When Life Imitates Dream Team: the Barton edition

It’s the summer, transfer season in the English Premiership.  Newcastle midfielder Joey Barton is looking at a relatively novel loan – six months in the penal league:

England international footballer Joey Barton was jailed for six months yesterday for a “violent and cowardly attack” outside a branch of McDonald’s after he became embroiled in a street fight at the end of a drunken night out in Liverpool.

The Premier League player, who signed for Newcastle in a £5.8m deal from Manchester City last summer, had drunk 10 pints of lager and five more bottles of lager before launching a sustained attack on a stranger and punching a 16-year-old boy in the face.

Now 15 (!) beers might be enough to make anyone stupid, if they’re able to be upright.  But Barton has a long history of thuggish behavior:

The incident took place as the player was awaiting trial for two other offences, which he denies; alleged assault and criminal damage of a taxi - for which he will appear before Liverpool magistrates on May 30 - and the alleged assault of a former Manchester City teammate, Ousmane Dabo, 31, to be heard in Manchester next month.

But wait, there’s more!  Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Although he signed a new contract on 22 September 2004, which would keep him at City until 2007, the club considered sacking Barton in December 2004 after an incident at their Christmas party. He stubbed out a lit cigar in youth player Jamie Tandy’s eye, after he had caught Tandy attempting to set fire to his shirt.  Barton subsequently apologised for his actions and was fined six weeks’ wages (£60,000).

The following summer, Barton was sent home from a pre-season tournament in Thailand after assaulting a 15-year-old Everton supporter who had provoked Barton by verbally abusing him and kicking his shin.Barton had to be restrained from attacking the boy further by teammate Richard Dunne.  Barton underwent anger management therapy at the order of City manager Stuart Pearce and paid £120,000 in club fines. 

While I find it puzzling that so many people appear to want provoke an obvious psycho — seriously, attempting to set his jersey on fire? — it seems there’s ample evidence that Barton is a bad, bad boy.  Just the kind who you’d expect to turn up at Harchester United.  Though I’d imagine that they’d upscale the details of his brawl.  A McDonald’s?  Really, Joey, the Arches?  Make that a high-end nightclub…and then have him score a crucial goal when he returns from jail.

Up the Forest!

One of the more intriguing elements of international soccer to an American is the concept of relegation/promotion.  A whole new element of drama for those at the lower end of the standings, much more life and death than our habit of letting losers go first in a draft for young talent.  Then there’s the excitement of getting promoted to a higher level — as if a whole team could be called up to “the Show.”  The novelty is entertaining, at least if it’s not happening to your adopted team.

So I need to mark the promotion of the lower division English team I’ve adopted, Nottingham Forest.  Here’s the good folks at Through the Seasons Before Us celebrating Forest’s return to the Championship:

There was the inevitable pitch invasion, which can be frustrating when you’re in the upper tier, but after attempting to prevent it, the police and stewards gave up and allowed the pitch to fill with dancing Forest fans, who caught hold of numerous players including Junior Agogo and Chris Cohen.  After it had died down and everyone was off the team re-emerged for a deserved lap of honour, taking applause from all the Forest fans as well as the numerous Yeovil fans who had remained to take in the celebrations.

After attempting a hand-holding length-of-the-pitch run and Klinsmann-type dive, the excitement got the better of the fans again who encroached and almost collided with the players; but what a day, the like of which it seems so long since we’ve witnessed!  I found myself almost numb and disbelieving after the dancing and the singing had died down, I don’t think it’s going to sink in properly until some time in the middle of next week.  So I’ll write it down.  We finished second, we’re definitely promoted to the Championship, we don’t have to play in the playoffs, and we’re playing Derby next year!

I became fond of Forest after making a visit to the City Ground in Nottingham.  For that story, with a cameo by Nottingham Castle and unavoidable Robin Hood references, along with some musings on the relegation concept, read on!

