Barca-Milan: I Feel a Change Coming On

You know that I'm jaded by Barca's success when they close out a 3-1 win over AC Milan - the current leaders in Serie A - and my first thought is "well, that wasn't especially impressive."  Barca played well, created a bevy of chances, outshot Milan 18-3, and were able to take their feet off the proverbial pedal for the last 20 minutes of the match, but because their finishing was poor and they relied on two penalties - one of which was debatable - they didn't win with the sort of panache that one would expect from this team.

Then again, from a historical perspective, I'm probably asking for too much in wanting every home match to finish 5-0, regardless of the opponent.  Last year, Barca benefited a dubious red card against Robin Van Persie and a clumsy touch from Niclas Bendtner in order to see off Arsenal.  Three years ago, Barca slogged their way through 180 minutes against Chelsea before finally getting the break-through in injury time after having survived a number of penalty appeals (one of which was actually legitimate).  In 2006, Barca needed a late miss by Benfica in the quarters and then a favorable call on a potential equalizer in the semi against Milan in order to progress.  In all three instance, Barca won the Champions League.  It's not necessary to dominate every match and it's helpful to keep in mind that I always remember the opponents' close calls without accounting for those of my team.

The main issue that I had last night after watching the match was that Pep Guardiola still seems to be searching for the best combination with this team.  In his two previous Champions League victories, Pep had to shuffle players at the back to deal with injuries and suspensions, but he always knew whom to play in the midfield and forward lines.  In contrast, in 2010, he was dealing with the unraveling Ibra situation and so he didn't really know how to deploy a striker along with Messi and Pedro.  After Ibra flopped against Inter, Pep saw out a second straight league title with Bojan as the third forward.

This year is closer to 2010.  Pep has to deal with Xavi's calf/Achilles issues.  More importantly, he is constantly shuttling players in and out around Messi.  At times, he plays Cesc as a second striker because his interplay with Messi is so good.  At times, he uses Alexis Sanchez as a runner for Messi's passes.  At times, he uses Isaac Cuenca and Cristian Tello for width.  And then there is a Pedro, a fixture for the last two years and a reliable scorer in big matches, but also a guy who has lost much of his form this year, at least in part because of injuries.

With all of these questions swirling in the background, Pep used a new formation for the most important match of the season: a 3-3-4.  On the one hand, it's nice to have a manager who can tailor his team to the opponent and thus remain unpredictable:

The real interest here was Barcelona’s shape. Dani Alves was pushed up even higher than in the first leg, with (at first) no responsibility to get back into the right-back zone. He and Cuenca played on roughly the same horizontal line, with Fabregas in a free role and Lionel Messi as a false nine. It could be interpreted as a 3-4-3 with a diamond midfield, with Fabregas at the front tip, but he and Messi were often together, playing as a partnership and dovetailing – therefore, the unusual 3-3-4 notation makes sense here.

Barcelona have played that way briefly in league games at the Nou Camp against weak opposition, but this was probably the first time they’ve looked 3-3-4 in a truly big game. In many ways, it makes perfect sense against this Milan side. It allows a spare man at the back, and if Fabregas dropped back slightly, equal numbers in midfield against Milan’s diamond. The obvious problem with a 3-3-4, on paper, is the lack of cover on the flanks – but few sides are as narrow as Milan, so in theory it shouldn’t be an issue.

On the other hand, Barca are supposed to be a team with a set way of playing that says to opponents "we are going to play a certain way and we are so good at it, you'll know what's coming and you won't be able to stop it."*

* - Michigan fans will be familiar with this mantra.  It worked when Bo was the coach and was more problematic when Lloyd was in charge and had only 85 players on scholarship.

Jonathan Wilson, a student of history who has previously wondered if this Barca team is going to reach its statute of limitations the way that most great teams do after 3-4 years, thinks that Pep tinkering with his formations is a good thing:

What marks Guardiola out is his awareness of the future, not in the sense of positioning himself for a move to another club or even in terms of youth development – although he is clearly acutely aware of that – but in terms of understanding the sweep of history, of recognising that what is good now will not necessarily be good in a year or two's time. Dress it as the lesson of Bela Guttmann ("the third year is fatal") or Karl Marx ("all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned"*), but that awareness marks Guardiola as a true dynastician. Not for him the club-hopping of Guttmann or even José Mourinho: he wants to erect an edifice for the ages, something, paradoxically, strengthened by his refusal to commit to more than a 12-month rolling contract; he will not become a weary leader, governing by convention, but leaves open a perpetual route to step down for a fresher man when the occasion calls for it. (As examples from Tony Blair to Abdoulaye Wade indicate, though, leaving the door open does not necessarily mean he will still be willing to step through it when the time is right.)

In football terms, Guardiola is clearly determined to prevent Barcelona ever becoming complacent or predictable, to make sure they always have a second line of attack. The signing of Zlatan Ibrahimovic was intended to give them height, the option of going aerial if the usual tiki-taka didn't deliver and, when that didn't quite work, he began experimenting with the back three.

What I am trying to accept in my head is the idea that change and uncertainty might not be a bad thing.  When a team has won as much as Barca has, it's natural for a fan to say to himself "keep doing what you've been doing."  The memories of Rome and Wembley are so happy and positive in my mind that I want Barca to avoid change at all costs.  However, opponents are constantly changing their approaches to playing the Blaugrana and Barca's personnel is changing in all sorts of ways, so sticking with what worked before isn't a realistic option.  Hard to accept as it might be, if Barca are to win the Champions League again this year, they will have to do it in a different way.

Catching Up

Sorry for the lack of content in recent weeks, but between work and my posts at SB Nation's Atlanta site, time has been tight.  For those of you who don't visit the Atlanta page on a daily basis, hang your heads in shame ... and then click on the tab that I added to the right that goes directly to my profile there.  That has a fill list of what I have been posting, both in shorter and longer form.  Some highlights from the last few weeks:

My predictable gloating over the Saints' little bounty issue:

The last parallel between the Ohio State and New Orleans scandals is that both relate to the most pressing issues facing their respective sports. College football has been plagued in recent months with significant scandals involving major programs and improper benefits, leading many to question the continued viability of a sport that is built on a fiction. For instance, the 2010 national title game was contested between a team whose star quarterback's father was trying to sell his son to the highest bidder and an opponent currently under investigation for paying a runner in Texas to direct players to Eugene.

The biggest issue facing the NFL is the long-term health impact of the sport, a dilemma that leads to a plausible scenario in which the NFL no longer exists. Through a combination of: (1) the school firing its head coach and suspending several of its best players; and (2) the NCAA tacking on a one-year bowl ban, Ohio State has essentially had to give up two football seasons. That's the message that the NCAA and its members have to send to deter money finding its way to the players who generate it.

I don't pretend to know what is in Roger Goodell's holster in terms of potential punishments, but it is clear that he is going to have to bring the hammer down because the participation of Saints' coaches in the team's bounty system and the acquiescence of the head coach and general manager in that system touches on the biggest problem facing the league. Goodell has to ensure that current and future authority figures in the league see what happened to the Saints and take the lesson that they have to stamp out incentives to injure opposing players.

This is one of those instances where I am quite happy that Roger Goodell has given himself untrammeled power to punish league figures who "damage the shield," to quote that preposterous phrase that was bandied about by authority worshipers when Goodell was disciplining Ben Roethlisberger for tawdry conduct that did not lead to criminal charges.  Let's see him use that power when the wrongdoers are management instead of labor.  That, after all, is the big issue with the Saints scandal.  It's not that the Saints had a bounty system, as that appears to be something that happens every now and again in the NFL.  It's that this appears to be the first instance in which a defensive coordinator, a head coach, and a general manager all either participated or at least knew about the scheme and did nothing.

My predictable counter to Forbes labeling Atlanta as the most miserable sports city in America:

Forbes would never permit this terrible reasoning when evaluating companies. Financial reporting is (at least theoretically) based on reviewing the entirety of a company's record to make the best evaluations possible. That same rigor apparently does not apply to sports analysis, where we define disappointment based on a "small sample size important; big sample size unimportant" framework.

The point of sports is to provide us with entertainment. We all want an escape from the ennui of the working world and games provide us with exactly that. A team like the Braves during their heyday provided great entertainment, as they consistently won more than they lost. Day after day, we could rely on the Braves to make us happy by beating down the rest of the NL East. Losing a playoff series was a sad experience, but was it enough to overwhelm six months of happiness? No.

Personally, this has been a pretty good period to be an Atlanta sports fan.  How many other times in city history can we say that two of our teams - the Hawks and Falcons - are playoff regulars and the third - the Braves - are at least on the cusp and have a roster full of promising young players.  Maybe my expectations were beaten down by two of the city's three teams being so bad in the 80s when I was growing up, but this seems fine to me.  It's unfortunate that the Hawks have reached their ceiling at the second round of the playoffs and the Falcons can't win a playoff game, but as between playoff disappointment and finishing in last place every year, I'll take the former.

