I wonder what the prime minister of Thailand has to say about the thrashing.

Just coming in over the wire services, Steven Gerrard arrested in a pub brawl.  Supposedly Stevie G was out celebrating the 5-1 thrashing of Newcastle United and one thing led to another.  Just when I couldn’t hate life more than I thought possible, the universe serves up one more nightmare.  In related news Google reports the number of insensitive scouser jokes one the web increases tenfold.

… Just made an amazing save to deny a West Ham equalizer. He’s been knocking them out all day. Am considering changing the format of this blog into an all-Brad Friedl superfan site. (The other Brad Friedel, here.)

Sad that he’s not available for international play. (Anyone know why that is?)

Think I gotta credit him for the P$100 Villa is gonna win me in this week’s pretend betting … and, dude, an outsider cracking into the “Top 4″? Go American goalies!

Tags: American internationals, Aston Villa, Brad Friedl, soccer betting

I’m in an American Football “pick’em” league and doing quite well — top 1 percent. Currently ranked 24th out of nearly 10,000 in Las Vegas, and 244th out of more than 140,000 nationwide. (Tied for 1st out of 13 in the Danieldinho family group.)

Of course I’d love to be able to claim such success making these picks on the Premier League … but I just don’t know the teams well enough. And though, as strange as this may seem, I’ve never made a bet in a casino sports book … I’ve been having a hankering to bet me some soccer. So I’ve started making some practice picks, to see how I would do as I get up the nerve to lay down some real money on the games.

Frankly, I’m not 100 percent sure I’ve even got a complete understanding of how the wagers work. But in my little soccer betting world, I made a pretend $100 wager on each game — either the amount it would take to win $100, or $100 to win more.

My results this weekend, with my pick in bold:

---

-150 Middlesbrough 1:1 Arsenal
+100 Aston Villa 4:2 Bolton
-400 Hull City 2:2 Liverpool
-100 Everton 1:0 Manchester City
+190 Fulham 0:0 Stoke City
+100 W Bromwich 0:4 Sunderland
+100 Blackburn 0:3 Wigan
+210 Manchester Utd 0:0 Tottenham
+220 Newcastle 3:0 Portsmouth
-650 West Ham 1:1 Chelsea

---

Total: -$380

Hmm, without Liverpool and Chelsea, I’d be +$670. So I guess what I’m learning here is that the big-disparity favorites simply don’t make sense to bet on?

My pretend full betting card woulda required putting up $2,010 in an attempt to win $1,315.

My pretend no-bigboy betting card woulda cost me $960 in an attempt to win $1,115.

Tags: American football, Chelsea FC, English Premier League, Liverpool, soccer betting, sports betting

Honestly, I had never heard of them before. But apparently they are called The Donkeys … and I just saw AC Chievo come back from a 2-0 deficit against Inter Milan (they were taking them for granted) to draw level in the 60somethingth minute. Apparently they are gentlemen from Verona.

UPDATE: They are actually called the Flying Donkeys (emph. added) … even cooler.

CRAP: Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored. I suppose it was inevitable.

NEVER MIND: Another one for Ibrahimovic. It was just a brief scare, apparently, and Inter has stepped back up to put Chievo back in their dominated place. Bummer. Back to rooting for Roma, I guess.

Tags: Chievo Verona, Inter Milan, Roma, Serie A, Zlatan Ibrahimovic

There are defining moments in any season which either propels a team to a championship or sends into the depths of heartbreak.  With almost half of the season gone in the EPL such moments will occur for every team from Liverpool to WBA.  Today’s match between Man Ure and Sunderland may well have been one of the first of the season so far.  Roy Keane walks out on Sunderland and Man Ure must keep up with Liverpool and Chelsea as the midway point approaches.  For Sunderland to walk away from this with any points would have been a major step into salvaging this season.  The heartbreaking winner in injury time by Vidic may have sealed Sunderland’s fate into relegation.  Such is the pain that lurks for every team once teams reach this phase of the season.

The best gaming review show on the latest incarnation of the best-selling sports game of all time*:

Says a lot about where soccer is headed — but maybe I’m biased, because I credit the video game more than the live sport for setting my innards atingle for non-American football.

*Right?

Tags: EA Sports Fifa, G4, video games

Just picked up a book in paperback called Bloody Confused.  It chronicles the experience of an American journalist moving to England and immersing himself in the football culture of the Home Isles.  Very funny writiing, but more importantly shows the cultural confusion of trying to adapt to an entirely different sporting world.  Sure you want to converse with your neighbors at the match, but maybe that is just not done over there.  What do you mean I can’t buy a ticket even though the game isn’t sold out.  These are some of the nuances of becoming a fan of the game in England and navigating such pitfalls lends the book an innocence I haven’t felt at a sporting event since my first foray into point shaving. 

