Tag: soccer (page 1 of 2)

Barney Ronay:

Even England, this England’s version of hole-in-the-head football will give you dramatic interventions, trapped energy, last-minute overhead kicks. Somehow France entered this game as the only team at the Euros not to have registered an assist. Before this semi-final they played five games during which nobody on either team had scored from open play.

This isn’t “anti-football”. It’s un-football, non-football. It’s time being killed, athletically, talent reduced to furniture. Watching France is like watching someone do accounts, brilliantly, like watching a team of your favourite elite entertainers very diligently assembling a shed, and then realising towards the end that actually, they really are just assembling a shed. 

Watching France and England in this tournament first bored me, then frustrated me, then made me actually angry. Both sides played the whole tournament as though they had been told that excessive movement would deplete their oxygen supplies and cause them to faint. They just stood and passed the ball around until someone on the other side took the ball away from them, at which point they reluctantly trotted back to defend. 

Bukayo Saka has been almost the only English player to get exercise, and exercise produced a goal. For France, Mbappe occasionally tried, but when he did he got closed down by three or four defenders because they weren’t worried about what anyone else in the France jersey would do. It was dire.

The most frustrating thing is: There’s nothing that can be done when teams choose to play this way. It’s not against the rules, and you can’t change the rules in any way that would fix the problem, unless it’s possible to give players electrical shocks when they stand in one place for too long. 

But you have to ask yourself: Why do they choose to play this way? I think pressure is a relatively small part of it. The real issue is that these players play far too many games. If you want to have good Euros and World Cups, then you have to eliminate some of the competitions, both domestic and trans-domestic. 

Spain has been very good and sometimes fun in this tournament; the Dutch have had their moments; Switzerland, Austria, and Georgia were all great. So it’s not all bad news. But far too much of Euro 2024 has indeed been bad news, because it’s been played largely by exhausted players. 

UPDATE 2024-07-10: Today against the Netherlands England played much more positively for a half, after which they looked worn-out. It took Southgate a loooong time to make the necessary substitutions, but when he did — wow: two subs, Palmer and Watkins, combining for the winning goal. 

So: the Three Lions in the final! I am excited! Do I repent of my criticisms of Southgate? I do not. I have said all along that he (a) sets up his defense excellently, (b) allows or encourages too much caution in attack, and (c) is too slow to make changes. I still think all that. Because England defend so well, they are always in a position in which one goal can make the difference for them. But crossing your fingers and hoping for a late moment of brilliance isn’t a good strategy, even if you happen to get that moment of brilliance three matches in a row: Bellingham, 95th minute; Saka, 80th minute; Watkins, 90th minute. You’re trusting your luck too much, and even when luck shows up, there are better ways to play the game. 

But I will say this: the first half today, in which England were so much more dynamic and endeavoring and footbally than they have been all tournament, suggests that Southgate knows that he’s been too cautious. The problem is that the players simply couldn’t sustain that level of energy. So here’s my prediction for the final: If Southgate makes two or more subs before the hour mark, England will win … or at least take it to penalties. (Kinds hedging my bets there.) 

Above you see what I believe was the key moment in today’s match between Portugal and Slovenia. After having a penalty saved, astonishingly, by Jan Oblak, Cristiano Ronaldo collapsed in tears, and I mean collapsed: during the break between the two halves of extra time, his shoulders were shaking, he was inconsolable. Several teammates came up to hug him and pat him on the back, but only Palhinha gave him what he needed, which was a stern pull-up-your-socks talking-to.

Given the excessive deference Portuguese football exhibits towards Ronaldo — manifested today by allowing him to take several terrible free kicks which should have been taken by Bruno Fernandes, with Ronaldo in the box trying to get his head on the ball — Palhinha’s initiative was brave, and it may have saved the match. Without his intervention, would Ronaldo have been able to get himself together for the penalty shootout? Maybe. But I’m not sure. 