I also finished a post that I've been meaning to write for weeks on the decline of the ACC as a basketball conference.  I offered four potential explanations: conference expansion, bad coaches, the Big Dance killing the regular season, and the possibility that we are just seeing a statistical blip.  The decline of the ACC stands out for me because of the juxtaposition with SEC football.  The latter is as strong as ever, as population trends have dovetailed with the ability of athletic departments to monetize fan passion - and thereby build facilities and hire coaches that create a recruiting advantage - to put the SEC on top of college football.  Those same shifts in population should be helping the ACC in basketball, but they aren't.  That leads to a chicken-egg question: is fan intensity down in the ACC because the product is weaker or is the product weaker because fan intensity is down?

 

No Really, You Go Ahead And Blow Your Own Foot Off. I’ll Be Here In The Corner, Doing A Lot Of Nothing

On May 6, 2009, I sat in this room, in front of this computer, and wondered about the meaning of my team winning a big game when it had been both outplayed and the beneficiary of at least one notable close call.  In that instance, Andres Iniesta hit a 93rd minute winner past Petr Cech to send Barcelona to Rome.  Iniesta’s shot was Barca’s first on target in the match.  The Blaugrana trailed for most of the encounter and had to stave off numerous close encounters, including a pair of one-on-ones between Didier Drogba and Victor Valdes and four penalty appeals of varying quality.  In the end, Barca were the inferior team, but went through anyway. 

In the aftermath, I came to grips with the fact that there are more ways to succeed in a football match than by dominating possession and creating chances.  For one thing, a goalie making big saves is not exactly luck.  You would think that I would grasp this fact given that I have played goalie since age ten, but after the game, I had to remind myself that Valdes performing to keep Barca in the match counted just as much as Messi or Eto’o creating and finishing chances at the other end.  For another, a team keeping its concentration in adverse circumstances is important.  Barca could have gotten frustrated with Chelsea’s defensive approach, with the penalty that they were denied in the first leg, and with the general unfairness that their perfect season was about to end without the most coveted prize available.  Instead, they kept plugging away and then Iniesta foreshadowed his World Cup-winning strike with the goal that made the treble possible.

Tonight, I’m in the same position.  Michigan just won the Sugar Bowl, capping an 11-2 season that, with one notable exception, is as good as any I’ve experienced since enrolling in Ann Arbor in September 1993.  By conventional metrics, Michigan had no business winning the game.  The Wolverines were outgained 375 to 184.  The Hokies ran 24 more plays and were 1.4 yards better on a per play basis.  Michigan’s two touchdowns were both Jeff Bowden specials, with Junior Hemingway playing the role of Greg Carr.  Michigan’s first field goal in regulation came from an insanely lucky deflected pass to a previously-ineligible receiver.  The Michigan defense was stout in a number of respects, especially in the red zone, but they gave up a season’s worth of third and longs to a team without an especially good passing game.  In the end, Michigan benefited from a close reversal of a Hokie touchdown in overtime (the right call, I think, but very close) and then an ignored false start on the winning field goal (although it’s not as if Virginia Tech can claim that Michigan gained any sort of advantage from Brendan Gibbons starting, stopping, and then having to start again).  Notre Dame in the late 80s, Tennessee ‘98, and Ohio State ‘02 all came to mind; this was lucky.

All that said, the ability to avoid blowing off one’s own foot is a skill in college football.  If we have learned anything over the last few days after seeing kickers repeatedly spit the bit, coaches turtle up in end-game situations, and players of all shapes and sizes make mistakes, it’s that avoiding big errors is important.  Michigan had one turnover and 24 yards of penalties.  They didn’t miss a field goal.  They didn’t call a stupid fake punt on fourth and one when their running game was cooking.  Fitzgerald Toussaint didn’t take a 220-yard loss on first and goal.  They neither roughed a punter to prolong a drive, nor watched the drive end by not knocking down a pass on 3rd and 17.  Feel free to shoot me in the face for sounding like a Tressel acolyte, but playing mistake-free football can atone for a lot of sins.

Likewise, just as Barca’s persistence at Stamford Bridge was a skill, so was Michigan’s performance tonight.  They came in with their star left tackle limping around.  They then added an injury to their Rimington-winning senior center who makes all of the calls for the line and who relies on mobility to make up for a lack of size.  A group of players who remember total collapses like Illinois 2009 and Ohio State 2010 showed that they don’t roll over anymore.  Virginia Tech dominated most of the first half, but the defense made stands in the red zone and then the offense had a brief flurry to turn a 6-0 deficit into a 17-6 lead.  When the Hokies pegged them back to 17-17 and then 20-20, Michigan stood up in overtime and won the game.  Add persistence to “didn’t blow our own feet off” to the list of skills that this team used to make up for the fact that they couldn’t block or make a stop on third and long.

In a way, this is how the 2011 season had to end for Michigan.  At the end of the Rich Rodriguez era, Michigan was a great offfense and then a smoking heap of wreckage.  The defense was unconscionably bad.  The special teams were barely above that level, most notably because the Wolverines could not kick a field goal.  Michigan did dumb things like not knowing that a blocked field goal is a live ball.  The turnover rate was terrible.  This year was a palate cleanser in every way.  In the end, Michigan won a game despite the offense being completely stymied.  The Wolverines won by being good on defense, very good on special teams, and smart enough to avoid the mistakes that killed their otherwise superior opponent.  In 2010, I looked at box scores and said “we have to be better than what the scoreboard says.”  At the end of 2011, I say “according to that gleaming Sugar Bowl trophy headed to Schembechler Hall, we are better than what the box score says.”  

Brazil Goes to the Map Room

My favorite movie is Raiders of the Lost Ark.  My parents dragged me to it when I was six years old.  I say "dragged" because I wanted to see Clash of the Titans instead.  Based on the picture of Indiana Jones in the newspaper wearing a Middle Eastern headdress,* I feared that the movie was going to be an extension of Sunday School, which I was already mature enough to find boring.  Two hours after being forced against my will to go into one of the theaters on 29 in Charlottesville, I came dancing out, convinced that I had seen the best movie in the history of the world.  Three decades later, I will admit that there might be other movies of superior technical quality, but no movie has surpassed Raiders as my favorite.

* - Showing a similar mentality, my five-year old described our neighbors' nativity scene as "Jews, a camel, and a donkey."

One of Raiders' best aspects is that it is stuffed to the gills with iconic scenes.  Indy running away from the boulder.  Indy's travels being tracked by a red line on a map.  Indy shooting the swordsman in the Cairo market.*  The Ark melting the faces of Toht and Dietrich.  The Ark being buried in a government warehouse along with who knows what.** 

* - If there is a better 30-second metaphor for colonialism, I'd like to see it. OK, maybe the fact that the locals cheer the Westerner who uses technology to defeat the skilled, but outdated native cuts against my conclusion, but leave me my attempt to find meaning in a pulp classic.  Also, it's interesting to me that two of the best scenes in George Lucas-affiliated movies - the swordsman scene in Raiders and the "I love you." "I know." scene in Empire Strikes Back - were both improvised by Harrison Ford.

** - The perfect metaphor for government waste.

For me, the best scene in the entire movie is the Map Room.  Indy takes his right-sized staff into the Map Room at the right time, waits for the sun to hit the right spot, and then looks on with amazement as a brilliant beam of light strikes the location of the Well of the Souls.

Two qualities make the scene.  The first is John Williams' score, as the Ark's theme rises to an inspiring crescendo.  The second is Harrison Ford's expression of wonder at the show of light.  The cynicism of a world-weary archaeologist with the weathered leather jacket and fedora - the guy who said earlier in the movie " I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the boogie man" - melts away now that he realizes that he is in the presence of the ethereal.  Steven Spielberg's movies are often noted for the moment of realization that his protagonists have.  (Think about Roy Scheider's face in Jaws when he realizes the size of the shark he's hunting, or Liam Neeson's face when he finally realizes the extent of the Final Solution and its effect on children in Schindler's List.)  The definitive moment of realization is Indy in the Map Room as his face changes to a wide-eyed gape.

I had Indy's expression in mind when I read Tim Vickery's pieces about the lesson that Brazilians should take from the hiding that Santos took from Barcelona in Japan.  With the world title on the line, Santos brought in a team that had been strengthened after winning the Copa Libertadores and was led by two burgeoning stars: Neymar and Ganso.  With the Brazilian domestic league in good financial form after signing a lucrative TV deal and the currency doing well against the failing Euro, this seemed like the time for a Brazilian club side to show its strength against a European champion.  Instead, Barca won in embarrassingly comfortable fashion, breaking out to a 3-0 lead at the half and then coasting home.

Vickery, who has been preaching about the failings of modern Brazilian futebol for as long as I have been reading and listening to him, could have viewed the match as a confirmation of his hypothesis that Brazil has given up the ability to produce passing midfielders.  Here is what Vickery wrote for the BBC:

Like watching Muhammad Ali against some outgunned challenger, Barcelona's destruction of Santos was as joyful as it was clinical. Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas and Lionel Messi ran rings round Santos as if the Brazilians were traffic cones in a training exercise.

