Best hair of the tournament? I say yes.

Every few years, thirty thousand sweaty, fat, drunk, sunburned England fans love to remind their Teutonic counterparts that there were ten German bombers in the air, but that the RAF from England shot them all down. Sadly, MI6 neglected to inform the RAF that the Luftwaffe brought their jet-engined Messerschmitt Me 262s to play on Sunday in Bloemfontein.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Sinister German Menace will always find a way to beat you. The Americans found this out the hard way in 2002 by outplaying The Hun Bastards in the quarterfinals and losing 1-0 after having a goalbound shot cruelly deflected by the arm of Torsten Frings. You don’t truly become a footballing nation until you outplay Germany in a major competition and lose anyway; that loss put the Yankee Soccerball Squadron on the map more than their 3-2 defeat of heavily fancied Portugal or their glorious dismissal of Mexico in the second round of that tournament.

Some observations from Sunday:

-For much of the first half the English were static in attack. This is one of the cardinal sins of soccer because it makes the opposing side’s job very easy. Soccer is a game of mistakes; if either side play mistake-free defense they simply will not concede. It’s almost tautological. The way to unlock an organized defense is for attacking players to have the energy and positional awareness to be moving around continuously, stretching and deforming the opposing side’s defensive formation until a weakness appears. This is what the pundits call “creating space”. For most of the first half it seemed like England just couldn’t be arsed.

-Being lazy in attack also poses problems for your defense because scoring a goal with lazy players requires more of them going forward than you would otherwise need, leaving you vulnerable to be caught on the break. In a weird way, England were caught out for the first German goal. England’s entire back four were further up the field than they should have been given:

a. Manuel Neuer’s ability to distribute the ball;

b. that the Jabulani ball seems to travel farther than other balls; and

c. that the German forwards could not be flagged for offside on a goal kick.

England’s second cardinal sin of soccer was letting Neuer’s goal kick bounce. You must always get your head to a flighted goal kick; John Terry and Matt Upson left it to each other and Confused Polack Miroslav Klose was off to the races with predictable results. It’s the kind of goal a team of twelve year olds would be embarrassed to concede; no wonder England’s goalkeeper/male model/writer/all-around Renaissance Man David James was so furious.

-The second goal demonstrated how simple a game soccer is when it’s played properly. After giving the ball away cheaply in the 32nd minute, England did not get a sniff of it again until it was in the back of their net. Upson hoofed it downfield rather than doing anythng creative and eighteen seconds, seven quick passes, and a good run by The Impostor in the Gerd Müller Shirt later it was 2-0 courtesy of the other Confused Polack, Lukas Podolski. The Germans had threatened to do it two minutes earlier after a clever one-two pass between Muller and Confused Tunisian Sami Khedira left Upson and Gareth Barry for dead; at this point there was blood in the water and England were lucky to find themselves down only two goals.

-Despite the score being 2-0 to Poland after half an hour, I wasn’t overly worried. England had played like garbage but had shown flashes of intelligence and had plenty of time to get back into it. Besides, the defensive duo of Per Mertesacker and Arne Friedrich was not, is not, and will not be convincing at international level. England’s opener was only a matter of time: five minutes to be precise.

You could tell that the Germans were a bit flustered after that and the equalizer seemed to be on the cards well before halftime. Not that I care enough to do this, but if I did I would go to my grave insisting that England would have been more likely to win the game than Germany had the referee and linesmen managed to see what the other 40,000 people in the stadium saw when Fat Frank Lampard’s shot bounced a full yard over the goal line.

And now, a tangent. Of course there’s a delicious irony to the nature of Lampard’s ghost goal given its eerie similarity to Geoff Hurst’s second goal against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup Final. However, anyone who claims that this non-goal somehow represents karmic justice for what transpired at Wembley all those years ago is foolish, because to do so requires an argument from the premise that Hurst’s goal was illegitimate. That premise is untenable, and here’s why:

No one will ever know whether Hurst’s goal crossed the line. Roger Hunt was convinced enough that he turned away in celebration rather than put the ball in the net, which he could have done easily. Maybe the ball never did cross the line; I read sometime ago that some German computer scientist modeled the flight of the ball as shown on television and “proved” it never went across the line. Seeing as the television coverage itself is a model of actual events and does not conclusively demonstrate whether or not the ball crossed the line, one cannot then reach a definitive conclusion using a model of that model. It violates Information Theory 101.

