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I wonder how this will play in revolutionary Tunisia.
Well they are neighbors.
Yeah not sure they can hang on to the one goal lead for an hour.
edit: The announcers just mentioned that away goal tie breaker is in effect. So Bradford is REALLY in trouble.
Villa's looking good, but their season is looking a touch Birmingham-y, no?
The irony is not lost on anyone...
I remember Ian Darke referring to it just that way when the US was at Azteca last summer.
1. Thanks
2. As it applies to Shea ... is this going through a normal process? Should Dallas and MLS been on similar pages before entering negotiations with Stoke? Is MLS the bad cop that extracts a bit more in transfer money after a deal has already been reached????
3. Less, but still a bit confused.
BTW, could this announcer be pulling any more for Bradford?
They should be, but they aren't as evidenced by the Mellberg debacle. TFC wanted him as a DP, the league vetoed it because they want goal scorers and playmakers as DPs. Hopefully once each team has a unique owner the teams will have a little more freedom.
It's normal in the sense that Shea is contracted with the league, not the specific team. As far as Dallas and MLS being on the same page, it's an issue I've wondered about, too. The league seems to be pushing Shea as one of its stars -- he's front-and-center in those Adidas commercials, he's had a cup-of-coffee with the USMNT, he's young -- so I could easily see a situation where MLS' valuation of Shea is a bit higher than Dallas'.
Didn't Dallas go through this exact same situation a year or so ago with George John? I seem to remember Blackburn (IIRC) sniffing around, with the end result being John not moving because MLS and Blackburn couldn't come to an agreement. The whole thing strikes me as a rather awkward arrangement.
Memo to Paul Lambert: I hope you elected to rent and not buy.
It's Randy Lerner, so the answer is of course "no."
What is it that makes Villa so bad? Is it just that their players are bad (though cheap)? Is there something they should do differently tactically? They're just really - bad.
It was OK. He spends a lot of time trying to disprove the idea that Veronese are racist/xenophobic, and that gets kind of repetitive at times. He keeps bringing up this story of a Uruguayan immigrant who faked an assault in Verona as a way to show how Veronese are not as they are portrayed in the media. And while I get that point, it is clear that a lot of Verona fans are d-bags, as shown in other examples throughout his book.
Anyway, it's a decent read and I got through it pretty quickly. I like Fever Pitch better when it comes to books about fandom.
Has anyone read Hesse-Lichtenberger's Tor!? Thinking about picking that up next.
In one sentence: Lack of stability, control, and intelligence in center defense and center midfield.
The forwards are good players, there's some talent on the wings (if not intelligence), the fullbacks are inferior but not so bad you couldn't cover for them, and Guzan/Given is a highly competent pairing in goal. However, apart from Vlaar, the core of the team's shape is made up of kids (Bannan, Delph, Clark, Herd, Baker) who might be tolerable bench players but have no business starting in the top flight. Oh, and Westwood, who has talent but just arrived in the EPL from League Two. It's a continuous tactical disaster, where the team's strengths are entirely nullified by a complete inability to exert control over the game in their own end, and the best player (Bent) is rendered useless because he can't get any service. Add in the leadership void in the wake of Petrov's leukemia and Dunne's season-long injury, and here they are: a team that gets dominated by fourth-tier Bradford City.
I truly believe that the addition of a solid center back and a strong, stable defensive mid would instantly turn Villa into a mid-table-quality team. You can see flickers of quality every now and then, but they can't put it together when the core of the team is, in (gridiron) Football Outsiders terms, "hole in zone."
In Spurs news, because you people can't get enough, I'm seeing some ITK rumors Defoe is injured. Ruh roh! AVB, evidently, was in Scotland tonight to scout Gary Hooper from Celtic. I'm not sure what to make of that. Anyway, time for Spurs to try out this false 9 thing...
They're good sometimes, there is talent there but not much experience, they lack an organizer or two on the pitch and some workrate. They could even use a Joey Barton....
And an attacking midfielder that could harm prem defenses.
Yes, I thought it was pretty good. There's a lot of interesting pre-WW2 German football history in there that's not otherwise available in English. Another When Saturday Comes book, Morbo by Phil Ball, about Spanish football, is even better.
They have had spells where they have been out of the top flight since the War - most recently the 1987-8 season - but a club like them falling out of the top flight is a pretty big deal.