According to the dominant current of thought in Brazil in recent years, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. The physical evolution of the game, it was thought, had made it impossible. In this modern football of reduced space, the central midfielders need to be six-footers, big and strong enough to win the 50-50 balls and protect the defence.

And there was no point in possession football - a move with more than seven passes had a reduced chance of ending up in a goal. The way to win was to block the middle and look for quick counter attacks and set-pieces.

And the quality of the play? "If you want to see a spectacle," says Santos coach Muricy Ramalho, "then go to the theatre." Or maybe go to watch his side taken apart in such style by Barcelona.

In football the idea comes first. And the line of thinking helps explain the type of players produced. In Neymar Santos could count on a Messi equivalent. But where is the Xavi or the Iniesta? Brazilian football no longer has them because it is not looking to produce them. They do not fit the mould.

And here is his similar description for ESPN:

Sunday's match was not decided by a financial imbalance. It was the imposition of one footballing philosophy over another, a victory for the skilful little guys with the low centre of gravity, a triumph for the spectacle and self-expression of pass and move - a win like many that South American football has enjoyed in its glorious history.

The value of defeat is always in the lessons that it can teach. Perhaps the big lesson that Barcelona have taught in Yokohama is this: if Brazilian football wants to keep on winning not only titles but also hearts then it would be well advised to get back in touch with elements of its own tradition. There is an argument against the view that possession football is outdated and that the central midfielders should be unimaginative giants. Its case was made loud and clear in Japan this Sunday.

If Spain's triumph and Brazil's failure in South Africa was not evidence enough, Sunday's result in Yokohama should be Brazil's trip to the Map Room.  It should be enough to convince the cynics who have led Brazil astray ever since the beautiful 1982 iteration to the Selecao - led by Zico, Falcao, and the late Socrates - was upset by Italy (ironically enough, in Barcelona at Espanyol's old ground) that technical ability in the central midfield is more important than brawn.*

* - As Jack Lang of Snap Kaka Pop was marveling at Thiago - Barca's latest midfield prodigy and the son of a former Brazil international - and expressing regret that Thiago has declared for Spain instead of Brazil, I was tempted to respond with "maybe he didn't want to become a fullback."

To come back to this blog's favorite topic, the Map Room analogy has me thinking about similar episodes in college football, instances where one striking result caused an epiphany from a team or a conference.  These are the examples that came to mind, but I am all ears for more:

1.  After getting his tail kicked in by Florida State and Miami in a series of Orange and Fiesta Bowls, Tom Osborne decides that he needs defensive players who can run.  He recruits Texas and California more heavily, thus producing the dominant team that won national titles in 1994, 1995, and 1997.

2.  After a favored Ohio State team gets obliterated by Florida in the 2006 national championship game, the Big Ten moves towards the spread offense.  Ohio State shows a run-based spread with Terrelle Pryor, Penn State deploys the "Spread HD," and Michigan hires Rich Rodriguez. 

3.  After Danny Wuerrfel is beaten to a pulp by Florida State at Doak Campbell Stadium in November 1996, Steve Spurrier relents on his long-standing opposition to the shotgun.  The Gators bury the Noles in the rematch and the 'gun is a feature of Spurrier's offense from that point forward.

4. After the SEC was dominated in the 1980s by conservative, run-the-ball-and-play-defense coaches like Vince Dooley and Pat Dye, Spurrier arrives in 1990, destroys a highly-rated Auburn team in 1990 48-7, wins the Gators' first SEC title in 1991, and then sets himself on a path of destruction through the conference.  The rest of the SEC enters the Map Room and emerges with the David Cutcliffe offense at Tennessee, the Air Raid at Kentucky, and the quasi-spread run by Terry Bowden and featuring Dameyune Craig at Auburn.

Others?

The Mexican Bus

Jerry Hinnen’s comment to my admission that I don’t dislike the Mexican National Team:

Ugh, Michael. Ugh ugh ugh. It's not often I disagree with you at all, much less vehemently, but I don't get the calls to "respect" Mexico and their fans and all.

caused me to think back to why I feel this way.  So let’s play a game of early childhood memories, soccer edition.  My appreciation for Mexico dates back to seeing them in 1994.

When the US hosted the 1994 World Cup, my family got tickets to the games in Orlando.  We had three tickets per game for the five of us.  The first game for which we had tickets was the coveted clash between natural rivals Belgium and Morocco.  The crew for that game was my mom and two brothers, Dan and Jacob.    They committed the ultimate sin in my world: they got to the game late and missed the only goal.**  So, when my Dad, Dan, and I went to the next Orlando match – Mexico vs. Ireland – we got to the game very, very early.***

* – Jacob, my youngest brother, was seven at the time, so he got the short end of the stick: the two Morocco games.  As a redeeming gesture, we bought him a fez at Epcot Center, so everybody wins.

** - I am not a super punctual person, but I will always leave way too much time to spare when going to two places: the airport and a sporting venue.  This topped out when I was on the train from Notting Hill Gate to Wembley three hours before the Champions League Final.  I could have walked to the stadium and made it in plenty of time. 

*** – Mexico-Ireland was really just a cruel joke on the Irish.  It was game two for each team in that World Cup’s Group of Death (Italy and Norway were the other teams involved) and it was must-win for Mexico because they had lost to Norway in Washington, DC in their opener.  Ireland, on the other hand, had a margin for error after they had upset Italy at the Meadowlands on Ray Houghton’s famous goal.  (Every goal scored by Ireland during the Jack Charlton era could be described as “against the run of play” and as the result of a long ball not properly dealt with by the opponent.  Why people stomached that Ireland team I’ll never know.)  To cater to the European TV audience, the game was played at 12:35 EST.  In Orlando.  At the Citrus Bowl, which sits next to a dingy swamp-like spot that the locals refer to as a lake.  Now, imagine what the weather was like and then imagine how a bunch of fair-complexioned Irish players based in England fared in that weather.  The only people who were worse off were the Irish fans, who drank before the game and then turned into distressed lobsters as the match progressed, sitting in the roof-less, shade-less Citrus Bowl.  On the bright side, one guy behind us unintentionally taught me a hole panoply of ways to use the c-word and another guy implored the ref to give every Mexican a yellow card, both individually and collectively, thus giving me a saying (done in a horrible Irish accent) for the rest of my life.

With time to kill before losing my big futbol game virginity, I wandered around the stadium.*  By happenstance, I was wandering by when the Mexican bus arrived to deposit El Tri at the Citrus Bowl.  By this point in my life, I had been to plenty of sports events, but I had never seen a reaction quite like this.  The Mexican fans surged towards the fences separating them from the buses.  Men, women, and children all had facial expressions that combined innocent joy and abject fear.  As the players got off the bus, they all grinned sheepishly and acknowledged the fans.  I imagined that they were thinking “man, it’s great to be supported by these fans, but holy shit, we can’t lose this game.”  I distinctly remember noticing Jorge Campos making eye contact with the fans before heading towards the locker room and then thinking “that guy is really short.” 

* – Possibly subconsciously, I did the exact same thing before the Champions League Final.  In both instances, I went counter-clockwise without thinking about direction.

I rooted for Mexico in the match, in part because I hated that Ireland side* and in part because I was in awe of the love shown by their fans to the team when they arrived.  There was absolutely no expression of contempt for a team that had just been upset in its first World Cup match in eight years.**  Mexico scored twice*** and held on for a 2-1 win.  The atmosphere was memorable enough that I’m prattling on about it 17 years later.  I can’t say that I am a fan of the Mexican National Team, but I don’t dislike them the way that most fans of the Nats do and the expression of unbridled joy delivered to players getting off of a bus on a one-match losing streak is a formative reason why I feel this way.  So there.

* – That Ireland side competed in the ‘90 and ‘94 World Cups.  In nine matches, they scored four goals.  Four.  They played a stultifying long ball style that led to the single worst game in international football history: the 0-0 draw with Norway that followed the match against Mexico.  When people talk about the dismally boring Italia '90 (redeemed only by Cameroon, Toto Schillaci’s facial expressions, and a worthy champion), they often talk of too many knock-out matches ending up being decided by penalties or Argentina’s disgraceful display.  Me, I think of Ireland making it farther than Brazil and the Netherlands.  Any time you can make that statement about a World Cup, you know that the tournament was disappointing.

** – Mexico was barred from Italia ‘90 for fielding over-age players at a youth tournament.  So Jerry, you have that going for you.  That ban is what created the space for the US to make the World Cup for the first time in four decades.      

*** – “The Americans have been very fond of their pink caps and self-importance in running this World Cup and that’s just another example of it.”  Uh, you gave us Bono.

An American Culé in London

So I'm back, with my ears still ringing.

