Sport

Sorry, Chris. At least Stevie Gerrard played well.

Where do FIFA find these guys?

I really hope the Yanks hold out for a draw.

I’m not sure what it is about Italian footballers that inspires sheer loathing. Their Oscar-worthy acting? The purity of their cynicism? Whatever it is they’ve got it to burn.

Final whistle. Well done the U.S.

The other day Matt Yglesias “said”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/06/world_cup.html that the continuous flow of the game (and the fatuous American commentators) make it hard for him to learn what’s happening in a soccer match. “Here’s a masterclass”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhuRMiDz63w from Argentina, who beat Serbia & Montenegro 6-0 this morning.

[click to continue…]

The U.S. “got schooled”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/sports/AP-SOC-WCup-World-Cup.html by the Czechs. The Times says that Dubya gave the team a call beforehand:

bq. Eager to prove they are among soccer’s elite after their surprising quarterfinal finish in South Korea four years ago, the Americans brought their most-talented team ever to this year’s tournament. They even got a pregame pep talk from President Bush, who called from Camp David before the game and wished them well.

Today’s result shows diplomatic good wishes won’t do it, so that leaves the other two standard policy tools for strategic foreign intervention. First choice would be a large foreign aid package. Seeing as Italy is the U.S.’s next opponent bribery stands a very good chance of working. Something to bail out “Juventus”:http://www.google.com/search?q=juventus+scandal, for instance. Failing that, it’s airstrikes on Turin.

I just noticed via our “Technorati Link Page”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedtimber.org&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos that in the last few hours, CT has been linked to by dozens of (presumably) robo-generated blogspot blogs. Each one I’ve looked at is populated with a page of posts with content that looks like it was scraped from Wikipedia. All of them have names of the form AdjectiveNoun. My favorite name so far is TiredStation, which could be used by some pro-business content generators we know. So far the content is innocuous, but I suppose that the next step is for the Wikipedia content to disappear and be replaced by true spam after some suitable delay. Feh.

Meanwhile, the World Cup continues. In the general spirit of four hundred years of oppression I was hoping Angola would beat Portugal, or at least draw. The more anxious English pundits are killing themselves over Eriksson’s mysterious tactics, even though England won their opening game. Eriksson brought relatively few strikers along in the squad, and if the usual number of functioning legs for any _n_ strikers is given by the formula n∗2, in England’s case the calculation is presently the slightly more complex (n∗2)-(n-1). Coming up today: Australia vs Japan, USA vs Czech Republic, and Italy vs Ghana.

_Update_: My “adopted team”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/05/allah-allah-dennis-bergkamp-dennis-bergkamp/ came through with a late rush of goals. Australia were unlucky with Japan’s goal, which might easily have been disallowed seeing as a Japanese player impeded the keeper. But then again, Japan should probably have had a penalty just after Australia equalized, so them’s the breaks.

Because it is impossible to find a live internet radio stream of World Cup matches, I am forced to follow the games on the text-only FIFA MatchCast. Winding up to the Poland vs Ecuador match, which is just starting, the Official MatchBot Commentator guy just wrote, “Poland’s record on German soil is excellent …” I guess it depends when you’re talking about.

The World Cup is only a week away, which means there is actually a reason to be in Tucson in June, if like me you (i) want to watch the games but (ii) are too cheap to buy the cable package and (iii) only have a useless old TV in the garage somewhere. (We’re close enough to the border to pick up the Mexican stations.) “Here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1790025,00.html is a self-hating Englishman, deciding to support Germany because English footballers are oiks and English football fans are thugs. At least you’re in the competition, mate, unlike “some countries”:http://www.fai.ie/ I could mention. (“Here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2tjfbNRdz8 is some nostalgia. It’s all we have.) Given Ireland’s regrettable absence, I think I will be cheering for the “Socceroos”:http://www.footballaustralia.com.au/, seeing as my daughter was born in Canberra. The Aussies “have to play Brazil”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4973552.stm in their group. Probably their best bet is to hope the Brazilians will be confused by the Australian kit, which looks a lot like Brazil’s. I’m also hoping that the “U.S. team”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/teams/usa/default.stm does well, just because it will piss off the footie snobs.

