Joining the Rooney bandwagon

If Rooney can maintain current form he will finally start to live up to the hype and may help England to its first World Cup Final since 1966. He has now matured into a genuine “World class” player. He is not a second Pele, Best or Maradonna or van Nistelrooy or Gerd Muller for that matter. He’s the first Wayne Rooney. He will never beat a man or poach goals the way they did but they didn’t have his physicality. Otherwise he’s a very complete player added to which there’s his drive, determination and strength. He’s now a constant menace for any defence, whether making plays to set up chances or taking them himself. Rooney-Gerrard doesn’t quite meet the “Moore-Charlton equivalency” criterion but throw in a Joe Cole and a blossoming Walcott along with a steady defence and there’s enough to get excited. (Goalkeeping is a bit of a worry.) Back at Man U, there’s also room to entertain significant thoughts of a Championship repeat despite improvements to all of the quality opposition. The defence is still sound, midfield overpowering, even without Hargreaves and Scholes and Rooney, Ronaldo, Berbatov and Tevez available for scoring. Pity any defence against any permutation of that group.

Cubs win World Series Shock Horror

While I’m shocked that the Cubs made such an early exit, I’m relieved that the Apocalypse has been put off. I was convinced that the Cubs would win this year – in a “subway” series no less! And pretty convinced that this would precipitate the End of Days.

Like any true Cubs fan, I’m already thinking of next year and on this front, purely at the level of self-interest, I’m hopeful of an immediate positive development, viz., enough people falling off the bandwagon that it will be easier to get tickets. This past season I got on the internet service about 5 hour after tickets went on sale and could find no pairs left in July or August.

The hand-wringing that we’re seeing in some media and blogging is not, I assert, the Cubs way. Yes, we want the Cubs to win but in a certain indefinable sense the Cubs are a transcendent entity. Partly it’s the timeless beauty of Wrigley Field, partly the futility and partly history. When you go to Wrigley you’re entering a little time-bubble; how rare is that? The trappings are different but the simple game is essentially the same, even down to its small rituals, like the starting pitchers’ warmups. Now that Yankee Stadium is gone and Fenway is not likely to exist much longer, this is all the more precious.

Baseball is the most quintessentially stochastic of sports. As much as people don’t want to accept it, it’s inherent in the game that the team with the best record over 161 games can lose three in a row. Derek Lee, Carlos Zambrano and mates are not “chokers”; their numbers just didn’t come up. A pretty low probability result, it’s true but nothing out of line from baseball’s remorselessly statistical nature.

EURO 2008

..has been great. Aside from the exhilarating football I've also enjoyed seeing pundits careen from one wretched nostrum to another. Germany were lionized, then Portugal, then Spain, then Holland, then Russia, then Turkey, then Spain again. Perhaps the old order is crumbling..we'll see.
The most amusing failed punditry has been with respect to coaches. Choose the genius - Rehagel, Scolari, Hiddink.
I guess if I had to make up stuff for a living I'd do the same thing but it gets a bit much. Going into the Russia-Spain match, the Beeb has a pundit that claimed that the key matchup was Hiddink versus Aragones. When will sports journalists recognize the obvious? The players determine the result. The coaches set the table but the meal is all the guys between the lines.
I like Hiddink. I like him because he gets his teams to buy into attractive soccer. But there are limits. Spain won because they have better players not because Aragones "out-thought" Hiddink.
The final is a crapshoot. Spain don't have better players than Germany (or vice versa); it could come down to that persistent German virtue - indomitability; but I'd like to see Spain win.
Finally, we've had the predictable nonsense about Arshavin. A genius against Holland who "disappeared" against Spain. No. Just the probabilities. It's very hard for even the most talented player to put together 3 stellar outings in a row. He was neither as great against Sweden and Holland nor as poor against Spain as the "experts" said. In the former everyone noted the times he beat his man but not when he didn't - because you just need to "come off" 2-3 times as an attacking player to create good chances and people forget the failures. What marks a very good player - as Arshavin surely is - is that they keep trying to make plays. Several times Arshavin almost pulled off a move or a pass but not quite: them's the breaks. Ultimately, Russia just lacked the all-round skill; without Arshavin pulling rabbits out of his hat they were pretty much out of tricks - but they made for a fine contest.