Why I Went



I've been a member of FC Barcelona since 2007, but in that time, I haven't been to a game. (Insert standard reference to wife, kids, and job.) The only Barca match I had attended before Saturday was on September 9, 2001, the home opener against Rayo Vallecano. I had proposed to my wife in the city two days before, so my political capital was high. This was not a good period for the club, as they had finished fourth the previous year only by virtue of one of the all-time great clutch goals:



and they would finish fourth again. The match was a harbinger of a pedestrian season, as the team drew 1-1. The result flattered Barca, as their goal was an own-goal by Rayo and Rayo also managed to hit both posts with one shot late in the game. Before Saturday, that was the sum total of Barca matches that I had attended in person.

As a member of the club, I get e-mails on a fairly regular basis regarding the process for applying for home and road Champions League tickets. Typically, when I get the e-mails, I forward them to my Delta employee brother to ask about flights, he responds, and then I invent a reason not to go, usually because it would involve missing 2-3 days of work. When I got the e-mail about applying for tickets to the Wembley Final, I finally grew a pair. The fact that the game was on a Saturday instead of a Tuesday or Wednesday helped. I was aided by asking three different friends “how much would you pay to see your favorite team in a championship game?” and received a uniform response of “$1,000.” I was also aided by my saint of a wife telling me that she supported the decision because, as she put it, “you work hard and it’s not like you spend a lot of money on clothes.”

I was also motivated by the historical implications of the match. For Barca, this was the chance to make their definitive case as one of the greatest club sides of all-time. Three Champions League titles in six years is no small feat, especially when no team as repeated since the creation of the Champions League from the European Cup in 1992. Winning the third of those titles against Manchester United – the kings of England – at Wembley would be a colossal exclamation mark at the end of a season that was preceded by the nucleus of this Barca side winning the World Cup and included the famous 5-0 win over Real Madrid that kicked the “greatest team ever?” discussion into high gear. Additionally, the number of players and coaches involved made this a target rich match in terms of telling my grandkids “I saw this guy live”: Sir Alex Ferguson, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Edwin van der Sar in their final games,* Wayne Rooney, and the Ferdinand-Vidic pairing on one side; Pep Guardiola, Gerard Pique, Carles Puyol, the Xavi-Iniesta fulcrum, David Villa, and Leo Messi on the other. As a history major who still has regrets over my decisions not to go to the Braves game that turned out to be Randy Johnson's perfect game, as well as the 1996 Michigan-Ohio State game in Columbus (I sold my ticket thinking that Michigan was going to get slaughtered and that anyone wearing maize and blue would be drawn and quartered), this was too much to pass up.

* – The first Champions League Final I ever watched was Ajax 1 Milan 0 in the 1995 Vienna Final. Van der Sar was the goalie for Ajax in that match and the announcer (JP Dellacamera, I think) made a point of noting that he was young and would be nervous playing against a Milan side that was in fully dynastic mode. Van der Sar had a nervous moment or two in the first half, but settled down and ended up with a clean sheet against the defending Champions League winners. There was a nice closing of a circle that van der Sar played in the first Final that I watched and then his final match was the first Final I attended.

The Lead-up



Being a risk-averse person who had spent $120 on a ticket that I described as once in a lifetime and who was also lucky to have gotten the right to buy a ticket (96,000 of Barca’s 175,000 members applied for the 16,000 tickets available to members, which means that I won a one-in-six bet),* I was on the train to Wembley three hours before the match.

* - One nice thing about Barcelona: every member has an equal chance to get tickets to big events like Champions League Finals. Most clubs would reserve their allotments for season ticket holders. Barca has a democratic structure, so all members can apply. I suppose that a guy who went to 15 games at the Nou Camp this year could be annoyed that someone like me didn't go to a game all year and then got to go to the Champions League Final, but I watch the games, I buy the jerseys (or at least I did before the new sponsor), and I click on the links. Surely I count for something. Barca's structure does have its downsides - the public tapping up of players during elections is one obvious examples - but there are a lot of upsides to a club owned by the members.

The experience was great. Barca and United fans were bantering in a friendly manner the entire time. For the entire day, I didn’t see one verbal altercation, let alone a physical one. Maybe the language barrier between the fans helped, or maybe there is a level of respect between the fans that was accentuated by the verbal bouquets being tossed back and forth between the players and managers during the week. The United fans were singing their song about going to Wembley:



And the Barca fans were just grinning at our good luck to be playing at Wembley again.*

* – Being a Barca fan is a little like being in the Eagles. We have about six songs and we sing them in concert in a rotation. It’s not hard for a non-Spanish/Catalan speaker to pick the songs up quickly, especially thanks to a helpful video from BarcaLoco:



After my wife, my brother, Johan Cruyff, and Lady Luck, I have to give thanks to BarcaLoco because without this tutoiral, I would have looked like even more of an idiot than I already did as a non-Spanish speaking Barca fan. In contrast Being a United fan is more like being in Dylan’s band. There are dozens of songs and you never know which one is going to be sung. “Hey, it’s Mascherano, let’s sing the song about shitting in your Liverpool slums! No, not the one about Scousers not having job, the one about shitting.”

I noticed more Barca fans in the street headed toward the game and surmised that the United fans would be in the pubs until shortly before kickoff. This played out in the stadium, as the Barca end was full and singing well before the United end. Similarly, I saw more Barca fans on Friday when I was tooling around London, but I chalked that up to the fact that Barca fans would be more likely to see the tourist sites (Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the British Museum, in my case) than United fans who have probably been to London on dozens of prior occasions.

The Match



Needless to say, the match lived up to billing. Barca put on a signature performance, better than their performance against United in Rome two years ago. (Interestingly, Guardiola said after the match that when he rewatched the Rome Final in the preparation for this match, he wasn’t overly impressed by his team’s performance.) Brian Phillips did a great job of describing the effort:

Barcelona’s performance in the second half is going to be talked about in hushed tones for a while, and deservedly so. The most impressive thing, to me, was that they won by doing exactly what they wanted. Matches at this level tend to be decided, if not by penalties, then by lucky bounces (Xabi Alsono getting his penalty rebound in ’05, Inzaghi deflecting Pirlo’s free kick in ’07), sudden breakthroughs (Iniesta in the World Cup final), goals squeezed in after a scramble in the box. Yesterday, though, each of Barcelona’s forwards scored from open play, with each of their midfielders contributing an assist. They had 63% of the possession and 12 shots on target (to one for Man Utd—Rooney’s goal). Messi scored in England, even if it was in London on a Saturday night. Valdes didn’t have to make a save. They played exactly their game, and their game worked exactly the way it’s supposed to, and the second-or-third-best team in the world was basically powerless to frustrate them. If soccer is about realizing a collective intention against the limitations imposed by the game and the resistance imposed by the opponent, then Barcelona epitomized soccer yesterday. Forget the backlash, your anti-mass-media skepticism, conspiracy theories, blog rage, and Heineken. If you love sports you were lucky to watch that.

Alex Ferguson said that his team was beaten by "the best team we have ever played." Just like in Rome, Barca had a nervy first ten minutes when United were on them like a pack of wolves. Also like in Rome, Barca grabbed the game by the scruff of the neck after that, dominating possession and restricting United into a smaller and smaller defensive area. Unable to keep the ball, United started hoofing long balls to Rooney and Chicharito, which was an odd strategy in light of the fact that neither of their forwards are big guys. Route one to the Little Pea is never a good idea. Barca struck on 27 minutes and for six minutes, I was thinking that this was going to be Athens ‘94 (Milan 4 Barca 0; the beginning of the end of the Barca Dream team) in reverse. Then, Rooney scored out of nothing - a terrific goal that showed that he would not be out of place in this Barca side with his ability to pass and move - and the United fans let out an unholy roar from the other end of Wembley. Game on. For the next several minutes, it felt like I had to force myself to sing and cheer. You recognize why there are so many chants taunting a losing team for being quiet; it’s hard to muster the energy to chant when the game is going against you.*

* – I was struck by two aspects of the game that were especially pleasant after years of going to games in the US. First, because the game is non-stop, you don’t lose the emotional high from scoring. Nick Hornby is right; there is a quasi-sexual feeling to the release after your team puts one in the back of the net. It’s not quite like your team scoring a touchdown because the moment is more explosive. More importantly, the goal is followed by a celebration and then the opponent kicks off. There is no cold shower of commercial break-kickoff-commercial break. Second, there is nothing in the stadium to distract fans from the game. Wembley is as expensive and modern a stadium as there is in footie, but it has two video boards that would make a Texan guffaw. Those boards play a live feed of the game and occasional highlights. That’s it. No wrap-around boards with stats. No Kiss-cam or Tesco Price Check. The PA announcer does nothing save for announcing goals, cards, and subs. And keep in mind that the Champions League Final is the European Super Bowl, so if there were ever a chance, in the words of Mortimer Duke, to “get back in there and sell, sell,” this would be it.