In any case, if Ze Germans and their sympathizers see fit to question the referee’s decision on that goal, it is only fair that we also question why Karl-Heinz Schnellinger was allowed to handle the ball on Germany’s last minute equalizer. If the referee saw that offense, Hurst’s goal never would have happened because the match would have finished 2-1 in normal time to England. Quod erat demonstrandum.

-At the start of the second half the English had plenty of time to equalize, but in typical fashion they politely allowed their opponents to blitz down the wing and score twice to put the game beyond doubt. Just like 1986, when Terry Butcher could have poleaxed Diego Maradona (who would have deserved it) but instead courteously let him score the greatest individual goal in the history of the World Cup, England twice were good sports and got punished for it.

Had imitation footballer Glen Johnson not got a stupid yellow card in the first half he could have fouled The Most German-looking Person in the World, Bastian Schweinsteiger (translated loosely as “pig rapist”), and prevented the third goal. Similarly, Gareth Barry (who was at fault for the third German goal) could have hacked down Confused Turk Mesut Özil and prevented the fourth goal.

Ultimately, England got what they deserved for playing poorly in the group stage of the tournament. They lacked pace, patience, posession, positional awareness, and teamwork, and played tactics which insulted the quality and intelligence of their oppostion. As a result, they were dead lucky to scrape by in a group they should have won at a canter, found themselves on the wrong side of the bracket and were cruelly exposed by a younger, less experienced, less individually talented German side. Good riddance to England; the final whistle was catharsis for an entire nation.

More than any other character in literature, I identify with Meursault (let the amateur psychoanalysis commence!) but as that horrendous match wore on I began to understand the torments of Winston Smith at the hands of the vicious inquisitor O’Brien. Ze Germans were playing the way soccer should be played; Özil, Khedira, and the Pig Rapist were irresistible and even the comically mediocre Klose and Müller looked like geniuses compared to England.

What then is the point of resistance? It is, of course, futile. There was only ever going to be one result, ghost goal or not, so if we can’t land that plane we might as well crash it. As the clock counted up to ninety and England were deservedly put to the sword, I could feel the Bavarian DNA from my maternal great-grandmother wash over every cell in my body like the Panzer Divisions plowing through the Maginot Line at Maubeuge. This time there was no RAF to put up a fight, no Winston Churchill plagiarizing Teddy Roosevelt to conjure up blood, toil, tears, and sweat, and no cameo appearance by the Americans to win the day.

But it’s all right, everything is alright. This England fan’s struggle is (mercifully) finished,  as I have won victory over myself. I heart Deutschland.

¡Vamos Alemania, que se ganen contra los putos Albicelestes!

The tournament is really heating up now, and as more and more Americans tune in their viewing experience is being ruined in three ways, all of which can be mitigated by FIFA, the organizing body of the tournament.  As the USA is the final, potentially very lucrative  frontier for the growth of the game, the organizers really ought to get rid of the bad habits that are so thoroughly stereotyped by the non-soccer community.

IMHO here are the three most pressing problems with the 2010 tournament from the perspective of someone who wants soccer to grow in popularity in the USA:

1.) Vuvuzelas – Seriously, these annoying cheap plastic horns must be destroyed.  They degrade the viewing experience on television and in the stadium and seem to cause communication problems among the players.  In addition, I’ve had several American friends who are curious about the World Cup tune in for five minutes and then turn the television off because the din is so intolerable.  Not good!  Part of the appeal of soccer is the immense crowd noise, songs and chants; these are all but drowned out except for the 30,000-strong contingent of drunk, Empire-nostalgic England fans.