Surely Ronaldo is the most unlikeable of the truly great footballers. He has always been petulant, whiny, preening, and selfish, and has often been on the edge of losing self-control altogether. As a starlet at Manchester United, he took more dives than Greg Louganis … but eventually he realized that his behavior was counterproductive — he was not getting calls that he deserved because the refs assumed that he was diving once again — and he stopped. Just stopped. 

Ronaldo strikes me as a narcissistic asshole who wants so desperately to be great at football that he manages — with enormous difficulty — to control his bad disposition sufficiently that it doesn’t prevent greatness. His devotion to preparation is, I think, unparalleled. Consider for instance how good he is with his “off” leg — he’s scored around 175 left-footed goals in his career — and think about how many thousands of hours of practice enabled that success. His conditioning is likewise superlative: he’s 39 years old and just played 120 minutes, but of all the Portugal players he’s the one I’m least worried about being tired for the Friday match with France. 

It would have been so easy for his own temperament to destroy his career, but it didn’t. I don’t like him, I don’t like him one bit, but I have to admire him for that. I’m talking here only about his play, not about the rest of his life, but: Whether his demons are inbuilt or whether he has indulged them, they’ve been afflicting him his entire career, and yet in every essential way he has throttled them. That’s remarkable. 

All that said, I wish he’d have missed that second penalty as well, and that Slovenia had sent him home. 

P.S. Palhinha’s full name is João Maria Lobo Alves Palhares Costa Palhinha Gonçalves. 

UPDATE after the Portugal loss to France, from Jonathan Liew: 

In a way, it’s hard not to feel resentful of him: resentful of the way this grand, galaxy-sized occasion is ultimately reduced to a function of one man’s ego. This could have been an all-time great quarter-final, and instead a part of it was stolen: stolen ball possession, stolen attention, stolen minutes from better players who actually deserve to be there, rather than a pure anachronism trotting out simply because no one has the clout to tell him not to.

Liew points out that Ronaldo was the only Portugal player on the pitch not to console Joao Felix after the kid missed his penalty. He just turned and walked away, even though he had received consolations in the previous match. 

The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees: An excellent in-depth study. None of the problems identified here are easily addressed, but I think the first steps should be: 

First: retrospective punishment for players who (a) surround the ref to intimidate him and (b) simulate being fouled. And not fines — the players are too rich to care about fines. I think the best option would be for players found guilty in these matters to begin their next match with a yellow card. That may seem strong, but there is a deeply-ingrained culture of bullying and deceiving that needs to be addressed. 

Second: eliminate VAR. Just get rid of it. Many years ago my persistent back pain led me to consult a surgeon, who told me that one-third of the people who had the operation I needed got relief from their pain, one-third were left unchanged, and one-third experienced increased pain. VAR is like that; and even when its decisions are correct it makes every single match in which it’s used worse, because fans don’t have any idea whether to celebrate a goal or not — it might be overturned. Almost any idea — including adding a second referee — would be preferable to VAR. 

One more thing about VAR: it’s even less reliable than people think, because one of its weaknesses is almost never noted. When VAR is looking at a potential offside, we’re always shown the players at the offside point and the line that indicates whether the attacking player is ahead of the defender or even with him. What no one looks at is the ball: Has VAR captured the precise moment at which the ball is struck? Typically you can’t tell, because the ball itself obscures the player’s foot. (Here’s an example, from the Premier League website.) VAR might have frozen the video at the precise instant that the player’s foot strikes the ball, but that’s highly unlikely. It’s much more likely that the video is stopped a fraction of a second early or a fraction of a second late; and that might make the difference between whether a player is offside or not. VAR is thus tasked with making decisions that it simply cannot make. Be done with it, I say! 

Brian Phillips’s new podcast episode on Pelé reminds me that, back in the day, when I was contributing to his site The Run of Play, we had a kind of sideways dialogue about that genius. Here’s my post, and here’s Brian’s. 