If the 5-0 thumping of Real in November was the opening opening argument for Barca’s “best of a generation” case, then the second half of the Final was the closing argument. Barca quickly pinned United back and within 11 minutes, Leo Messi had put the Blaugrana ahead. 13 minutes later, David Villa scored with a wedge shot that would have made Seve Ballesteros proud and Barca spend the last 20 minutes passing the ball around, content that three goals would be enough. United didn’t muster a single shot on target in the second half. In the end, the Barca players were on another podium, receiving another Champions League trophy with the club’s name on it. Puyol’s decision to let Eric Abidal lift the Cup as captain was a nice touch, reminiscent of Andres Iniesta’s tribute to Dani Jarque after scoring the winning goal in the World Cup Final. As best as one can tell about celebrities with managed images, these Barca players seem like good guys.

In the end, it has to be said that United are a good match-up for Barcelona. For one thing, the Red Devils were so successful over the course of the year because of their depth, but in a one-off final, that depth doesn’t matter so much, especially when the teams have had weeks to prepare and and rested and healthy coming in. (The American sports analogy would be to a team with five great pitchers in the starting rotation, a strength that is somewhat pearls before swine in October.) For another, United are incapable of playing the negative, destructive style that gives this Barca team trouble. Jose Mourinho concluded that the way to handle Barca was to pack the midfield with defensive players, starting with an aggressive central defender (Pepe), and then to hope that a counter could produce a 1-0 win.* United do not have that personnel, especially with Darren Fletcher not entirely fit, and Alex Ferguson probably sees that style as incompatible with his team’s image (although United’s approach in the first leg of the 2008 semifinal against Barca came close). United brought a sterling defensive record to Wembley, but without a proper defensive screen, even a terrific central defensive pairing like Vidic and Ferdinand (a pairing that was a major factor in United not allowing a goal in the Champions League away from Old Trafford all season) bled three goals in 69 minutes before Barca made the “you’ve had enough” decision. All three goals came from the area in front of the back four that a screen of defensive midfielders would seek to control. The opener was eerily like the opener in Rome: Xavi/Iniesta breaks free from the center of the pitch, has time to pick out the final ball, and hits one to the right to a forward to finish at the near post. It’s to Ferguson’s credit that he tried to play his game and went down trying, but then again, it’s not his job to earn the plaudits of an opposing fan.

* – In going to the game, I was interested to see the differences between my outlook - formed by watching every week on GolTV and reading Sid Lowe, Phil Ball, and Graham Hunter – and that of Barca fans who go to the Nou Camp every week and get their news from the Catalan sports dailies: El Mundo Deportivo and Sport. I was happy to learn that a white-hot hatred for Jose Mourinho united Barca fans around the world. The first chant on the escalator headed to the upper deck was “Ese Portugues, hijo puta es.” The guy in front of me kept singing “Jose Mourinho, hijo de puta,” regardless of whether the rest of the fans were singing with him. He also took great pleasure in calling his friends to sing that little ditty. The new chant that Barca fans sing is simply “por que, por que, por que, por que,” a dig at Mourinho’s rant after the first leg of the semifinal. (I wonder how Vikto Kassai’s “stop, or I’ll say stop again” homage to London bobbies, specifically as to Antonio Valencia’s repeated attempts at tackling, fits with the UEFA-Unicef conspiracy in Jose’s mind.) This guy liked the chant so much that he had it emblazoned on the custom t-shirt he made to honor the 2011 champs:



As the gate agent told me when I was boarding the flight home (subtly dressed in a Xavi jersey and a game scarf; why didn’t I paint my face and have “Cant del Barca” playing on a loop from my phone?), “football won.” This was a needed tonic for a game struggling through the obvious corruption of its global governing body. It was also important for a team that had disgraced itself to a degree with the play-acting in the first half of the first leg against Real. I’ll defend the histrionics to a degree as a rational response to a noxious strategy employed by the worst person in the world, but in the end, when your players repeatedly go to ground holding their faces after not being touched in that area, then something’s amiss. This game had none of that. Not much fouling, no surrounding the ref, no play-acting, no diving, no playing for penalties, and no surrounding the ref. Hell, Busquets only went down twice. If I were trying to get a friend on the fence into footie, I would not have shown him or her the matches against Real (although the fourth match [not coincidentally the one without Jose] was a pretty good one), but the Champions League Final would be a persuasive advertisement.

I Can Almost Taste the Bile: Five Thoughts on Barca-Shakhtar

1. I was very excited to see Shakhtar after they finished tops in their group ahead of some side from North London and then destroyed Roma in the Round of 16.  Oddly enough, Shakhtar didn’t disappoint, despite the 5-1 score line.  The Ukrainians created a good number of chances and if Luiz Adriano would have converted one or two them, then we would have had a game.  (Come to think of it, it’s a little odd to call Shakhtar “the Ukrainians” when their front four are all Brazilians.  If Franklin Foer takes another run at arguing that soccer is a metaphor for globalization, then he might consider writing about the front line of Adriano, Jadson, Willian, and Douglas Costa plying their trades at the Donbas Arena.)  Anyway, credit to Mircea Lucescu for playing his game at the Nou Camp.  His team deserved better than the final score.

2. After a while, Barca games start to run together in my head.  They all seem to follow the same script.  Opponent starts strong and has the better of the opening exchanges.  (Despite Barca jumping on top early, Shakhtar created the majority of the chances.)  Then, Barca’s midfield grabs the game by the scruff of the neck for the remainder of the first half.  Either Iniesta or Xavi sets up a goal by swinging a pass from the left to Dani Alves busting in from the right wing.  (This is a major difference between the Guardiola teams and the Rijkaard teams.  It used to be that massed defenses would work because Barca was a narrow team.  Now, with Alves bombing up on the right side, the massed defense in the center no longer works.  After Messi and Xavi, Dani Alves is the irreplaceable player on the team.  And if only he didn’t…)  Either Busquets or Dani Alves will embellish a challenge from an opponent.  Messi will do something wacky to set up a teammate.  David Villa will look a little out of sorts, but he runs hard and passes well, so Barca fans accept him in a way that we wouldn’t for Ibra.  Barca put the game to bed in the second half and bring on some combination of Bojan, the alternate left back, and Afellay.  The only difference is that Barca win their home games comfortably and struggles on the road.

3. I had a little chuckle when the play-by-play guy opined that Iniesta made a mistake by getting a yellow card by standing too close to a free kick.  I’m pretty sure that he meant to get the yellow so he would be suspended for the second leg (Barca were up 3-0 at that stage) and wouldn’t not face the prospect of a suspension for the semifinal against Real.  Speaking of which…

4. Despite the Manita, the fact that Barca haven’t conceded a goal to Real in over 300 minutes, Ronaldo’s dry spell against the Blaugrana, and the fact that La Liga has been put to bed, I’m worried about playing Real in the Champions League.  The experience of Mourinho coaxing his Inter team into an epic performance after Barca had handled the Nerazzuri comfortably in the group stages has stuck with me.  At some point, Real have to break through and they’ll have four bites at the apple.  Barca’s defense is just creaky enough that I could see Jose figuring out the right way to exploit it.  Also, I have fairly vivid memories of Real handling Barca easily in the 2002 Champions League semis.  I just have to channel Rick Pitino: Zizou ain’t walking through that door, Macca ain’t walking through that door, Hierro ain’t walking through that door…

5. Graham Hunter wrote a great piece this week on the underrated Victor Valdes after Valdes played a terrific game to earn a clean sheet at Villarreal.  So what did Valdes do thank Hunter for the faith?  He left his near post unguarded and nearly gave up a goal from a tight angle.  Yes, the exact same way he let Arsenal back into the tie at the Emirates.  Once is unfortunate, twice is careless.  There are few sports topics about which I can comment with first-hand experience, but goalkeeping is one such topic.  Victor, bubeleh, stop leaving your near post.

Salt, Meet Wound

You're Just a Sweet Memory / And it Used to Mean so Much to me

I am a few years older than Brian Cook, so I remember the Fab Five very well.  I remember my first “holy shit!” moment for the Fabs: Webber’s 360 dunk in Columbus, a game in which Michigan played extremely well for a half and then got beaten up in the second stanza.  I went to the team’s first two NCAA Tournament games at the Omni against Temple and East Tennessee State.  (Ah, the good old days when Arizona blowing a first round game was a veritable rite of spring.  Mister Jennings had his way with them.)  The second round game was incidentally the first time that a rival fan told me to “Go Blow!”  So creative.  I remember the overtime of the regional final against Ohio State, which was Michigan’s best period of basketball between the 1989 run to the national title and the 1993 game against Kentucky.  I remember not noticing that the team had unveiled black socks for the opener their sophomore season against Rice at the Houston Summit, but instead being impressed by Juwan Howard’s passing from the high post.  I remember Alan Henderson blocking Webber’s potential game-winning shot in 1993 at Crisler in a game that effectively decided the Big Ten title and then remembering that play every time Henderson festered on the bench for the Hawks while Webber was putting up 24-12-7 games routinely for the Kings.  I remember Michigan almost blowing their sophomore season against UCLA in Tuscon before taking care of George Washington in the game in which the establishment finally turned on them.  (Wait, Jimmy King just dunked the ball and he’s in the face of an opponent?  The horror!) 

