Nottingham Forrest playing Norwich City right now on Setanata.  Anytime Forrest is playing one’s mind turns to memories of the great Brian Clough.  Brash, outspoken, and maybe the most charasmatic manager ever to grace the sidelines in the English first division.  His memorable quotes are legion and never once could it be said the man wasn’t entertaining.  One of the more surreal videos on youtube is a mid-seventies interview between Muhammed Ali and Alan Parkinson where Cloughie interjects his two cents in the middle of the chat from the audience.  Pure Clough, pure balls, outstanding television.  Now to see Nottingham Forrest struggle in the Championship shows the dramatic change the world of English football has taken.  Here is a club that has won a league title and back to back European cups only to see them struggle against Norwich.  Well at least they’re not Leeds.

For the record I support Liverpool FC and everything about the club.  And I will admit I’m merely a recent convert, so I do have much to learn.  So in the recent issue of 442 there’s Eric “Scored the winner in the 96 FA Cup final fucking bastard” Cantona.  The Liverpool fan wanted to spit on the issue, yet as a fledgling blogger I knew I had to pay some attention.  The one thing that stands out for me is his take on the infamous “kung fu” incident at Crystal Palace.  Cantona’s words here, “I should have punched him harder.”.  Ok I can respect that.  In fact I can reallllly respect that.  Even after over a decade the passion still burns.  Yes he has broken many an opposing fan’s heart, but you have to give it to the Frenchman for being an unrepentant believer in what he feels is right.  Yes God bless the arrogant sangfroid of the French.

Within the football world nothing draws like derby.  Two city rivals pounded the living crap out of each other for city bragging rights.  Hell strike that about bragging rights, something so trival and bourgeois as bragging rights has nothing to do with a real hard core derby.  When I tuned into AS Roma vs. Lazio I expected the kind of fireworks one finds in a third world hovel turned abbatoir by years of malicious infighting for reasons lost to history.  And yes both clubs despise each other like to the point where it can be said that winning the league isn’t as important as winning the derby.  So imagine my slight letdown when the game became a hard fought but rather pedestrian affair by Roma and Lazio standards.  No right wing facist salutes, nothing thrown off the top tier unto opposing fans, no riots, no fights, no real drama except what went on the pitch.  Yes there were two red cards, five yellows, and 38 fouls, yet nothing occured that made me go yep that is sooooo Roma-Lazio.  Well the recent press surrounding Italian ultras and the violence that seems to creeping into Serie A, maybe a rather quiet Roman derby was what was needed.  Still I kind of miss the rather insipid posturing of a Di Canio “saluting” the fans.  Yeah does nothing for the integrity or public image of the game, but I like hating facists.  Well there’s always Ajax-Feyenoord.

I am about to commit football heresy.  The probability of me forcibly taken from my bed and sold into a crazed form of modern day slavery in some backwater cesspool like Mogadishu or College Station will grow with each sentence I write in this post.  The scarilege, the sheer beauty of scarilegious dribble.  I tempt the gods here, for if not careful I will be villified as if I had just pissed on the grave of a Heysel victim in a crack induced rage.

There are  cliches in any sport, we live off them on a daily basis.  Ask any fan to recite them and invariably you will be witness to some poor fool reciting a string of accepted postulates that sound as if they have been down from previous generations as if spoken by the Metatron itself.  One that surrounds football, is that it is the “beautiful game”.  That phrase crops up in any discussion one has about the game.  And I for one find it wholly unsuited to the game.  There is nothing beautiful about this game, it is brutal for all those involved.  Anyone assoiciated in any form, whether directly or obliquely has doomed themselves to years of anguished pain.  Take for instance the tackle.  When done properly the football faithful will gush over it’s sheer beauty, placing it along some sublime plane of existence like virginal female genitalia.  When in reality it is the ultimate expression of beastial man.  It is the footballer saying this is mine not your’s, you have no right to the ball.  Even the mere act of scoring is an excercise of brutish human endeavour.  Kicking may very well be one of the original violent expression mankind must have felt after puching.  And in football the very act of scoring involves the athlete producing as much force and torque possible to propel that glorious round ball past someone who tries everything possible to prevent the ball from getting by.  There are primal atavistic undertones to this game.  Even the man who coined the phrase was once involved in one of the most memorable and brutal matches in the annals of the game, the infamous Battle of Berne.  It is a game where over a long season there is only one champion, and three teams that get demoted to the purgatory of a lower division, and with that comes the pain of being singled out as being less than 17 other teams.  Even to play the game it is a matter of running constantly for over 90 minutes with hardly a let up, no time outs no true respite in relation to the amount of running, chasing, grunting, heaving, and strain upon the human body.  When watching the game I see nothing that is beautiful, nothing artistic.  What I see is the physical and emotional strain of one group trying to impose their dominance over another group.  And in all certainty I will never ever get sick of watching that particular drama unfold.  I’m an addict, and already I can hear the footsteps as they come for me.