Recently I was watching an MLS match and a familiar scene played out before me:

A player comes flying down the left wing with the ball at his feet, and a defender charges out to confront him. The attacker slows for a moment, which of course slows the defender, and then suddenly puts on a tremendous burst of speed that leaves the defender far behind. Now he’s all by himself out there near the touchline, with his teammates gathering in the box. He puts in a cross … and it sails far over everyone’s head and goes out for a throw-in — on one bounce. He overhits the cross by a good thirty yards. 

As I say, a pretty (sadly) typical scene for the viewer of what my son calls My Little Soccer: absolutely elite athleticism combined with shockingly poor technique. This is also what makes it so difficult to compare MLS sides to the rest of the world. The FiveThirtyEight club ranking currently gives the Philadelphia Union the highest ranking among MLS teams, at 95th in the world — but that seems way too high to me: I just can’t see them beating any of the next 25 or so clubs on the list. Though every MLS team has some skilled players, the Union don’t have enough players with the requisite level of skill. But the strength and speed and stamina of the players are tremendously impressive. 

Basically, when I watch MLS I feel that I’m watching world-class athletes from some other sport who just started playing soccer a year or so ago. I know that that’s not true, of course; I know that these guys have been playing soccer their whole lives. But it’s so rare — in comparison not just to the level of the European top five leagues, but to Championship and Bundesliga 2 sides — to see a delicate first touch, or an accurate cross, or close control of the ball in traffic, or several passes strung together, that that’s what it looks like. To me anyway. 

I’d really like to enjoy MLS more, because, as I have noted, VAR in the Premier League is so utterly broken that I’m taking a break from watching that league. VAR can be shambolic elsewhere too, and in my view should be completely abandoned everywhere in the world — but the Premier League’s implementation of review is consistently appalling. If I’m going to regularly watch another league, though, it’s probably not going to be MLS. 

I’m going to be taking a little time away from watching the Premier League, because VAR is simply ruining the experience for me. Even if it were well-implemented, VAR would be a mistake because it interferes so badly with the flow of the game and the game’s emotions — no one can celebrate anything any more without waiting to see if VAR flips the script. But it is not well-implemented. Especially in the Premier League it is more likely to result in a wrong decision than a correct one. 

Of course, this is simply one element of the shockingly low level of officiating quality in the Premier League, but it greatly magnifies incompetence. I would rather live with ordinary human error than have to deal with technologically-enhanced human error. When people are already bad at their job, it’s unwise to give them even more opportunities to be bad. 

I only watch footy because it’s fun, and VAR — plus other elements in the catastrophic mismanagement of English football in general and the Premier League in particular — takes away a lot of that fun. So why should I keep watching? 

It’s been said many times by many people, but the state of officiating in the Premier League is disgraceful — and does not appear to be improving. In today’s match between Brighton and Manchester United, there were several major errors, every one of which went in favor of the bigger club — which is par for the course in the PL, I’m afraid. Lisandro Martinez shoved Danny Welbeck right in the back in the box; no penalty, and VAR contrived not to see anything. Harry Maguire, already on a yellow, grabbed Leandro Trossard by the neck and threw him to the ground; ref didn’t see it, VAR didn’t look. Other calls were possibly defensible — an early offside call against Welbeck, a booking for Scott McTominay that probably should have been a red — but oddly enough, they went Man Utd.’s way also … and they still lost, which tells you what a shambles that side is right now. 

As I’ve said many times, the ref in a modern top-level football match has an impossible job: the game is too fast and there are too many players. That’s why VAR exists — but in my experience, VAR gets calls wrong about as often as it gets them right. The Premier League makes so much money that it doesn’t care about any of this, but it ought to care. 