Finally, I remember the ‘93 Final Four very, very well.  I remember reading Curry Kirkpatrick’s story in USA Today on the way back from Spring Break, the story about how Michigan didn’t stand a chance against Kentucky.  I remember the Fabs playing their best game in college, showing once and for all that a team could win without relying on threes.  I remember Webber abusing Gimel Martinez after Jamal Mashburn fouled out of the game.  I remember the serious looks that the Fabs had for the final, the shooting performance from Donald Williams that won the Heels the game, the ridiculous performance that Webber put forward that was obscured after the timeout, and the ending.  I had received my rejection letters from Dartmouth and Princeton that day and had already made up my mind that Michigan was ahead of the University of Chicago in the pecking order, so when Webber screwed up and my brother taunted me, I threw a shoe (black, naturally) at him and proclaimed “I’ll see you in Charlotte next year!” before storming off to my room. 

There’s a point to the repetition of “I remember.”  The Fab Five are indelibly etched in my memory and, given the chatter about the 30 for 30 entry about the team, I’m not alone in this respect.  With college basketball teams trending towards the unmemorable as the cult of the coach has fully taken over, there aren’t teams that invade the public consciousness anymore and certainly not like this particular team did.  They had charisma, they fit together as a unit (a fact that the critics who dismissed them as playing streetball never quite grasped), and they inspired strong feelings on both sides of the love/hate divide.  Hell, Duke won the national title last year and I couldn’t even work myself up into a feeling of anger.  It was like the end of Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader becomes a sympathetic character.  When the villain is no longer vile, it’s time to end the series … or come up with an embarrassing prequel involving a platypus with a bad Jamaican accent.

In watching the documentary, I was struck by how much I was reminded of watching highlights of the Clockwork Orange Dutch sides of the 70s.  Think about the parallels.  The Fab Five and the Dutch both lost consecutive finals, but are remembered far more than the teams that vanquished them.  (That said, Jalen Rose was wrong about one thing: I can name the starting five for the Carolina team that vanquished them: Phelps, Williams, Reese, Lynch, Montross.  What’s my prize for wishing that they all die in a fiery blimp accident for all these years?  Also, there are at least two major parallels between ‘78 Argentina and ‘93 UNC: both teams wore light blue and were coached by liberals.  However, Cesar Luis Menotti is an avowed lover of playing attractive football, so he would have little time for the coach who almost ruined basketball with the Four Corners.  I digress.)  Both teams are noted for their style of play and cultural impact.  When I watch highlights of the two teams, I feel intensely bittersweet feelings: joy for my teams at their apex, pain for the ultimate failure to win the big one. 

Sports are full of teams that captured the imagination, but not silverware.  Soccer is especially replete with such examples because the difference between teams that play well and teams that play negatively can have such a big impact on the viewing experience.  Thus, there is a special place for ‘74 Holland, ‘54 Hungary, ‘82 Brazil, and ‘86 Denmark.  In college football, ‘83 Nebraska comes to mind because of Tom Osborne’s decision to go for two in the Orange Bowl.  In the NFL, the Bills teams of the 90s are a great example, although moreso in retrospect as the full extent of Buffalo’s sports trauma has played out.  The Fab Five are a little different in their own, larger-than-life way, but they are best remembered (there’s that word again) as one of the teams whose ultimate losses added to their fame rather than detracting from it.  

It’s All Bob Costas’s Fault

According to betting odds, we are headed for a Green Bay-Pittsburgh Super Bowl.  The NFL would have to be pleased by such a match-up, as it would pit two of the largest, most passionate fan bases in the league.  The optics of thousands of Cheeseheads and Terrible Towels descending on Dallas, filling local hotels and driving up the secondary market for tickets, would make for a great event.  Moreover, these two teams are consistent draws on television, so the NFL’s broadcast partners would be happy covering a Super Bowl with extra eyeballs. 

Now think about this: Pittsburgh and Green Bay are two of the smallest media markets in the NFL.  Pittsburgh is the 22nd largest MSA in the country, while Milwaukee is 39th.  It’s a testament to the NFL’s structure that two of its most popular teams come from smaller MSAs.  (One can make the same point regarding the Saints, who have been the “it” team over the past two years and hail from the 46th largest MSA.  The Saints’ crowing achievement was winning a Super Bowl over the team from the 34th largest MSA.)  This would never happen in baseball.

The immediate explanations for why teams from small markets are so successful are the salary cap and revenue sharing.  Teams from the larger markets cannot leverage their natural advantages into success on the field because: (1) they can’t spend much more on players than their smaller rivals can; and (2) they can’t sign lucrative local TV deals based on being in bigger MSAs, as the NFL has national, evenly distributed TV contracts.  Thus, when a team like the Jets makes it to the NFL’s final four, they are doing so on the basis of good player acquisitions and a smart head coach, as opposed to when one of the baseball teams from the nation’s largest MSA succeeds by virtue of the innovative “let’s identify the two best free agents and pay the most money for them.”

That said, there is another factor at play here that further distinguishes the NFL from MLB: the NFL does a much better job of mythologizing its past.  The Steelers were one of my first two rooting interests.  (In case you’re scoring at home, Virginia hoops with Ralph Sampson was the other.)  I became a Steelers fan at age five in 1980 because my Mom would take me to the Charlottesville public library and I would read about Super Bowls.  Because the Steelers had won twice as many Super Bowls as any other team at that time and they had cool helmets, a fan was born.  My rooting interest was cemented by watching NFL Films videos of the Super Bowls.  Super Bowl Sunday was nirvana for me because ESPN would run all of its half-hour Super Bowl programs in order, leaving me with the dilemma of when to watch and when to play outside.  (The good Super Bowls to skip: V, VIII, and XI.)  I suspect that I’m not especially unusual in this respect.  NFL Films does a terrific job of selling the story of past champions.  The Packers – the team that won the first two Super Bowls under Vince Lombardi – and the Steelers – the team that won four of six in the 70s – are the major beneficiaries of the gauzy treatment of the past.

Despite its reputation as a traditional, stuck-in-the-past sport, Major League Baseball doesn’t have any equivalent to NFL Films.  MLB doesn’t create fans of the Big Red Machine or the Earl Weaver Orioles with string music and John Facenda.  (If you want a modern example, compare the America’s Game series on NFL Network with the one-hour documentaries that MLB Network runs on specific baseball seasons.  The former are outstanding; the latter are forgettable.)  In the void left by MLB not producing features on its past that come close to the product of NFL Films, we end up with “blurry-eyed nostalgia about the Only Great Era In Baseball History, i.e. the time in which an especially narcissistic generation of New York writers were growing up.”  Take it away, Scott Lemieux:

But what really gives away the show, I think, is the complaint about too many teams. In large measure, this complaint is about New York sportswriters craving a return to to what Ken Burns called “the Capital of Baseball” era — the 2/3rds of the 50s in which baseball was completely dominated by New York teams and large parts of the nation were deprived of major league baseball. This New York domination was terrible for baseball, of course, creating stagnating or declining attendance during a boom economy, but this is something we’re never supposed to notice. And to draw a line under it, he devotes another long paragraph to the elevently-billionth assertion that the Brooklyn Dodgers mattered more than any team has ever mattered to anyone ever, although this has nothing to do with either Willie Mays or the book under review.

In the end, the NFL ends up as the most popular league in the country because of its ability to create Steelers fans in Charlottesville, Virginia, whereas MLB experiences declining popularity because all it can offer is fetishization of when New York City had three teams instead of two.  The NFL has a democratic structure in which teams from any market can win, whereas MLB has an oligarchy in which the only factor that prevents the rich teams from winning every year is the lottery nature of the playoffs.

A Few Follow-up Thoughts on the Falcons Post

• It's worth mentioning that a low variance offense can be very effective, even though it ends up with a lower yards per play number. Georgia Tech's 2009 ACC Championship team is a perfect example. Tech averaged 6.2 yards per play, which is good, but only ranked 17th in the country. According to Football Outsiders' FEI rankings, however, Tech had the best offense in the country. Why? Because FEI is drive-based and Tech's offense was excellent at scoring by consistently stringing together five-yard gains and by avoiding long yardage situations that kills drives. All things considered, you would rather have an offense that gains five yards on every play than one that gains seven yards per play on two 35-yard plays and eight plays stopped for no gain. The Falcons seem to follow that model. The Eagles are the polar opposite; they have an offense that generates a high yards per play number on the strength of a wealth of big plays, but they are also high variance, which is how they found themselves down 31-10 to the Giants with eight minutes to go on Sunday.