Meanwhile, here are two terrific bits of World Cup commentary, both much better than the now-hackneyed “Gol” guy: a clip in Arabic from “Kuwait vs Czechoslovakia”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IS48giKs1U in 1982, and one in Dutch from the last minute of “Holland vs Argentina”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqEWpHuib9A in 1998. Both commentaries are out there in the realm of religious/sexual ecstasy.

Munster 23 — Biarritz 19.

_Later_: Here is “Stringer’s try.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMdc_RCyJg Superb.

The Irish and Welsh contingents here at CT must be well pleased … and no doubt they’ll be dancing in the streets of Auchtermuchtie tonight too (not to mention Malmo, Asunción, Port-of-Spain, and points in-between). Departing England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has picked a World Cup squad with only two fit recognized strikers: a 17-year-old who has never played a competitive game in the top division, and Peter Crouch.

Georgina Turner at “the Guardian’s Newsblog”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/05/08/sven_strikes_speculative_parting_shot.html :

bq. “Maybe it’s not logical,” the Swede laughed at the press conference, with the same half-laugh of a soon-to-be ex-employee explaining how exactly the entire client database had been wiped. “But sometimes things work out very well even though they’re not logical. Of course it’s a gamble, but it’s a nice one.”

I’m hoping against hope that the forces of “Good”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ will defeat the legions of “Evil”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/abramovich.shtml in the semi-final of the FA Cup later on today (although “God himself”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Fowler is ineligible to play for Good, being cup-tied from an earlier round). Meanwhile, I laughed aloud at several passages of Simon Burnton’s meditations on “Djibril Cisse and the off-side rule”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1758833,00.html .

Yesterday was a big day in the Bertram household, as we are season-ticket holders at “Bristol Rugby”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/ and Bristol beat Newcastle Falcons convincingly and thereby secured our Premiership status for next season (Leeds would need to win every remaining game with a bonus point, with no further points for Bristol to catch us — it isn’t going to happen). Bristol came up from National Division One last season and were every pundit’s tip to go straight back down. So it is a very nice feeling that the critics have been proved wrong. I expect it will be tough again next season, but at least there will be a next season in the top division.

Via David Glenn, this “wonderful chart”:http://hoverbike.blogspot.com/2006/03/partisani.html showing the political affiliations of Italian football team support groups. Lazio’s supporters, not surprisingly, vary from the right to the extreme right. A friend’s sister briefly dated a Lazio supporter; it sounds to have been an interesting experience. The links between soccer and politics are especially strong in Italy; Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” is the only political party I know of that takes its name from a football chant.

Changing the subject a bit, it looks as though Berlusconi is going to go down in flames when Italians head to the polls next month. He’s had no success in lowering the opposition’s “5% lead”:http://www.repubblica.it/speciale/2006/elezioni_sondaggi/index.html in the polls, and the stench of desperation from him and his supporters reeks so strongly as to be nearly tangible. Public attacks on “Confindustria”:https://registration.ft.com/registration/barrier?referer=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Berlusconi+confindustria&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&start=10&location=http%3A//news.ft.com/cms/s/7e792606-b833-11da-bfc5-0000779e2340.html, the most important Italian business organization (and usually a reliable water-carrier for the right), claims that the left is organizing riots to create a “situation of democratic emergency”:http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-22T180212Z_01_L22597576_RTRUKOC_0_UK-ITALY-BERLUSCONI.xml&archived=False, and most bizarre of all, a public plea for pity from the press.

bq. I’m carrying all the paperwork for the cabinet meeting, which is very hefty as you can see. I stayed up and worked on this until five this morning, as I have done throughout these five years. I say this with little hope of it being reported … I’m sorry if I’ve been long-winded, but I am at peace with my conscience … Let’s hope that some good soul in the media world, out of pity, will write news of this.

What the Italians would call a ‘brutta figura’ (bad show). It sounds as if Berlusconi himself believes that he’s lost the election.

Update – Thanks to Scott McLemeee for the photo below – the Brigate Autonome Livornesi are clearly fans of Uncle Joe.

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/stalin.jpg!

According to my local suburban paper, Western Brisbane has won more gold medals at the Commonwealth Games than either Canada or New Zealand. I’m sure Doreen Root would have something to say about this.

Although I’ve contributed nothing to this outcome beyond some desultory cheering at the TV set, and have never previously considered Western Brisbane as a distinct entity, I am, of course, filled with patriotic pride at this glorious victory.

Unless “you’re English”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4813172.stm, I mean. Not very funny at all then, really.