Oh, one more thing: there’s talk that the VAR program will be turned over to the recently retired Mike Dean. Well, that would fix it! [cue maniacal laughter] 

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship, AKA the women’s Euros, and it’s been enjoyable throughout. And as much as the generally high quality of play — most notably from Arsenal legend Beth Mead — I have enjoyed the complete absence of drama-queen nonsense. I’ve been watching women’s footy for a long time, but not so much in so brief a period, and I think perhaps it’s the condensed timeline that has made me so aware of what’s missing: the flinging yourself to the turf, the rolling around in mock agony, the clutching of your face when an elbow grazes your bicep — the constant bullshit that really, seriously defaces the men’s game. 

By contrast, these Euros have been all Chumbawamba: they get knocked down, they get back up again. They don’t get a call they want, they go on with the game. Sure, they let the ref know when they think a call has been missed, but essentially they just play footy. It’s been great. 

Anyway, don’t you realize that yesterday was a fantastic result for the USMNT? I read our coach’s comments. He said we were “dominant.” He said that the Canadians “couldn’t handle our physicality.” Frankly, I don’t see how things could possibly have gone better. 

(To me, in all seriousness, these sound like the comments of a man whose job is hanging by a thread and in my judgment ought to be hanging by a thread — at best. In fact, that press conference alone is a justification for sacking.)  

In footy (aka soccer) it is possible for players to make the following kinds of run: 

• Mazy 
• Marauding 
• Lung-bursting 
• Darting 
• Slaloming 

The Laws of the Game permit these runs and no others. 

• Southgate set up to play for penalties, and he just might get his wish. 
• Chiellini spent the entire second half playing way up the pitch, like a left wingback, because he knew England wouldn’t try to attack. (Saka finally had a chance to run at him and old Giorgio dragged him to the ground. Maybe he’ll drop a little deeper in extra time.) 
• Losing Chiesa is huge for Italy — he was their biggest threat by far, and it’s hard to see where their attacks will come from now. Which, again, means that Southgate will likely get his heart’s desire: pens. 
• I’ll venture this: If Grealish comes on in the first half of extra time, England will win; if not, they’ll lose on penalties. 

(Possible updates coming when it’s over.) 

UPDATE: Saka is incredibly mature for his age, but I just don’t understand why Southgate put him in that situation. Southgate did a great job bringing this team together and keeping them together, but he got almost everything wrong tonight. Alas. 

The better team won. And remember: Mancini took over a team that didn’t even qualify for the last World Cup. 

Thomas Tuchel is known as a skilled practitioner of modern atacking football, but when he got to Chelsea in the middle of last season the first thing he attended to was his team’s defending. Under Frank Lampard the side had been leaking goals at an alarming rate, and Tuchel was content to set aside his tactical preferences for a while in order to plug the leakage. Chelsea’s first few games under Tuchel weren’t exciting, but they almost completely shut down opposing attacks, and then, with that foundation in place, Tuchel turned to the task of expanding his side’s offensive repertoire.

In these Euros, Gareth Southgate has done much the same for England. I complained in the group phase about his conservatism, but after today’s thrashing of Ukraine, it’s easy for me (and everybody else!) to see the wisdom of his approach. In the group stage they scored one, zero, and one; then against Germany they scored two; and now against Ukraine four. But they have yet to give up a single goal. It seems that this England squad, like Tuchel’s Chelsea, has learned that when you have well-earned confidence in your defending, then you can grow ever more ambitious and creative in attack.

So: a big thumbs-up to Gareth Southgate. 

Looking ahead: On current form an England-Italy final is obviously the more likely, but all four sides are playing well and, even more important, are very well-balanced, with few evident weaknesses. I expect Italy to exploit Spain’s defensive limitations, and England to wear down Denmark; but no result would surprise me, and these are four very likable sides to boot. I will of course be cheering for England all the way, but I would be happy to see any of these four teams lift the trophy at tournament’s end.

People get paid to do minute-by-minute reports on matches, but they’re never as good as the ones my son and I do. The “Yorkshire Pirlo” is Kalvin Phillips, who has been the man of this match (England-Croatia), so far anyway.

A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League.