• A second benefit of a low variance offense that strings together consistent, medium-sized gains is that a team with that sort of offense will hold onto leads very well. Remember the stat during the Cowher years about how the Steelers almost never lost games in which they led in the fourth quarter? Mike Mularkey has brought that tendency to Atlanta. Here's your stat of the day: the Falcons have not lost a game in which they held a fourth quarter lead since the road game against the Saints in 2008. The Smith/Mularkey regime has only lost two times when the Falcons had a lead in the fourth quarter: the games against New Orleans and Denver in 2008. For Falcons fans like me whose formative memory is the home playoff loss to Dallas in 1980, this is a refreshing feeling. It's like rooting for a team with a great bullpen. If the Falcons have a lead heading into the fourth quarter, they're in great shape, even with a suspect pass defense.

• Watching Michigan on Saturdays and then the Falcons on Sundays has been an Elvis-like experience of taking uppers and downers. Even with an appalling defense, Michigan had a reasonably good yards per play margin this year because the offense averaged 6.9 yards per play, which was 7th nationally. However, Michigan's yardage advantages didn't translate onto the scoreboard because of what I described as the "dumb shit" factor: red zone turnovers, missed field goals, and terrible kickoff coverage and punt returns that gave opponents field position advantages. The Falcons are 180 degrees from that. The Falcons are outgained by a significant margin on a per-play basis, but they get the dumb shit. They don't turn the ball over, they make field goals, they don't commit penalties, and they are good on special teams. If "dumb shit" is a way to measure the effect of coaching, then Mike Smith should be coach of the year and Rich Rodriguez should be making way for Jim Harbaugh.

• When I did the chart of conference champions from the pas decade, 2008 stood out to me for a couple reasons. First, Arizona was better than their record. The '08 Cardinals were not strong in terms of points and Football Outsiders was very down on them, but their yardage margin was better than the margins of a number of Super Bowl champions (admittedly against a weak schedule). It shouldn't have been a massive surprise that they made the Super Bowl. The team they played in the Super Bowl had the best defense on a yards per play basis of any Super Bowl team in the decade. The '08 Steelers were three-tenths of a yard better than the '02 Bucs and four-tenths of a yard better than the team that struck me as having the best defense at least since the '85 Bears: the '00 Ravens. (The '85 Bears allowed 4.4 yards per play, which is surprisingly high, although that team did force a ridiculous 52 turnovers. The '76 Steelers - the Steel Curtain at its best - allowed 3.8 yards per play.) Given the quality of the teams in the game and the way that it played out, Super Bowl XLIII deserves consideration as one of the best Super Bowls of all time.

• One argument in favor of the way that championships are awarded in college football: the two best teams of the past decade in the NFL were the '01 Rams and the '07 Patriots and neither team won the Super Bowl. In both instances, those teams lost the Super Bowl to opponents with demonstrably inferior records whom the '01 Rams and '07 Pats had beaten on the road during the regular season. It strains the meaning of "champion" to assign that title to the '01 Patriots and '07 Giants. I remain in favor of a small college football playoff; four teams would be good, six teams would be very good, and eight teams would be OK. However, we shouldn't ignore the fact that the absence of the playoff reset button in college football is a good thing in a significant way.

This is a Great Sports Town, the Spencer Hall Edition

If I had a nickel for every debate I've gotten into with a Yankee about Atlanta's merits as a sports town, I'd be Midas. Inevitably, the debate progresses along the same lines: "you don't sell out your Braves playoff games." "Georgia football versus Boston College, what what?" "But, but, baseball!" I've made the same arguments over and over again, but I never quite phrased them this well:

Telling someone the exact charms of Atlanta is difficult, particularly if you're talking to a transplanted Northeasterner repeating what everyone outside of Atlanta says: "This is a terrible sports town." They would be right in a certain sense. If I went to New Orleans I could say "This is a terrible restaurant town," since all the typical easy signs of modern food civilization are gone from the landscape of the Quarter. There is no Applebee's sign, no easy Olive Garden beckoning the eater in, only a series of stand-alone cafes, diners, and restaurants where you will not eat quickly, and where you may be denied entry for not wearing the right thing.

This assumes correctly that the outsider has a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation, and bad taste. This is true, since sports fandom in Atlanta is almost wholly dependent on college football, the one thing suturing together the disparate group of people who come here for work, love, or because several months into a lengthy layover at Hartsfield, they decided to just stay and make the best of things ...
Go to Taco Mac in Decatur on a fall Saturday, and you will step into a football United Nations. There is a guy who brings his own Brutus Buckeye doll, plops it on the table, and then attempts to singlehandedly drain the place of its Bud Light. A contingent of Michigan fans usually occupies a table along the wall, including a doctor who treated me for a health scare a few years ago and, in the middle of an EKG, asked me about Michigan's prospects for the year with all seriousness. I have a running, years-long tauntfest going with a Florida State crew who sits by the streetside windows. On the whole, they've behaved a lot better than I have. Then again, my team's been doing all the winning, so it should be that way. Occasionally, on special nights, you will see actual Pac-10 fans there. They're real. I touched one just to see.

It's funny that Spencer mentioned the Taco Mac in Decatur, because I cite that same restaurant as an example of what's great about Atlanta as a sports town. (In fact, Mr. Hall, I think that the UN line is mine. This will represent the first and only time in which you will take one of my bon mots, as opposed to the reverse.) Watching a game there is a little like spending time on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: there is shouting coming from ten different directions and you always have to figure out which fan base is shouting to know what's going on. Someone has lost his fortune; someone else can retire.

The downside to watching games at the UN/NYSE is that the potential for humiliation is maximal. When a bunch of Bostonians get together in a bar to watch the Sox in October ("not anymore" says Dr. Lecter with a smile), they are all happy or sad together. Everyone is pulling in the same direction. When one goes to a bar in Atlanta to watch the ol' alma mater play, there is the potential to be miserable around others who do not share that misery. When one's alma mater comes into the season ranked #3 and loses at home to a I-AA team, there is the potential to be unexpectedly and completely miserable and humiliated while everyone else is joyous as a result of the event that just made one miserable. There's no shared misery or sympathy, only the rest of the crowd pointing and laughing like Nelson Muntz while one's cell phone is blowing up with texts from "friends." One might choose to respond by hurriedly putting all of the money in one's wallet on the table to cover the bill because one has to get out of there as fast as possible (leaving what must have been a 300% tip) and then walking two miles home, jersey in one hand (after all, one cannot be identified by cars passing by as that would only increase the humiliation) and cell phone in the other, shouting at one's college friends "Lloyd is a military history buff, he should know that the general resigns as a matter of principle after a defeat of this magnitude! Right now, he's not even McClellan; he's Gamelin!"

(Funny thing about that season: I started the season watching Michigan-Appalachian State with Spencer at Taco Mac, wondering why I ever became a sports fan. I ended it by getting misty-eyed as the Wolverines carried Lloyd off on their shoulders in Orlando and calling Mssr. Hall to say "you know, you were right about Wondy Pierre-Louis." That reversal of fortune is what keeps me warm when I think about Michigan being 3-13 over the past two years in the Big Ten and entering this season with a secondary that has Brian Cook asking "what's the point of anything?" and most Michigan fans hoping for seven wins.)

If you are a college football fan, this is the greatest place in the world. It refutes the notion that college football is a regional sport. Sure, it's fun to spend a fall in Tuscaloosa or Lincoln or Blacksburg to experience the euphoria of a season seized by the local team, but is that really so much better than a summer in New York City when the Yankees and Mets are good or a fall in Green Bay when the Packers are in contention? No, what makes this market unique and great is that it's a melting pot. Everyone is from somewhere else. The downside of that is that the Braves have empty seats in October. The upside is Taco Mac tomorrow at noon. It's just hard to see that upside when Shawn Crable blocks the outside rusher and lets the inside rusher go free.

One final anecdote that I couldn't work into this post, so I'll just stick it here as a useless appendix: the Platonic ideal for an Atlanta sports moment comes from when I was 12. My Dad took me to a Hawks game at the Omni. We sat about midway in the upper deck to see the Hawks play the Jazz. This was when the Hawks were the one good team in Atlanta, so the crowd was fairly lively. The Hawks overcame an outburst from Darrell Griffith (I still remember my Dad telling me after Griffith got blocked on a fast break "they never would have caught him when he was at Louisville"), got a dramatic three from John Battle in the left corner at the buzzer, and won in overtime. At one random point in the third quarter, a guy stood up about eight rows in front of us, apropos of absolutely nothing, and shouted in every direction at once "War Eagle, all you Georgia fans! War Eagle!" That's Atlanta, the place where no one cares about sports.

