|
|
No!
No, no, no!
Not you, too, Brazil.
Over the next four years, everybody is going to adopt a 4-2-3-1, according to new Brazil coach Mano Menezes. All the cool kids are doing it.
The formation’s the it thing, coaches are going to be hired based on their knowledge of it, but the ones that are really going to make waves three, four years from now are the ones who will have a sure-fire way to break this year’s fad formation. Those coaches may not roll-out their solution until Brazil, but somebody – more likely, multiple somebodies – will find a solution.
If you buy that (and based on history, it’s a good bet that the 4-2-3-1 will be unlocked by 2014), why would you hire a 4-2-3-1 advocate?
I’ll tell you why: You would hire a 4-2-3-1 disciple if you’re only concerned with catching-up to the world, but when you define what the world’s supposed to catch-up to, you should only worry about what’s the next step in the game’s evolution. Brazil is supposed to be one of the nations defining that revolution.
Or rather, Brazil was supposed to be one of the nations. I don’t usually associate Brazil with biting.
Completely indefensible gut-reaction that I’ll regret tomorrow: Mano Menezes is going to ruin Brazil.
Source: something called FIFA
For seemingly a year, Manchester United’s Owen Hargreaves has been a few months, a few weeks away from returning to the team. In January, it was thought he’d be back for their title, Champions League pushes. In late spring there was hope he’d be able to play for England.
No dice. Hargreaves has not played soccer in about a year-and-a-half, with no cure in sight for his chronic tendinitis.
Of course, the one thing that it seems like Hargreaves and United have not tried is rest. Why would they? He’s always two weeks away from playing!
All kidding aside, a prescription of rest would come with a lot of issues. If you rest, you’re not playing soccer, which means once you’re recovered, you have to spend more time training, which increases the possibility of the tendinitis coming back before you’re healthy … and before we know it: socialism.
Soon, thanks to new rules, Manchester United will have to register a 25-man team for the first half of the Premier League season. Players 21 and younger need not be registered, but eight spots on the team must be players who spent three years with the team before they turned 21.
Hargreaves is neither. He counts toward United’s 17 inflexible “any player” slots, which presents Alex Ferguson his first major managerial decision of the season. If Hargreaves is not ready to start the season (which apparently, he will not be), do you give him one of the 17 slots and hope he can play before January’s re-registration, or do you omit him from the team and risk him getting healthy while ineligible?
I know T.O.-all about Hargreaves’ knees, but the rest can’t hurt, and if the mandatory three-month layoff forces player and club to take a different course with the injury, that may not be a bad thing. Owen: come back in December, we’ll see what you’re at. Just take care of the knee.
Source: Telegraph
And if you’re against, why?
Because there are a number of teams in Major League Soccer that are wallpaper. Some teams are the new entertainment center (New York). Some are the fully-featured entertainment center (Seattle). Some are digital projector with HDMI out (Los Angeles).
Kansas City is a panel of wallpaper. I’m not saying anything about the quality of the team, fans, or the way the organization goes about its business. But the brand is wallpaper.
I mean, look at this logo:
At one time, that may have been cool, but today, that gets you kicked-out of Central Valley College of Design and Motorcycle Maintenance.
I should know.
Source: Kansas City.com
Remember earlier this summer when rumors for a Nemanja Vidic for Gianluigi Buffon swap were floating around? Depending on how you heard the rumor, £20 million or €20 million was going one direction or another in a deal, yet another reason you know the swap was pure paper talk, but it was still fun to imagine. Nemanja Vidic to the left of Giorgio Chiellini would have been scary, and Gioanluigi Buffon would have been an “of course” goalkeeping acquisition for Manchester United.
Despite their troubles last season, players don’t leave Juventus easily. You look at the tenures of players Alessandro del Piero, Mauro Camoranesi, and David Trezeguet – what they’ve had to go through in recent years to stay with the club – and you realize it will take a lot to tear somebody out of Turin. If a forced relegation won’t do it, what will?