It would be nice if FIFA banned vuvuzelas for the knockout stages of the competition.  Sepp Blatter’s rationalization for allowing the horns is that it’s part of the culture. I’m not sure about that, but am happy to concede that point because it is irrelevant.  Here’s a simple reductio ad absurdum counterargument.  What if blowing on whistles incessantly was part of South African culture?  FIFA would never allow anyone but the referee to have a whistle.  How about bringing guns into the stadium and shooting them in the air when the home team scores? Yes, Dallas Cowboys fans, I’m talking about you. Too bad you are all illiterate.

It is time for FIFA to pull its head out of its ass and stop being needlessly sensitive about “culture”.

PleasePleasePrettyPleaseWithACherryOnTop, get rid of the vuvuzelas.

2.) Diving – By being relatively lenient towards players who act as though they have been shot in the face, FIFA is bringing the entire sport into disrepute.  The advent of slow-motion replays in high definition give soccer skeptics a lot of ammunition; American sports sites like Deadspin have nightly roundups of the most transparent, shameless flops.

In order for more Americans to be brought into the fold, there must be comprehensive reform to the punishment for diving.  As it stands now, the worst a flopper can expect is a yellow card.  I think you would see behavioral changes if the penalty for diving was a red card and/or a five-match ban and/or point reductions.  This brings us to the third problem:

3.) Luddite Attitudes Regarding Technology – The position of FIFA towards technology has generally been that there should be no differences between how the game is played at the highest professional level and how it is played at the most local, amateur level.  It’s time for FIFA to recognize that this attitude is quaint and counterproductive.

For example, the United States was very nearly screwed out of the tournament by having two legitimate goals disallowed by comical refereeing.  If this happened, the backlash in the American media and among the troglodytes in Sarah Palin’s Real ‘Merica would have been merciless and could have set American soccer back years.

Whether it’s goal-line technology, video evidence for punishing the Italian Diving Team, or artificial intelligence to make offside calls, FIFA must allow the precision of the referee’s calls to stand up to the intense scrutiny coming from television.

We will need to make progress on these fronts before soccer can truly break into the mainstream of American sporting consciousness.

Now, for your enjoyment here’s Jozy Altidore getting huge air as he swan dives into the mandatory celebratory pile-up.

Some lovely stuff from Ghana and The German Menace today, while Slovenia, Algeria, and Serbia did not distinguish themselves. Here’s my brief analysis of the matches from Sunday, June 13.

Algeria 0-1 Slovenia – Sometimes you can tell that a game is going to end scoreless.  This game seemed destined for 0-0, a result that would have suited the United States and England very well indeed.  Both sides were fairly well-organized in defense, the passing from both sides lacked precision, and there was no creativity from either side in attack.

Abdelkader Ghezzal proved with his dodgy haircut that there’s no accounting for taste, and he also proved the legendary Bullet Tooth Tony correct when he said we should “never underestimate the predictability of stupidity” by getting himself sent off for a stupid foul and a needless handball offense just minutes after coming on as a substitute. Ghezzal’s World Cup is now probably over. Good riddance.

That ejection opened the game up just enough for Robert Koren’s winning goal, which should have been saved easily but instead was fumbled into the net by the inept Faouzi Chaouchi.  My buddy Sam swears that Chaouchi and Rob Green must have thought they were playing volleyball, and it’s hard to disagree. Algeria is left with a mountain to climb, likely needing wins against both England and the United States to qualify for the knockout phase of the tournament.

The three points for Slovenia may be the only ones they get. Based on today’s evidence the USA and England should be too strong for the tiny Adriatic nation; however, a draw against the United States would leave the American Soccerball Squadron needing a win against Algeria in the third match to progress to the second round. As Algeria are likely to be mathematically eliminated by that stage, the Slovenia-England match now looks to be all-important.

Serbia 0-1 Ghana – Your correspondent is happy to eat his words today. Despite missing very important players in Michael Essien and Sulley Muntari, the Black Stars made a (theoretically) strong Serbian side look timid and boring. Milan Jovanović looked useful on the left but his final ball was disappointing every time. Other than Jovanović and Branislav Ivanović, the Serbs looked to be physically outmatched at every position. Miloš Krasić was especially useless on the right wing and further disgraced himself by looking like an underfed Russian pop star.