Gerrard and the gangsters

Another edition of “Life Imitates Dream Team” …

This time the star is the otherwise fairly straight-shooting Steven Gerrard of Liverpool.  Liverpool, you see, is a town filled with rough elements, and when they do you a favor then, as we all know from the movies, you owe them.

When the name of the character witness was read out to the sleepy jury at Lincoln Crown Court this week, even the doziest of their number sprang to rapt attention.

Steven George Gerrard MBE - captain of Liverpool Football Club, occasional captain of England and role model to millions of impressionable youngsters - wished it to be known that he had “the utmost respect” for the man who stood in the dock.

Never mind that the defendant, John Kinsella, was a known gangster charged with tying up a security guard during a £41,000 robbery.

Wonder why Gerrard aborted that move to Chelsea a few years back?  The answer may be here:

With a big wage increase in the offing, he even text-messaged then Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho to say he was looking forward to working with him.

Days later, all that changed. Gerrard told a stunned press conference that he had changed his mind and would be staying in Liverpool.

Officially he was happy - but his ashen face and monosyllabic speech told a different story.

The truth, insiders say, is that on the eve of his transfer, Steven had a visit from his father.

Paul Gerrard, who had previously been supportive of his move to the capital, had a stark message for him: you can’t go.

“If you were to leave this city and this football club,” he said, “our lives would become intolerable.”

Steven, sources say, buckled under the pressure.

The precise reasons why this remarkable U-turn came about remain shrouded in mystery.

However, it is known that, at the time, a number of leading gangland figures in Liverpool were determined that their football club’s prize asset should not be lost to the city - at any cost.

Just the kind of story you so often see here in the US with our NBA stars — even the clean ones can find it hard to escape the tougher elements from the ‘hood.

Great Expectations

So DC United’s season is off to a bumpy start.  A couple of shutout losses on the road in league play already, with the 4-0 loss to Real Salt Lake one of the worst games I’ve seen the team play in years, and eliminated from regional play by Pachuca.  The grumbling/worrying/complaining has begun.  Perhaps the off-season changes aren’t helping.  Perhaps it’s time for a new coach.  Etc.  That’s what fans do.

This comes down to expectations.  We United fans have high expectations, at least in MLS terms.  We’ve had a winning team for four years now, with the best regular season record in MLS the last two years.  It might be different if we were rooting for Real Salt Lake or Toronto where just getting to the play-offs would constitute a good year.

Other teams I root for have even higher expectations.  Look at Celtic.  Two consecutive league titles and back-to-back trips to the round of 16 in the Champions League.  Pretty good.  Oh, but they’re in second this season in Scotland and, perhaps more importantly, keep losing to Rangers.  Heck, they’re having trouble even getting a goal on their eternal rivals.  (I hope that changes today.)  Cue talk about coach Strachan moving on.  It’s like what happens to an Ohio State or Michigan football coach who can’t get a victory in that rivalry.

There’s Arsenal, now clearly bound for third in the EPL and knocked out of the Champions League by Liverpool.  Cue complaints about the failure of Wenger to bolster his young squad.  At the beginning of the year, most didn’t expect the young team could contend for the league title but a nice early run had the Gunners in first place for months.  They even managed to play with some style, like notable recent championship teams coached by Wenger.  This should be seen as a successful rebuilding year and now would be the time to talk about missing pieces to add — a world-class center defender, perhaps? — but now it doesn’t feel as successful.  Hopes were raised.  Expectations grew over the course of the year.  And, as students of revolution will tell you, it’s always when expectations are rising that rebellions are born, not when everyone is ground down and dispirited.  Still, no one thinks Wenger is going anywhere.

Finally, mighty Barcelona, stumbling to second (or third?) in La Liga but still in the Champions League.  Superstars on the wane, with talk that Ronaldinho, Deco, maybe even Henry to leave after the season.  Not to mention coach Frank Rikjaard.  One would think a run to the semi-finals of the Champions League would count for something.  But the expectations for Barca are so very high — win the league, contend for the Champions League, and do so with massive style.   It’s tough to meet them for very long.  Time to bring in a new manager, the old one’s running out of steam.