So Buffon never seemed like much of an option, leaving Manchester United still searching for the next Edwin van der Sar, the next Peter Schmeichel, as one article put it. Specifically, it was the Manchester Evening News who, while reporting United interest in Anders Lindegaard, framed United’s interest in terms of Schmeichel.
Perhaps it’s been too long since I saw Schmeichel play, but this American’s memories of that pre-ubiquitous Premier League are of a White Incredible Hulk in goal. I literally imagine a player with a disproportionately huge upper-body, muscles grotesquely protruding through his kit, the Dane yelling as he annihilates opposing strikers who are contesting crosses. Schmeichel was legendary for his wingspan, but my mental exaggerations have his arms spread 11 feet wide.
I mean, look at the picture. He’s lifting a huge trophy and a full grown man while Alex Ferguson’s trying to pull the trophy down. Another man is trying to tackle him. The guy’s incredible!
In short: I have no reasonable memory of Schmeichel.
But, at least I have some memory of him. I have no idea who Anders Lindegaard is. But that’s what the interwebs are for.
According to the aforelinked post, the best thing about Lindegaard is that he’s a cheap date. He’s in the last year of his contract and he won’t cost much. In addition, my friends say he has a great personality.
From other sources, he’s 26-years-old, plays in Norway but is Danish, and based on his international record, he’s no Thomas Sorensen.
I suppose the relevant question is whether he’s Tomasz Kuszczak.
Source: Manchester Evening News
BTW, if anybody has any legitimate memories of Peter Schmeichel, could you share them? As much as I like the caricature I’ve carved in my mind, I’d like to be reminded of the actual player.
Marseille and PSG played to a scoreless draw in Rades, with the defending Ligue 1 champions winning the French Super Cup on penalty kicks.
More interesting to me, the attendance. A reported 55,000 people showed up to the Tunisian venue. Does that seem like a huge amount to you? It seems remarkable to me. Clearly, there’s some culture significance with this being a French league match, but still. That’s a great turnout for almost any soccer match.
Last year, I’d heard rumors that Miami, Florida was trying to get this game. How many people do you think would have shown up for a Super Cup in South Florida?
Source: GSM via Soccerway
RFFootball.com was a great idea at one point in time, but in the latter stages of the game I’ve played over the last year, the site became neglected. Time was spread thin, priorities were rearranged, and more than one good site has gone tumbleweed over the dusty terrain of my writing career. I think I still see Russian Football Now rolling in the distance. I miss you, Vasili.
The nadir of this neglect came last month. The World Cup was an absolute drain, much more of a commitment than I could have possibly imagined. At the beginning of May, the requests started coming, the content had to flow, and by the middle of July, I was a spent vessel. I’d like to tell you that my quality didn’t suffer during that time, but at least I can hang my hat on quantity. I hope I still provided something you could use.
Two weeks of recuperation and I’m finally starting to feel like my old self. For the first time since Spain beat the Netherlands, I broke out my notebook. I’ve restarted the endless pursuit for matches to watch, and I’m starting to write things I enjoy (and some things I know you won’t).
As is usually the case, the writing’s been done while ideas for projects float in my head. This time, as opposed to starting new ventures, the ideas center around what to do with existing ones. Russian Football Now is a great site, and considering how little coverage that great league gets, I want to save RFN (if not make it a model). Set Piece Analysts had greater writers like Ray Curren, Eben Lehman and Ryan Rosenblatt. Maybe something like that could work for more than just the Women’s Soccer Podcast?
And what of this site? I’ve always considered this an online CV, and there’s nothing worse than distributing an out-of-date resumé. This site used to be one place to distribute all my content – written and audio. Seems like it could be useful for that.
But more helpful, I’ve been fiddling around with trying to get Mediawiki for Mas OS X to work off a flash drive. No luck, no time, but given I was doing that as a way to help organize my notes, I started wondering if RFFootball.com’s blog might not serve the same purpose. See something I want to keep in mind? Put it on the blog, maybe people can get value out of my thoughts, notes, or mere flag, and when I need the information for a piece somewhere else, I can just come to the blog and search.
Find new sites that are useful? My posts and tags could be my bookmarks. I piece of feedback I found particularly insightful and want to expand upon? I can do so here.