More whingeing about officiating

The brouhaha over the second test at Sydney between India and Oz highlights the peculiar roles of officials in modern big-business sports. Officials aren't paid terribly well. They're people who love sports and they're motivated by being "on the inside". It's very rare that any of them are ever even moderately average ex-players. One of the exceptions that prove the rule was Rev David Sheppard who became a cricket umpire after a distinguished career as a batsman. He was a genuine anachronism from the era when cricket was played by "gentleman" (amateurs).

In sports as disparate as NFL and cricket we have now seen glaring examples barely a month apart.

There need not be bribery involved: although clearly that does go on.Nowadays officials are easily manipulated by the shysters and general money-men and geniuses that run sports. The latter use the power to appoint - to big games in particular - to elicit desired outcomes from game officials. Nothing direct has to be said. It's the same mechanism as is seen everyday in the workday world: brown-tonguers learn very quickly what to say to impress the bosses. With officials it's reflected in approval-seeking actions. Remember these guys are pros. They know much, much better than fans what goes on, what's acceptable rule-bending etc. They know when to make a judgment call that can stand relative to the rules but they know darn well is not the way the game is played. In soccer-football one area is the use of the arms. Watch the pros carefully in tight spots; a lot of arm use. Refs know they can't call this: there's no defensible line to be drawn once they start. In contrast, they'll call penalties now and again for armwork - this is a dead giveaway that they're trying to even up or edge a game in someone's favour. I suspect that in NFL the rough equivalent is holding. It could probably be called on every play but is used only for "flagrant" offenses or when the momentum of a game needs tweaking.

I have no doubt that he NFL brains trust favoured a storyline for the season that saw the Pats go undefeated; look for a "moral" denouement - they don't win the Superbowl. This doesn't mean that there was wholesale fiddling - just when it looked like they might lose, with Baltimore the big example of where it got out of hand and the officials had to make blatant remedying calls. Down Under the storyline is the Ozzies' triumphant win streak. This lead to probably the most disgraceful episode of biased umpiring of which I'm aware - which was only a continuation of the
umpiring assault on India from the first test but which reached epic proportions in the final session of the match, when 7 Indian wickets fell. Now the players normally go along with this mostly but this was so egregious that it just stuck in the craws of Kumble's men.

The accusation against Harbajan is just a smoke-screen and the countercharge against Hogg is also designed to distract attention from the real issue - crooked officials - by focussing attention an old-chestnut non-issue, viz. sledging. The bright boys know that prologued public contemplation about officiating could be ruinous but the sledging issue will blow away. I'm not saying that there's nothing to the underlying incidents - these are cricketers not actors - but that sort of chatter goes on every day and always will. Most of the public - who've never played at any reasonably competitive level - don't know this; so the spin will work.

With the money involved there's almost certainly nothing can really be done of a radical nature any more: you just have to take a lot of "achievements" with a pinch of salt. The big picture, though, remains intact. Guys with 100 innings and an average over 50 can really bat. Hitting 750 dingers means Barry Bonds is a great ballplayer, period. Likewise 6 Cy Youngs and Roger Clemens. The current Oz cricket team is one of the real great ones without umpiring help. Ditto the Pats. Steroids use just allowed these exceptionally competitive people to work like the devil to get better bodies. (This is a topic for another day but it's pathetic to see both of them lying their pants off to preserve their shots at Cooperstown.) Maybe there'll be a turn of the screw when the geniuses realise this and that they don't have to monkey with officials to create false "drama" and the extra eyes, hence advertizing revenues that they think comes with it. Then we'll be left with old-fashioned bribery and corruption, which can be virtually eliminated by video review. But, as Keynes said, we have to pretend fair is foul and vice versa a while longer -because that's the way market capitalism works - and just hope that by the time we can drop the pretense that we still know the difference.