egregious fouls have been missed, seemingly good goals have been waved off without explanation, and non-existent fouls have garnered cards of both the red and yellow variety.

Team Brazil is without their best player – Kaka – because of a phantom foul when Kader Keita of the Ivory Coast kinda brushed up against Kaka and then went down like Amy Winehouse after a long night full of jagerbombs. This phantom infraction earned Kaka a second yellow card for the match and thus, he is DQ’ed from playing against Portugal on Saturday.

To pour salt on the myriad officiating wounds, the refs themselves are shrouded in secrecy, protected from the media, and insulated from the real world. In short, they operate a lot like the Roman Catholic Church, or the International Olympic Committee, for that matter, with zero transparency and just as much accountability. The only group more getting worse press than the officials is Team France and you don’t need to be a lifelong fan of the English Premiere League to know that something is rotten in South Africa — the officiating.

But let’s not linger over what is wrong, but rather what is right. What is right is the American Cardiac Kids for the 21st century. Up against the wall because of the debatable draw versus Slovenia, and certainly well aware that England was hanging on to a 1-0 lead over Slovenia, the U.S. knew that a draw versus Algeria would not be enough to propel them past the round of group play. A win was essential. (Advancing on a draw would have been so less than satisfying anyway.)

They dug in and mounted scoring opportunity after scoring opportunity, but it seemed the goal, the one elusive goal, just would not come. Donovan was very quiet for much of the game. Herculez Gomzez missed the goal. Jozy Altidore missed the goal. Edson Buddle missed the goal. Clint Dempsey missed the goal. Michael Bradley hit a beauty, but right into the belly of the Algerian keeper, M’Bolhi. Hell, it seemed like the entire team missed the goal at one point or another.

But they kept coming. And coming. Tim Howard and Carlos Bocanegra held down the fort, making every necessary defensive play and save to keep the hope alive. These guys love to score late. In 18 qualifying games, they scored 10 goals in the last 10 minutes of regulation play and in their game against Slovenia, Bradley netted the tying goal in the 82nd minute.

It was fitting that it wasn’t until the extra time that their relentless pursuit paid off. Howard made a garden variety save, looked up the pitch, spied Donovan and winged the ball up to him. Donovan, the face of American soccer, streaked down field, fed the ball to Altidore, and then moved across the goal to be in position to blast in the rebound of Dempsey’s shot for the game winner.

Is this time — the 91st minute of play in the final game of group play — the exact moment when the USA crashed the rest of the world’s party?

Time will tell, but this is a team hitting every soft spot that we as a nation have. Americans love come backs. We love underdogs. While as a nation, we are rarely underdogs, but if ever we are, it’s on the soccer pitch.

An underdog team staging improbable victory against all odds in the waning moments — how much more American can you get?

Trying to Love Soccer

From True/Slant on June 14, 2010:

Stop Treating Soccer Like the Spectator Sport Equivalent of Brussel Sprouts

Americans suck. We don’t love soccer enough and, thus, we suck. For shame. Shame on all of us, a nation of cretins who watch five minutes of a soccer game, fall into a deep state of unenlightened torpor and flip to a rerun of Law & Order. That seems to be the accepted World Cup/Soccer meme, but I’m not buying it.

First, not every American hates soccer. That said, I’ll admit it that I don’t love it, but I am open to persuasion, so I started to wonder why willing consumers of sport like myself don’t love the game and how it can be made more appetizing? Short of changing the rules or shrinking the pitch, that is. Which is to say, how can the television broadcasts and promoters make the sport more entertaining?

Here are five ideas to bring the fun.

1. Let’s declare futbol detente. I come to bury the aforementioned stereotype, a Glenn Beck-style reactionary who hates futbol cause ‘it’s jess so darned fereign!’ But while we’re here, let’s put to rest the myth that it is more virtuous to watch futbol than football. Puh-leeze, people, it’s entertainment. I love women’s football. Does that make me a better person than you? Hardly. But I love the sport and I follow it because, hold on to your jocks kids, it’s fun. That’s right: Fun. Presumably, soccer fans watch because that’s fun, too, but non-soccer-heads are constantly hectored with the argument that soccer is spiritually superior, or something. This is not only false, it is the spectator sport equivalent of trying to force a willful five-year-old to eat her brussel sprouts. Nobody watches something on television because it’s good for them. We sit in front of the TV to have fun. So, put some bacon in those brussel sprouts, embrace the fun, and let’s agree to not bash each other’s heads in.