First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the entire enterprise was. The twelve clubs who signed up to create the Super League did nothing to get any of their constituencies on board. They didn’t even inform their managers and players. The one refrain from the managers interviewed about this – the managers who had to go out and face the press and public while the people who made the decisions were hiding in their penthouse apartments – was that they didn’t know anything more than the journalists: They found out at the same time the journalists found out. Moreover, the massive loan these executives had secured from J.P. Morgan was essentially an advance on television revenues, and they hadn’t made or even attempted to make a TV deal. If no TV deal had been forthcoming, or an unexpectedly poor one, then all of those clubs would have been on the hook for paying back a loan that at least some of them simply do not have the resources to pay back. It was a pyramid scheme, and a badly designed one at that. 

The second point is this: The chief makers of this fiasco are extremely unlikely to resign or be fired. (Ed Woodward is out, but he was on his way out anyway — I don’t think he would’ve been fired over just this, because Manchester United has been the least apologetic of any of the English clubs — and only Arsenal issued a straightforward apology that acknowledged the damage done.) There’s no way Florentino Pérez should still have a job, but I cannot imagine any circumstances in which he will get what he deserves; nor, obviously, can he. Andrea Agnelli remains confident in his excellent judgment and enjoys mocking his critics, despite being an absolute clown. And they can be so serene because they quite obviously do not give a rat’s ass about the clubs they work for or the game their teams play. They don’t care! It doesn’t matter to them! If, as a result of the stupidities of Agnelli and Pérez, those two great old clubs Juventus and Real Madrid had to close up shop, shut down altogether, do you think either Agnelli or Pérez would acknowledge any responsibility — or even lose five minutes’ sleep over the catastrophe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Somehow or another they would get a golden parachute and that would be just fine with them. Whatever wrath was directed their way by the press would mean absolutely nothing to them. This is what we mean by the word “shameless”: people cannot be shamed when they’re permanently content with their own behavior and care not a whit about the views of their fellow human beings.

It’s the fans who care, the fans who love the game and love their clubs, and they are the ones who are hurt by all this — and by the manifold corruptions that led up to it and that remain in place. And, as the Agnellis and Pérezes of the world know, this means that the fans will come back. The fans actually have the power to force change: if they were to stop attending the games — once attendance becomes possible again — if they were to boycott the clubs’ merchandise, if they were to boycott the television sponsors, they could make something happen. But we all know it won’t play out that way. People don’t just love their teams; in a cruelly mechanical surveillance-capitalism world they need the emotional hit that comes from investment in the successes or failures of their club. It’s surely asking too much of them to demand that they take meaningful collective action. And that’s why at the end of all this Agnelli and Pérez, or in any case people very much like them, will still be running the big clubs. They have the freedom that comes from not caring about anything but their own bank accounts.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the offside rule is. Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the handball rule is. What’s called offside in one match will be called onside in another; handball calls are if anything even more arbitrary. And VAR seems to have increased rather than decreased the inconsistency of rulings.

Consequently, the players cannot adjust either their expectations or their performance to meet the ever-changing rules, because changes in the rules don’t affect how calls are actually made, by officials or by VAR.

The only logical response to this ongoing farce is to eliminate VAR. However, FIFA is obviously absolutely committed to VAR, and I cannot see any circumstances in which they would abandon it, despite the almost unanimous hatred of it by players, coaches, journalists, and fans. (The complete insulation of FIFA from the game it is meant to serve is perhaps a topic for another post.)

Therefore, given the inevitable absence of logic, I make the following recommendation: Let VAR go on as it has been going in all other cases, but whenever there is a sniff of a question about handball or offside, VAR will take the form of a coin flip: Heads is offside/handball, tails is onside/no-handball. I think it will be easier for everyone concerned if the pretense of standards is abandoned, and the arbitrariness that actually governs calls is embraced.