Rest assured this is a post about soccer/football.   Really.  The old adage of one wins nothing in November in the Premier League gets thrown out ad nauseum every year.  If a Man U finds itself 16th in the league after four games finding a pundit reaching for the panic button is about as easy as finding a pre-op transsexual on Bourbon Street at four in the morning.  They abound like a pestilence sent by God to punish the unwashed.  A whole cadre of modern day Cassandras try to prove the sharpness of their acumen by predicting the demise of all we hold sacred.  And in the sporting world pundits such as these will flock to any mild hiccup or slip-up any team may suffer.  Usually I write such people off as insufferable dilatantes.  But what happens when said people are right.  Looking at the bottom half of the Premier League a mere four points separtes the teams from 20th to tenth positions.  With only a third of the season behind us, it’s still too early to predict anything.  Yet has the relegation battle seen anything as tight as this in recent years.  There are no clear cut candidates for dropping to the Championship.  In fact long storied clubs as Newcastle and Tottenham are seriously in danger of falling out of the top flight.  Usually I am of the opinion that the newly promoted become fodder for the established EPL teams to gain much needed points.  But looking at the promoted troika of WBA, Stoke City, and Hull City, they are proving to be highly unwilling victims.  So where will the threatened find easy points during this season?  The answer is nowhere.  The big story for this season may not be a changing within the “Big Four”, but how tight the relegation battle will be.  Come May having as many as eight teams fighting for EPL survival will not surprise me at all.  Maybe parity is slowly growing within the confines of merry England after all.

Lucas Leiva has had his home in Liverpool burgaled.  Insert scouser jokes here.  Love losing the public image battle, nothing like it in the world.

With the exception of Bobby Moore the list of illuminaries associated with West Ham United is list as long as a hermaphoridite’s penis.  Yet who knew that Barack Obama, the Bammer himself, is a die hard Hammer fan.  And it is an affinity based on family connections and is not some johnny come lately like myself in regard to Liverpool.  This may indeed spark spike in soccer in this country as Danieldinho hinted at in an earlier post.  I still stand by my statements, though, that various other factors must come into play before a wave of soccer fanaticism covers this nation circa 1977.  Still it is nice to know that the Bammer is a soccer nut.  Can’t wait till Liverpool pounds the holy hell out of the Hammers.  Welcome to soccer purgatory Bammer.

The thing I hate most in the world are Sooners, Aggies, and uninformed sport fans.  Now if one is any of the previous first two the only remedy is an exorcism to purge the foul demons that resides in their souls.  If you are the last read and become informed.  Two highly entertaining and informative books out their on the sport of soccer are “The Ball is Round A Global History of Soccer” and “Inverting the Pyramid”.  Read them and learn.

Parity.  Within the context of the sporting world it is a word that ellicits praise or hurumphs of derision.  If you look at the history of the major football leagues in Europe and South America, hegemony lies within the grip of a handful of teams.  In England they are known as the “big four”, Scotland has the Old Firm, Italy has the twin headed monster of AC Milan and Inter Milan, and Spain seems to always revolve around the Real Madrid and Barca.  Now this is not to say there are not disruptions, recently Valencia won back to back titles in La Liga, and Blackburn once broke the grip of the big four in the EPL.  Yet if anyone expects an Athletico Madrid, or Fiorentino, or even Bolton to win their respective leagues they can at best be described as overly optimistic.   Meanwhile in the U.S.  every major sport has built in mechanisms that allows even a small market teams to compete with larger teams in terms of size and wealth.  A key mechanism in this is the salary cap.  The cap allows for a leveled playing field in terms of going after free agents and and building teams.  With football going more global with each passing year, will populations outside of England, Spain, and Italy be consistently enamoured of leagues where no matter happens within the course of a season, the eventual champion will always be down to  two to four teams?  In order to maintain the strides some of the major football leagues have made in the world market, making the leagues more competitive and less predictable must be the next step in development.

Is it ever a good sign when the gaffer has to pack the midfield and subtract from the back four.  Usually this sounds like some insane Kevin Keegan experiment from his first go around with Newcastle.  Yet the beauty of any formantion from the antediluvian W to the 4-4-2 is that when properly used positive results can be attained.  When Real Salt Lake went to the 3-5-2 today against Chivas, I questioned the sanity of taking away from your defensive four in the waning minutes of a tied game.  This only taught me to never question authority, Eastern Europeans, and the power of the backheel as some dude whose name I can’t pronounce nor spell came to score a beauty in the 90th minute to snatch a victory from the face of a tie.  Go Real Salt Lake a team who I should mention was the absolute worst professional sport team in the norther hemisphere not too long ago.