And what of the work I’m trying to do to improve the podcasts – testing different set-ups of equipment, uses of technologies? We can try them out here.
And all my larks, side projects, and things I will eventually wish I never said? Seems like RFFootball has a purpose.
Who knows how long it will last. Over the past six months I’ve paid people to keep this site up-to-date, and that didn’t work. Now that I’m doing it for free again, this might be a temporary thing.
But with my trite rebirth post just over 550 words, we’re already going long. Hopefully, RFFootball is back – my personal playground.
Excuse the assumption in the title. I’m prone to do that, and maybe it’s because I know reports like USA Today’s about tickets sales are usually driven by the impression that the public will consume the product.
According to said report, there are 160,000 tickets for the World Cup that have gone unsold. This is not a new story. Go back a couple of weeks and you’ll find a similar theme, and fast forward to next Thursday and you’ll find the same refrain.
Allow me to look at this story differently, offer a different refrain. Look at the capacities of the ten venues that will be hosting matches, you get an average of 57,466. Divided the 160,000 ticket unsold by the 64 tournament matches that will take place, you get and average of 2,500 empty seats per match. That’s if no more tickets are sold. One more sequence punched into my calculator and you see a capacity of about 95.6 percent, a rough figure because my average capacity equally considers Nelspruit (43,589) and Soccer City (91,141). That percentage is likely higher.
Do you care about unsold tickets? They do not affect my soccer consumption. For all the complaints about vuvuzelas, you would think viewers would want fewer fans in attendance, but even if I were going to South Africa, I would not care about 1-in-every 22 seats being empty.
When somebody was absent in eighth grade, did you think to yourself, “this classroom is empty?”
Is this more envious scrutiny of South Africa getting the World Cup? Big world disbelief that little world got an event they wanted? Of, is this USA Today (and other outlets) misreading the appetite for the story?
Given how much attention sites pay to their traffic figures, I doubt it.
It’s clearly been on my mind over the last twelve hours, but allow me to reiterate: I’m not buying into the idea that the German Bundesliga is necessarily the superior league to the Italian Serie A. I’m not denying the possibility. I just subscribe to neither the fatalism nor the significance.
Germany may pass Italy in the UEFA coefficient. They may not, neither this year nor next. Italy’s descent to only three UEFA Champions League teams is far from a fe accompli. If Inter wins on May 22, Italy is safe for another year, and they have a stronger crop of teams going into next season’s Champions and Europa League tournaments.
But the UEFA coefficient is just one part of this puzzle (a puzzle, by the way, we are unlikely to up together any time soon). Germany may use their Europa League/UEFA Cup successes to pass the Serie A in the esoteric UEFA rating system, but as long as players still consider the Serie A a marque league – a step-up – the Bundesliga’s potential coefficient advantage will be short-lived.
Consider Kevin Kuranyi. German striker. Third in the Bundesliga in goals. Playing for the second place team. Considering a move to the Serie A.
Why? There could be a number of reasons specific to Kuranyi, independent of our evaluation of Germany versus Italy. Perhaps Kuranyi’s specific skill-set lends itself to Italy. Perhaps the other teams in Germany that can afford Kuranyi already have strikers. Perhaps the Brazilian-born attacker just wants to go to Italy.
And perhaps Germany is not as strong as some think. That might be the easiest explanation for all this. Many have pain-stakenly detailed the descent of the Serie A, but even now, possibly at its trough, it may be a superior league to Germany’s.
Perhaps Serie A will continue to descend, but if more players are of Kuranyi’s persuasion, the decent may not be long-lived.
If reading is more your bag than listening, you might enjoy Richard’s EPL weekend preview in a different medium than the EPL Talk podcast: text. Check it out over at Set Piece Analysts.
|
About Richard Farley Richard (me) is a writer and broadcaster in San Diego, California who spends most of his time analyzing The Beautiful Game. This site, his "personal" blog, serves as a scratch pad and content aggregator for the other places he publishes (listed alphabetically):
You can also follow Richard through his iTunes stream or via Twitter ... and now, Facebook.
His (my) email address is richardfarley aht gmail doht com.
|