2. Make It Personal. Nearly every sport is dull if you don’t have some connection to it. I’ll be the first to admit that baseball is boring. It’s boring, people. It just is. Games take longer than it took to sell my house, big league pitchers take leisurely siestas between pitches and batters fiddle with the minutiae of their equipment and article of clothing between pitches, sometimes even calling time out to do so a second time. Home runs are down and hitless games are up. And yet, I love the game. Why?

As a kid, I was such a baseball geek that I used to keep score along with radio and television broadcasts, which is an embarrassing level of geekdom; even to this day, I keep score at the ballpark. This is just a shot in the freaking dark here, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that personal memories — of games attended, of crowding around a radio with my best friends to listen to the bottom of the 9th inning, of playing catch for hours as dusk turned to actual night, knowing that I was risking backyard rhinoplasty in my vain efforts to track and catch a badly scuffed up ball in the dark — constitute the mental muscle memory I bring to games even now. It is why a 1-0 pitcher’s duel is a thing of beauty to me, but might send a baseball neophyte to the Ninth Circle of Ennui. I get it.

So stop lecturing and start sharing. Tell me your favorite memory of playing, or about watching a game with your grandmother, or about soccer parties at your uncle’s house. If I hear that stuff, I’m in. I really am.

3. Television. ABC and ESPN, I’m begging you, we need your help! I’ve spent a lifetime watching hockey. I can see a neutral zone trap without the announcer pointing it out; I can spot a defensive breakdown, a goal saving poke-check, or a momentum altering hip-check without the color analyst commenting. But that came from years of watching hockey. Even when a team doesn’t score, a savvy fan can see what they were trying to do. And that makes the game exciting.

The problem with soccer is that, despite the preponderance of youth soccer leagues, many of us still lack that kind of knowledge, the kind of understanding that we unwittingly supply to hockey or basketball which makes those games more exciting and entertaining. For most of us Americans, soccer matches look like nothing more than a bunch of super fit guys in nice shorts running around on a ginormous grass field. Find a way to incorporate replay. Show me a play and how it developed. Explain the strategy behind it. Use a telestrator and explain it to me like I am six years old. It might be annoying for the lifelong fans, but for most of us, that insight would be invaluable. It wouldn’t solve the problem of being able to see only a fifth of the pitch (those things are bigger than Rhode Island) on the telly screen, but it would be a good start on the road to making the game more appealing for us bloody Yanks, yeah.

4. Personalities. God have mercy on my immortal soul for saying this, but the broadcasts can borrow a page from the Olympics in that regard. Most of us don’t know any soccer personalities beyond Pele, Beckham and, maybe Ronaldinho. Maybe. Until I read Jonathan Curiel’s post I had no idea that US goalie Tim Howard had Tourette’s Syndrome. Curiel is dead on when he says that personalities and backstories like Howard’s engage even the most casual fan. Who isn’t rooting for the goalie with Tourette’s? Not rooting for that guy, dare I say it, would be downright un-American.

5. Win. Not to go all Talia Shire in “Rocky II” on you, but win, guys. People love a winner and we love to celebrate. Give us a reason to.

Let me put it on a small scale. Steelers games are sold out from now until doomsday, but it wasn’t always thus. In fact, the playoff game between the Steelers and the Raiders which ended with the Immaculate Reception was blacked out in the Pittsburgh television market because, get this, it wasn’t sold out. But, from there, the Steelers went on to win four Super Bowls, an entire generation was converted to the church of Steelers football and games have been sold out ever since. If you sign up for Steelers season tickets today, you might get tickets by 2028. If you’re lucky. And you know somebody who can pull some strings. Maybe.

Winning changes EVERYTHING. America’s soccer has team made it to the World Cup’s final four just once (in 1930, no less.) Make it past the group stage and I guarantee scores of new fans will be won over. Make it to the final, and you may convert an entire nation of cement-heads.

Well, maybe not Glenn Beck.