Yet the greatest joy within the book is watching a burgeoning fan attach himself to a team.  Read it and it feels like reliving your first sexual encounter with a non-family member.

So Bill Buford, in the “Sunderland” chapter.  I just love the short hand reference, keeps the unwashed out.   Fine elitist and fatuous so I’ll begin again.  In Bill Buford’s illuminating paen to English football and hooliganism, there is a chapter devoted to Buford’s interaction with one Superintendent R. McAllister.  In short the police official queries said American one the crowd conditions at U.S. sporting events where upwards of 90,000 fans are crammed into an enclosed space for upwards of three hours with no fatalities due to crowd violence, nor congestion.  Now Buford is not trying to claim the Taylor report as his own, rather that crowd control at U.S. events may have been slightly ahead of its English counterparts. 

Fast forward to today and reports are coming out of England’s Championship division of a call for a salary cap.  For anyone familar with Soccerati, a call for a salary cap was put forth some months ago.  In a trickle down gestalt of footballing economics, this credit crunch is affecting every aspect of the world economy and sport leagues are not immune.  Numerous chairmen and officials of Championship side teams are concerned that current and near future revenue streams will not keep pace with the transfer standards set in past years.  In other words the players Southampton could afford say three or two years ago may no longer be realilstic come this January or summer.  Already major clubs such as Man Ure and Chelsea have given signs that they will not pursue large purchases when the transfer window opens.  So maybe a salary cap, something U.S. leagues have all to some degree instituted, is the necessary tonic for current economic conditions.  Not as a short term panacea, but as built in mechanism to protect the leagues, from EPL to conference, from rampant fiscal meltdown.

Liverpool moves into first today by drawing with West Ham at Anfield.  Notice the disturbing aspect of the previous sentence.  Nothing about our performance today suggests a strong and sustained challenge for the EPL championship.  While no one in the top six delivered a stunning performance over the weekend, has anyone reached the top spot with such an anemic showing.  We bitch and moan about left and right back issues, width, and now scoring issues once again rear its’ ugly head.  Yes I’ll quietly celebrate being alone at the top of the table, but at the same time I’m stocking up on booze and oxycontin for the coming storm.

The first one says… well you know how these jokes go.  It all ends up with a polar bear saying “But I didn’t eat her.”.  However what isn’t a joke is how the MLS championship game played out( cheap and gratuitous intro I know, but we are in a recession so cheap is a good deal here).  One of the key pharses I picked up on during the broadcast was the description of Columbus’ play as “workmanlike”.  Yes quite possibly the most common back handed compliment on the planet.  Why would any sport team want to walk away from a match with the tag of “workmanlike”?  Yet maybe this is the identity the MLS is slowly but surely craving out for itself.  The Bojan Krikics, and Patos of this world are not ringing up their agents demanding a move to Columbus or Salt Lake City.  And the youth development system in this country are I believe a generation away from producing a steady stream of world class players.  So until then what realistic identity but workmanlike can this league have.  A sure imperative for football’s success not just in this country but within the world landscape is for the MLS to have a style of play that is easily identifiable.  Now workmanlike may not sound as sexy as the plethora of cliched adjectives that are heaped upon European and South American leagues ad nauseum, but workmanlike is something MLS can build upon.  Soon the league will expand into two more cities, growth for the leaue is steady.  The next step will be to focus on the international club competitions.  The Concacaf Champions tournement is definitely where coaches, league officals, and players must look to excel.  Joining the ranks of La Liga, the EPL, and Serie A is a long and slow process, but one which looks promising.

Strike the struggling comments from the last post.  Norwich just had a man sent off in the 20th minute.  So want Forrest to close it out.  The average age of the Forrest team is 22.  Christ Norwich just scored a man down.  Jesus this game will just kill you, fucking kill you.  Never ever let your children become fans and if for some reason you do let them become fans, know that you have doomed them to years of mental health issues.  Slightly odd to hear Martin Tyler call the game.

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.

Funny … the picture in this post about Soccer Bloggers Ruling the World (from TheOffside.com) makes me realize why Sangy F has a future in soccer blogging — he’s gotta love the uniform.

Good stuff on how the game could be greatly improved — I love the idea of changing the name of American football to “throwball” — and what a wonderful future life our nascent little site here holds.

Tags: soccer bloggers

Not really, but … Merritt Paulson wants an MLS team in Portland. Where’s he getting the money? From his dad — US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (architect of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout).

Tags: Henry Paulson, Merritt Paulson, MLS, soccer politics

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.