Turner Field is About to Burn

So after we all worried that the Braves were going to ride Troy Glaus to the bitter end, deliverance arrived today in the form of Derrek Lee.  Lee represents an immediate upgrade at first.  As long as the Braves’ doctors are right in concluding that Lee’s back issues don’t pose an issue for the remainder of the season, then we have a perfect fit: a National League first baseman who can hit for power and get on base.  Moreover, his contract is up at the end of the year, which is good in two respects.  First, Lee is going to be highly motivated because he is playing for money in the winter.  Second, he is not going to block Freddie Freeman.  Additionally, the Braves did not surrender any prospects of note, so this is not at all like some other first baseman the Braves acquired in a push for a pennant.  Cliff Corcoran of SI.com sums up the upside:

That the 34-year-old Lee is a far better hitter than his miserable first-half (.233/.329/.366) is what the Braves are hanging their hat on here, as Lee has struggled at Turner Field over his career (.237/.338/.388) and doesn't have any other favorable splits this season that would suggest his performance could be maximized through platooning or by escaping what is indeed the hitting-friendly Wrigley Field. If Lee can simply perform at a level equal to his career rates of .282/.367/.499, he'll be a huge upgrade for the Braves, equivalent to having the early-season version of Glaus back. In fact, with Infante effectively replacing the OBP-only version of Chipper Jones, Prado back in the lineup, and Lee and Alex Gonzalez representing upgrades on the aching Glaus and slumping Yunel Escobar, the Braves infield might actually be stronger now than it was with Jones in the lineup, both at the plate and in the field.

My trip to the Memory Motel turned out to be useful.  Just as Sid Bream’s look of dismay in 1993 presaged the Braves acquiring a left-handed first baseman, so did Troy Glaus’s look on Monday night.  This can only mean that the Braves are going to dominate for the rest of the regular season, a luxury box is going to catch fire tomorrow night, and the Braves’ season is going to end with a playoff loss to the Phillies. 

And speaking of departed Braves, Lee played a prominent role in Braves history as his home run off of John Rocker on June 21, 2001 marked the last appearance for Rocker as a Brave.  It was not a cheap home run.  I remember watching the game from section 409 and marveling at the charge that Lee put into his game-winning homer.  Lee and Rocker had mildly divergent fortunes thereafter.

Here I am, your Drama Queen

Thoughts on another comeback win:

1. The first Braves game I attended this year was the seven-run comeback against the Reds. I left at the start of the ninth inning. So last night (the third Braves game I've attended this year), when the Braves went into the ninth down 3-1 against Hong-Chih Kuo and his 0.88 ERA, I resisted the urge to get home. That was a good decision. The Braves scored three in the ninth without hitting a ball hard. Alex Gonzalez hit a duck snort to left. Brian McCann grounded into the hole between first and second. Troy Glaus popped out. Brooks Conrad walked. David Ross walked. Melky Cabrera grounded one into the hole between short and third (a ball that would have been fielded if the shortstop wouldn't have been at double-play depth). Three runs on three hits without hard contact. It was a fitting reward after the Braves had tagged some balls right at outfielders in the earlier innings. It was also a fitting reward for a team that has been patient at the plate all year. The bridge for the inning were the two walks.

2. I know that he had a homer and four RBI on Sunday, but Troy Glaus still looks lost. He had his big day against Vicente Padilla, who can barely crack 85 with his fastball. Glaus was overmatched yesterday against Billingsley and Kuo. You know that things are bad when you are hoping that your cleanup hitter strikes out with they tying runs on base in the ninth so as to avoid an inning-killing double play. When Glaus came up with runners on first and second against Kuo, I looked at my two friends and asked "if I offered you a strikeout right now, would you take it?" Both said yes.

I feel bad for Glaus. He might be coming to the end of his career and that cannot be an easy thing for an athlete to handle. With the way he was playing in May and June, I'm sure he could see a good contract waiting for him in the offseason. Now, he's looking at a paycut on an already-small salary (relatively speaking, of course). When I look at Glaus's facial expressions, I keep thinking of Sid Bream in 1993. There is one particular game that stands out in my memory. The Braves lost a Saturday night game in July to the denuded Pirates 4-3. The team was nine games back at the time and struggling to score runs. Bream had gone 0-4 to drop his average to .239 and he grounded into a double play in the sixth with the Braves trailing by a run. After the game, he was sitting alone in the dugout, looking forlorn. Skip Caray intoned "don't think for a minute that these guys don't care." Three days later, the Braves traded for Fred McGriff, rallied from 5-0 to beat the Cardinals, and then went on an epic 51-17 run to win the West in the last great pennant race. (How great would the duel between the Yankees and Rays be if only one of the two best teams in baseball could make the playoffs?) Bream barely played for the rest of 1993, then finished his career the following year by getting 70 plate appearances for the Astros. The moral of the story: it's hard for a baseball player to confront the end of his career and it's doubly hard when his declining performance comes in the context of a hot pennant race.

3. Last night's game illustrated that the Braves need Martin Prado back in the worst way. Brooks Conrad is a nice utility piece, but he's not a third baseman. When Prado returns, the Braves can shift Omar Infante to third base and they'll shore up the defense while improving the offense. Getting Prado back isn't quite like the Phillies getting Utley and Howard back, but it is important.

4. Don't look now, but Melky is hitting. His OPSs by month:

April - .508
May - .739
June - .710
July - .814
August - .833

After the Braves' annual struggles in getting production from the corner outfield spots, I'll take that. Additionally, Melky made a great throw to cut a runner down at the plate at the end of the top of the eighth. Without that throw, his single in the ninth would have tied the game instead of winning it.

5. If Bobby had a sense of humor, he would have brought Kyle Farnsworth in to face Brad Ausmus in the seventh.

6. Am I the only one who hears Octavio Dotel's name and immediately thinks of Octavio, the dancing mime who follows Richard Belzer at Club Babylon in Scarface? Yes? Never mind.

Thoughts on the Champions League Final

I guess you could say that I'm not over Barca losing to Inter.


When I put this jersey on, I was reminded that UEFA gives special patches to clubs that win the Champions League/European Cup four times. If not for Yaya Toure's "handball," the Blaugrana would be going for number four this afternoon. As is, I'm already thinking about how their short passing game will play on the dreadful Wembley pitch at this time next year.


This is my first Champions League Final with English announcers. I love Martin Tyler, but part of me misses Derek Rae, who did an outstanding job. Andy Gray over Tommy Smyth? Not a contest. Gray's voice reminds me of afternoons playing FIFA '97 with my friend JT in law school. We never stopped being amused by Gray saying "that was a great save for so many reasons."


30 minutes in and these two teams are cancelling one another out. With two superb tactical managers who have had weeks to prepare, I shouldn't be shocked. Inter are forcing Robben wide as opposed to cutting in onto his left foot and he hasn't put in a really good cross yet. He has been Bayern's sole source of offense.


And there's the opener for Inter, exposing Bayern's suspect centerbacks. You don't win your first two knock-out ties 4-4 with good centerbacks. Milito won a long ball from the back to Sneijder with Demichelis on his back, then broke for goal, leaving the Argentine in his dust. Sneijder then had a simple pass back to Milito. Basic route one. Drogba and Lampard pulled the same goal off dozens of times for Mourinho (or so it seemed). If Demichelis is starting for Argentina this summer, then the Albiceleste are doomed.


Milito then set up Sneijder for a great chance that he shot at the Butt. Inter are ripping Bayern in the middle. Van Buyten and Demichelis are no match for Sneijder and Milito. Mourinho has figured out how to isolate his best players on Bayern's worst. My Teutonophile friend Victor insists that Bayern was better when Demichelis was hurt, Badstuber was at centerback, and Contento was at leftback. [Update: I subsequently listened to the World Football Daily interview with Kris Voakes and he made the same point, so the Italians had apparently also figured out Bayern's best back four. Too bad Van Gaal couldn't do the same.]

I don't know how I feel about a threesome of Curt Menefee, Bruce Arena, and Eric Wynalda as the studio team. On the one hand, they don't know much about these teams or players, with the exception of Wynalda. On the other hand, maybe Fox is trying to sell this game to a broad audience? That can't be bad, right? Aw, who am I kidding? If ESPN figured out that European footie needs to be covered with an English accent, then Fox should learn the same. I'll be very interested to know what rating this game gets.

Bayern had their best chance right off the kick-off for the second half, but Muller shot the ball at Julio Cesar's legs. I like the youngster, but he seems a little Dirk Kujt-ish to me. Or maybe Eidur Gudjohnsen?

And that's that. Having already embarrassed Demichelis, Milito turns his attention to Van Buyten, absolutely skinning the Belgian on the world's biggest stage. Barca scored their killer goal to go up 2-0 in minute 70 last year; now, Inter has done the same. Trebles all around! And speaking of trebles, this is the second straight for Samuel Eto'o. That said, Eto'o has been rather peripheral for Inter in the second half of the season, giving way to Milito as the goal scorer. On the one hand, this shows that Guardiola and Beguiristain were correct in viewing Eto'o as less that a great finisher. On the other hand, Eto'o willingness to sublimate himself to the team's needs by doing the donkey work on the right side shows that his attitude is better than Barca thought.

Man, Mourinho's teams know how to kill a game off. Bayern looks like they are totally beaten.