Good for Bradford. Nothing has gone right for them since 2000, and reaching your first major final in 102 years is a great achievement.
I read that yesterday as well--and enjoyed it--but never got around to posting a link here. I thought one of the more interesting observations in the piece was a sort of throwaway line in the last paragraph about how "tactical trends change increasingly quickly". I figure this is related to the similarly rapid expansion of high-quality television coverage and available statistical data. Wasn't that long ago that the only reliable ways for clubs to figure out what their peers in other leagues were doing were to send a scout or actually play said other teams.
Oh man, you would probably think the MOTD stable of pundits are a godsend. The weekend crew on FSC is just awful. What does Warren Barton bring to the table besides looking like a scowling penis in a suit and saying precisely two things ever: (1) If a team is losing at halftime: "We'll need to see more from them in the second half." (2) If a team lost the game: "They just didn't do enough."
That's it. That is the entirety of Warren Barton's contribution, other than donning a pained and forced smile every time Rob Stone or Eric Wynalda shoehorns some reference to an American player into the conversation. Give me Brian McBride (and his anti-charisma) providing actual analysis any day.
The MOTD guys are more in the McCarver/Morgan mold for me. They seem decent enough when you're first learning the game, but the more you know the less they offer. Alan Hansen (a former Liverpool defender from the glory days) supposedly used to be pretty good but then declined as he reclined in the soft smugness of his security as an icon of football commentary. He's probably most famous for declaring, "You'll win nothing with kids!" when Ferguson first brought the Giggs/Scholes/Beckham generation of yutes into the Manchester United team. The rest of the regulars have, for the most part, fallen into the same trap as Hansen and McCarver and Morgan. They've failed to evolve with the game they're purported to be experts on and have retreated to the defensive posture that anyone who hasn't played the game at the highest level himself is in no position to offer an opinion on what happens on the field.
Just after Leeds had sacked Clough. I can't even think of a corollary in American sports television.
I think Jeff Stelling is generally well-liked. He is clever, he keeps it light, and he doesn't purport to be anything other than a quick-witted host. The stable of pundits Sky employs for the running commentary on live matches are, by and large, morons. Le Tissier is half-decent but the other guys are utter half-wits, especially Merson (who I'm surprised is able to dress himself considering his frequent inability to put together a complete sentence without practically spitting up on his tie).
I would say the same things about Gary Lineker, host of the flagship broadcast of MOTD on Saturday nights, as I did about Stelling.
Probably not. I kind of hate punditry and I often watch sporting events with the sound off and my Ipod on shuffle. I do listen to soccer with the sound on as I enjoy the droning of the announcers with British accents and the ambient noise. But baseball, football and basketball...give me my tunes. The thing about Wynalda is that I bet he has a lot to offer as a pundit--look at the team he threw together of amateurs that made a nice run in the Cup--but he doesn't offer it on FSC. If Spurs hadn't signed Dempsey they'd still have their claws out for Villas-Boas, most likely. Thanks Clint!
Speaking of Clint, here he is making a few bucks selling a mini rubberized version of himself. Take it with you into the bath!
Lineker's act is wearing thin, but not as thin as the rest of that panel. Many people record MOTD and skip the analysis, which is worthless now. Gary Neville's emergence as a decent pundit has really showed how out of touch Shearer et al are.
As for Clough and Revie:
1. The parallels between them are striking. Same home town, similar backgrounds, both forwards not quite good enough to be England regulars, both innovators as managers who took teams to unprecedented heights, both keen on money...and yet they hated each other. The difference? Revie wanted to win at all costs. Clough did not go that far.
2. What is doubly remarkable about the clip is that it is regional TV. What a coup. But sport was less important then.
I just can't believe how frank they were or that they even agreed to do it, but, as you said, neither seemed shy when it came to receiving a few quid.
Jonathan Wilson made an interesting point in his book that the prohibition against the back pass--along with economics and Clough's alcoholism--is what did Forest in as Clough didn't believe in fitness training and without the back pass teams had to do a lot more running.
He really is good. I think his facility with the lower divisions is down to his undying love of Hartlepool United. His reactions upon learning they've scored are always a treat.
From Matt's link. Wow. I respect Klinsmann's comments in that article, but if we don't have the players, we don't have the players.