So, back to DC United.  My expectations are high — I want the team to win and I want to contend for the MLS Cup, plus continue to qualify for regional tourneys.  If MLS set up its competitions as they do in Europe, we’d actually be coming off of two league championships in a row — but both would have seen flops in European competition (as the counterpart to our play-offs).  We’d be looking at our team like fans of Inter Milan and Real Madrid do, with some frustration and disappointment. 

Ah, but of course, we don’t set up our competitions that way.  With the MLS regular season counting for so much less than a European season, we’re going to be happier if the team performs as Liverpool and AC Milan have in recent years — “good enough” in league without necessarily threatening to win it and then excelling in Champions League runs.  (Of course, I really want a “double” like Manchester United is going for this year — league and Champions League — but my expectations would be met with an AC Milan/Liverpool type of performance.)  I also want to keep playing in regional tourneys.  One of these days we’ll beat a team in Mexico and, in the meantime, maybe we’ll learn something and keep building our name with Latino fans in the US who have all too often looked down on MLS. 

Expectations matter.  The last two regular seasons have led to rising expectations — we seemed clearly best in the league, making the play-off crashes all the more frustrating.  Just as, I imagine, an Inter fan is getting ticked off by a team that cruises to the Serie A title yet can’t make a real run at the Champions League.  I’m trying to lower my expectations back to what really matters to me. 

Which is, in a roundabout way, why I’m not particularly upset yet.  If it takes Soehn and the DC United folks another month to get Gallardo and the rest of our attackers in synch, so be it.  If it takes another month of formation tinkering, so be it.  (Please don’t play three at the back again, though, unless they’re three regular defensive starters.)  If it takes a month to get Emilio putting balls in the net regularly, so be it.  Maybe it’s time to figure out if Quaranta is there to spell/learn from Moreno or sub for Olsen at right wing or a mixture of the two.  And so on. 

Because as we’ve learned the last two years, it’s not the first few months that determine whether our expectations are met — it’s the last few weeks of the season.

 

When Life Imitates “Dream Team,” pt. 3

Apparently, Didier Drogba really wants his replica to be the most popular among Chelsea fans.  So much so that he’s taken to buying them himself to make the sales stats look better:

The £24 million striker, who was named Premier League top goal scorer for 2006-2007, has had less success in shirt sales compared to John Terry and Frank Lampard who reportedly taunt him about it on the training ground.

One Chelsea insider claimed Drogba visits the club shop up to 10 times a week and on one occasion walked out of the store with 40 shirts priced at approximately £45 each, setting him back £1,800.

The first-team regular could easily get shirts free of charge but the £70,000-a-week centre forward is paying like any other customer to improve his shirt sale statistics.

Maybe A-Rod should try the same thing with Yankees gear…

Overkill, but that’s a good thing!

The US starts World Cup qualifying in June with a two-leg preliminary series against either Barbados (ranked #133) or Dominica (ranked #182).  Should be a formality before the semi-final round of regional qualifying later in the year. 

Still, we need to make sure our team is sharp and has some practice in advance of those games, given the tremendous costs of a hiccup in qualifying.  So the Federation is scheduling some friendlies to get the team warmed up.  What teams will we play?  It’s looking like:

England at Wembley on May 28th.  At Spain on June 4th.  And Argentina on June 8th, perhaps at the Meadowlands.  That would be three of the top 11 teams in FIFA’s rankings (such as they are).  That’s a string of three games — two on the road — with maybe one-third of the countries that can claim with a straight face to be contenders to win the World Cup.  Yeah, I know England just choked out of Euro 2008 qualifying and Spain routinely blows it once it makes it to an international tourney.  Still, that’s a murderer’s row of games.  That should quiet the bigsoccer types who complained about our weak friendlies in advance of the ‘06 Cup, much as I enjoyed a second opportunity to see Latvia play in person.

