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.