Clough was also well gone in that last year.
The back pass law was viewed with trepidation but was a really positive change, it turned out. It speeded up international football in particular.
Wilson talks about this, too. Sheringham, evidently, forced the move to be closer to his family. That last year just sounds like it was brutal for everyone involved.
That's what has gotten Gary Neville a lot of plaudits as well. You get the sense that he really busts his ass researching stuff for his SkySports appearances, just like he busted his ass in training and preparing for his Manchester United appearances.
That was a fun season. With the EPL coming in, So much was new - wall to wall TV coverage, referees in non-black kit, no back passes, squad numbers for the cup finals. I had my first trip to Wembley. Even Man Utd winning the league was novel.
Alas...
I couldn't watch it. I tried but the book was such a visceral experience for me the movie seemed like a cardboard cutout and I just turned it off. Others have had really good things to say about it so I'd still check it out. Michael Sheen was born to play Clough, though, just as he was Tony Blair.
Indeed , the book is probably the best novel ever written about football, not that there's much competition.
[...]
And we're back. In a lot of ways, MotD reminds me of Quick Pitch on the MLB Network, which I also like, in that the ratio of highlights to analysis is pretty high. Generally I'm more interested in seeing the game itself than hearing people talk about it.
I still think the worse analyst I've ever seen was poor Michael Ballack during Euro 2012. I grant that he was (a) new at it and (b) not speaking his native language, but he was just awful: wooden, clearly uncomfortable on-set, I can't imagine why they hired him.
I thought Rossi was even worse! I think they hired Rossi and Ballack to make Alexi Lalas crazy. It nearly worked, so well played ESPN.
Oh, definitely. If Ballack looked wooden and uncomfortable, Rossi looked downright terrified. Like there was someone crouched under the desk with a pistol pointed at his genitals.
Pleat's areas of weakness mostly come off as somewhat endearing because of his age. He says a few facepalm-worthy things sometimes, but he's pretty harmless. His pronunciation "issue" with certain foreign players can be good for a laugh. As I posted earlier, he had a hell of a time with 'Kagawa' on Sunday. Another memorable struggle was Pascal Chimbonda.
Pleat was quite the tactical innovator in his day. He took Spurs to the cup final in 1987 with a multi tasking 5 man midfield behind Clive Allen as a lone forward, which was unusual at the time but pretty successful.
Too bad you don't know the story. It would be kind of hilarious to know why someone hates David Pleat.
I would not be at all surprised if one of my friends from the UK came over, listened to Buck and McCarver call a game on Fox, and say, "Why do you hate these guys again? They're perfectly pleasant."
The headline of that article is ironic.
Some of it is obviously ######## (because of the source material, the book is fiction) but it is really, really well done. Highly recommended.
Bob Ley: [Introducing a highlight] Here we see the German goal, that's great ball movement, isn't it, Michael?
[Clip begins to roll, 10 seconds of dead air]
Ballack: Yes
[10 more seconds of dead air]
Ballack: [Almost inaudible] Great ball movement
Ley: Thanks, Michael. Alexi, what do the Germans have to do to keep up the momentum in the second half?
Seems like there's a lack of quality soccer films, especially compared with other sports like boxing & baseball.
Creepy...
It was a shame they didn't keep Dixon who was loads better than the rest of the regulars. Hansen still provides the odd excellent bit (always on specific defensive things - his first prepared piece is normally worthwhile) but is a spouting cliche machine (which would be an upgrade for shearer)
Wikipedia has a list of soccer-related films. I've seen almost none of them, though I do recommend Mike Bassett: England Manager if you can find a copy.
Where are you guys watching ACN btw? Online "legal" streams? I ahven't seen it on Comcast here in Chicago.
ESPN3
ESPN3 has all the games.
Giroud with the goal off the corner. Nifty play.
How and why did I not notice this? Appreciate it.
Arsenal score from a set piece! Mon dieu!
Whatever Wenger said at the half worked wonders.
And now Walcott makes it 4-1 on a counter. This is nuts.
Arsenal continues to score at will in specific games. They have 26 goals 5 games and 18 in the other 18. Pefrectly mediocre (kudos to above).
Make that 27 in 5 as Walcott makes it 4.
Sam is not happy.
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