Yeah, our team might be ready to play mighty Barbados after that trio of games.  If they survive.  I can’t imagine what the Federation will schedule as a warm-up for the final round of qualifying next year.  Maybe Brazil and road games in Italy, Germany, Holland AND an African tour to play Ivory Coast and Ghana?  Yowza.

Sport and Empire

Simon Kuper is the pioneer of writing about soccer as an international game and how it interacts with politics, economics, culture.  If you haven’t read his ground-breaking Football Against the Enemy — also known as Soccer Against the Enemy — then you really should just go straight to Amazon and order it now.

These days Kuper has a column in the Financial Times and this past Friday he had a doozy, an exploration of the way a British game (soccer) leads the world long after the sun has set on the British empire while American games (outside of basketball and a few spots of baseball interest) have little traction outside America.  There’s a host of ideas tossed off in the course of the piece — it could easily be expanded to be a New Yorker article or even a book.

As Kuper puts it:

This is a struggle between two very different types of empire: the British (which, contrary to popular opinion, still exists) and the American (which, contrary to popular opinion, may not exist). Emerging from the struggle is a new breed of sports fan.

As best I can tell, Kuper thinks that fan is one who watches sports on television, the spread of which represented a “second wave” of globalization in sports.  The simpler the game, the better it translates.  (Tough luck, American football or cricket!) 

It also means, he argues, that the EPL benefits from its heritage, that century of tradition that makes a team from struggling post-industrial cities like Liverpool or Newcastle globally known.  With the advent of cable television and niche broadcasting:

A century-old model of fandom – the man who supports the home-town team he inherited from his father – is collapsing. In the US, China and even Argentina, people increasingly watch Manchester United on TV. Chinese and American soccer fans mostly came of age during the second wave of sporting globalisation. They prefer the real thing to their obscure local teams. For the same reason, the NFL closed its offshoot NFL Europe last year after 16 fairly anonymous seasons. In future, American NFL teams will visit Europe instead.

Global fans want global leagues, above all the NBA or the Premiership. It’s therefore wrong to think that Beckham will save American soccer by playing for the LA Galaxy. American soccer is alive and well and watching Manchester United on Fox Soccer Channel. This is a posthumous victory for the British empire.

This is at the heart of the struggle MLS faces.  The more World Cup and EPL soccer becomes a mainstream sport in the US, the more MLS looks second-rate.  One answer is to, of course, import David Beckham and a few others to bring glamour and international track records to the league. 

But here’s another point.  If I were at MLS HQ, I’d be paying attention to the fan experience and encouraging fan culture.  The enthusaistic fans of Toronto FC or DC United make attending an MLS game a more enjoyable thing to do — and it’s something that an American can’t get watching a game from Europe.  Get that passion in the stadiums and also try to convey it on television.  This is something that moving to soccer-only stadiums will help with.  There’s only so much that can be done to convey excitement in a mostly empty Giants Stadium or Arrowhead Stadium.  Then Americans can watch Man U or Arsenal and then try to replicate what they see here at home. 

An Easy Day’s Night

So Liverpool faced a must win game tonight in Marseille.  Win on the road or risk failing to make the knock-out stages of the Champions League.

Eleven minutes in and the game was pretty much over.  An almost instant Gerrard goal on a saved penalty and a gem from Fernando Torres, who danced through the Marseille defenders like they were orange traffic cones.  2-0 to Liverpool before I’d gotten halfway through my dinner as I watched the replay on Tivo.  It was 4-0 by the end.

I must confess to rooting for Liverpool, even though they were the “big” team.  I have a soft spot for “the Reds,” my second choice among England’s “big four”.  (Arsenal is my EPL side but that’s a story for another day.)  They liven up the knock-out rounds, even if they don’t seem capable of challenging for the EPL title (yet).  Why?  Well, I’m sure part of it has something to do with Liverpool’s most famous export.  Read on for a story about my trip to Anfield and why one “never walks alone” as a Liverpool fan…