When the great and utterly sublime David Beckham was asked on the quality of MLS he equated the league to be somewhere between the Premier and Championship leagues of England.  While this isn’t bad company to be in, the implication of Beckham’s statement is that on some level Major League Soccer will always be held to a standard of some other league.  Whether from the Aperatura to Serie A, will MLS ever have its own identity?  A style of play that any fan can easily identify as MLS.  Italy will always have catennacio, the English will run and chase after you over every blade of grass on the pitch.  The Germans, well the Germans will never miss a penalty shot in a shoot out, especially against the English.  But what identity will our league have.  I wouldn’t feel so conflicted over this issue if there were some identifiable signs of a discernable character within the league.  On the plus side the quality of play is one a fan of Doncaster or Nottingham Forrest would probably find rather enjoyable.  Probably my worst post but Texas is losing at halftime to a school frequented by inbred hillbillies.

So today around 2 PM Dallas time i went absolutely crazy, like clinically insane.  The first sign was an inability to control my breathing, followed by an overwhelming desire to choke a retarded nine year old to death.  Immediately following this psychotic rage my dog Henry began talking to me in Sandskrit for the very first time.  Never knew he could talk much less be fluent in an ancient language.  Henry advised me to take advantage of the rather lax gun laws regarding the purchase of firearms at local gun shows and shoot up any public establishment with the words “hot” , “spur”, or “pavlyuchenklo” in the title.  So be warned on advisement by my clearly demon possessed dog a series of grisly killings will occur in Dallas.  How the hell do you lose a lead in a game in a game where Liverpool clearly dominated?  All I can say to family members of my future victims is Liverpool 1 Tottenham 2.

     For anyone who knows me the one thing I enjoy more than anything, within a sports context, are blowouts.  Huge ugly blowouts that breaks the hearts and souls of those on the receiving end of a massive thumping.  It was for this one reason I found myself constantly rooting for the Denver Broncos througout the eighties and nineties.  Well I should elaborate, I rooted for the Broncos and horse faced Johnny Elway to make to the Super Bowl knowing full well that once they reached the biggest championship game in American sports they would choke like a first time porn starlet on her first on camera blowjob.  To know that 24-0 was only the beginning of a long and miserable day for a large segment of the American populace was icing on the cake come January. 

      So with this rather Un-American proclivity for witnessing the needless hammering of athletes pursuing their passion and joy, I was fully prepared for the EPL’s version of the Mariana’s Turkey Shoot this past Saturday.  Liverpool winner of 18 League championships, 5 European Cups, yadda yadda yadda taking on Stoke City, recently promoted Stoke City, “just happy to be here, Hello my name is James Brolin” Stoke City.  At Anfield no less.  And I could sit here and list all the reasons why Liverrpool should have won, blah blah blah.  And all the faults Livepool displayed.  I could point out that the striking corps at Livepool played anemicly,  how creativity seemed to have taken a holiday to Blackpool.   Yet other more qualified individuals have already pointed out all the failings of a Liverpool side that seemed intent on gifting a point to a Stoke side desiring only  survival.  No my main sticking point has mainly to do with the massive blood letting I deserved witnessing, but was denied.  Once the final whistle blew I felt very much like a 15 year old after my first “make out” party: befuddled and confused knowing full well I had been short changed.  I had fully expected a massacre like last year’s Liverpool’s trouncing of Derby County, instead I witnessed a punch and judy show of kick it out of bounds and hope for the best.  Did Stoke play with cynicism, with a lack of creativity and verve?  Not my place to hurl such accusations at such a storied club as Stoke City nor a manager with the credentials of a Tony Pulis( And for all the smart asses out there I know after Notts County Stoke is the oldest club in England and Pulis has never managed a relegated club, you shits).  But… yes the sarcasm drips rather harshly, but football takes no prisoners much like a Vegas stripper when the car payment is due.  Yet this may be the future of sports.

     With the millons of pounds Sterling at stake what responsible manager will take a Proustian approach to the beautiful game?  A new age has slowly dawned on the EPL, an age where the point all alone to itself is as meaningfull as three.  Many will argue that more than a few championships have been deceided upon such parameters, but in no way can such conservatism help the game into the 21st century.  Not very long ago a Kevin Keegan managed Newcastle United came to Anfield needing a win to maintain a precarious claim to the championship.  For those with a long memory and an appreciation of how much pain sport can deliver the details need not be revisited.  For the others, read up on football.  Is it possible to see such drama played out on the pitch again?  Or will the drama still exist but in a more truncated form, fleeting to the point where we are not aware of its importance till too late.  And if this is the case in no way is that sport in its meaningfull sense.  It is sport as business, as dictated by economics and accountants, and not by the passion of competitive suvival.  In short I may never ever see the complete and utter destruction of a footballing side unless of course Leyton Orient gets promoted.

P.S.  Sindazed says hi.