I’m going to say something I never ever believed that I would say in earnest: I think Arsenal should sack Emery and replace him with Mourinho. It would be only a transitional move, because Mou never lasts more than three years without disaster, but if there is one thing he can do it’s organize a defense. Emery patently cannot do that. At all. And if Arsenal are going to make a change they need to do it soon, before the season slips away. Or slips away any further than it already has.

P.S. This assumes that Mourinho would take the job. I think he would, if only because the club is in London.

P.P.S. And no, the result against Villa doesn’t change my mind. The lads fought back bravely, but they were digging themselves out of a hole their manager’s tactical ineptitude and inexplicable personnel decisions put them in.

There were so many bad calls in the Arsenal-Burnley match I just sweated through that I can’t figure out whether Burnley got hosed. Certainly Arsenal’s late penalty shouldn’t have been granted — Koscielny was clearly offside — but the Xhaka red card was debatable (though I think justified), and earlier in the match Jon Moss clearly missed Mustafi being fouled in the box.

Meanwhile, the outcome of yesterday’s Spurs-Man City clash would surely have been different if Kyle Walker had been appropriately punished for shoving Raheem Sterling in the back as the small man was racing all alone towards goal (that should have been a penalty and a red card). And Mike Dean, recently demoted to the Championship for ineptitude, seems to be continuing his inimitable stylings in his new setting.

All that said, Mark Clattenburg is clearly right when he says that the refs get the overwhelming majority of calls right and that disproportionate attention is given to the ones they get wrong — though he might have noted that some decisions have disproportionate effects: Jon Moss’s decisions today could possibly affect Arsenal’s hopes to stay in the Champions’ League (and maybe even Burnley’s ability to stay up, though I expect that they’re quite safe).

In any event, I think the most important point to note about this ongoing brouhaha is this: The refs are as good as they’re going to get. A great many people want to referee football at the highest level, and they go through considerable training and intense competition to get there. It is highly unlikely that there’s a substantial group of people out there who could do the job better than Clattenburg and Moss and Andre Marriner et al; or that the current crop of refs could be trained in new ways that would significantly improve their performance.

No: the athletes are better-conditioned and faster than they have ever been, there are 22 of them on the pitch, and the pitch is vary large. Calls will be missed, and the percentage of calls missed is highly unlikely to decline. So the moguls of international soccer effectively have three choices: they can shrug and tell us all to deal with an imperfect world, they can add one or more officials, or they can look for technological means to implement in-match corrections of errors.

But there’s really no point in complaining about the refs. They’re not just doing the best they can, they’re probably doing the best anyone can.

I’m looking forward to the Gunners’ inevitable draw with Swansea this morning (presumably with a Giroud equalizer in extra time). I don’t know how I became an Arsenal supporter, which may help explain why I don’t know how to stop, but I often wish I could stop, given the peculiar frustrations of Arsenal fandom: no club raises hopes in order to dash them with quite the style that Arsenal manages every. single. season.

When I first started following the Premier League I decided that, since I am from Birmingham, Alabama, I should support Birmingham, England’s Aston Villa. Somehow that just didn’t stick. And looking at how things have turned out for Villa fans in the past few years, maybe being an Arsenal supporter isn’t the worst thing.

• Goalkeeper: David de Gea 
• Central defender: David Luiz (can’t believe I’m saying this) 
• Fullback/wingback: James Milner  
• Defensive midfielder: N’Golo Kanté  
• Attacking midfielder: Kevin de Bruyne  
• Forward: Alexis Sanchez 
• Striker: Diego Costa 
• Manager: Antonio Conte 

I’ve read a number of stories this morning about last night’s MLS Cup final between Seattle and Toronto, but none of them have said the the most obvious thing, which is that it was an appallingly bad game of soccer, “won” by a team that did not manage a single shot on goal in one hundred and twenty minutes of play. The nearly complete absence of technique, creativity, and imagination on both sides was something soporific to behold. (The only player who manifested any of those virtues, Giovinco, was of course withdrawn by his manager in extra time.) It’s hard to imagine a worse advertisement for MLS than that match.