The scoreline flattered the Serbs; Ghana was positive, inventive and played with urgency while Serbia was largely reactive except for Jovanović. The Argentinian referee Hector Baldassi made the game closer than it needed to be by hating on the excellently named Prince Tagoe, whistling him for fouls several times when he was actually the victim and even denying him a clear penalty in the first half. Ghana are now in a great position to advance to the second round and nobody will want to face them.

Germany 4-0 Australia - The Sinister Teutonic Menace opened their World Cup campaign with an excellent performance from the youngest German side in the modern history of the competition. Excellently organized, very patient, and playing incisive passes that cut the Australian defense to ribbons, it really could have been a great deal worse than 4-0.

Well-taken goals from a confused Polack, another confused Polack, an impostor in a Gerd Müller shirt, a confused Brazilian, and a confused Turk was unlucky to have his goalbound shot cleared off the line by Filthy Lucre Neill. I’ll let the highlights speak for themselves. At this early stage it is difficult to tell whether Germany are that good or if the Socceroos are just really, really not very good. Tim Cahill’s red card was harsh and ought to be rescinded; however the damage was already done and his ejection probably did not affect the scoreline.

This was probably the best performance by a German side at a World Cup since 1990. Based on today’s evidence they should maul Serbia and have the group all but won by the time they take on Ghana. So often, the form sides in the early stages of the competition flame out before the semifinals (see Argentina 2006 and Spain since 1930); however, you just know the Germans will not do that. You just know that they will efficiently sweep everyone aside as their ancestors did in their adventurous, swashbuckling campaigns into Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, channel islands of the United Kingdom, the Baltics, the Ukraine, parts of Russia, and North Africa. It’s just what they do.

Just as it was seventy years ago, it will be up to the United States and England to halt the advance of the Hun Bastard and prevent him from establishing a beachhead for lebensraum in Africa. Joachim Löw looks to be a worthy successor to Field Marshall Erwin Rommell; who will be his George Patton?

#1. South Africa 1-1 Mexico – I was planning on watching this game live but was then called in for an 8:00 Friday morning meeting. Super weak!

South Africa played an excellent strategy against Mexico in the opener. Recently the Mexicans have been playing very aggressively against quality opposition like England and Italy. By withdrawing into a defensive shell for the first thirty minutes the South Africans resisted the Aztec onslaught and caught them on the break with a classic counterattack. Siphiwe Tshabalala’s finish was clinical; no goalkeeper in the world could have stopped it and Tshabalala will probably earn a nice contract with a European club just for that goal.

As usual the Mexicans were too deliberate on the ball, especially in the final third of the field. Giovani Dos Santos had the right ideas but couldn’t do it all by himself.

#2. Uruguay 0-0 France – This was a dull affair. Effective World Cup teams are more than the sum of their parts and France were far, far less. With enough talent to win the tournament they labored to a scarcely deserved point. Patrice Evra was excellent and Jérémy Toulalan did well enough but the rest of it was dire. The French press is howling about Raymond Domenech starting players like Sidney Govou and Yoan Gourcuff when players like Thierry Henry and Florent Malouda are on the bench, and it was easy to see why.

#3. South Korea 2-0 Greece – Greece is terrible at soccer and Ji Sung Park is not. That is all.

#4. Argentina 1-0 Nigeria – The albiceleste look very, very good despite the solitary goal. Dirty bastard Gabriel “El Gringo” Heinze’s diving headed goal should make ESPN Sportcenter’s Top 10, Leo Messi was lively, Gonzalo Higuaín looked surprisingly like shit, and Nigeria were pedestrian throughout and were lucky not to lose 4-0.

#5. The main event. England 1-1 United States – Having citizenship of both the United Kingdom and the United States made this match difficult to watch.  I found myself rooting more for England than for the United States in the early proceedings, but England were so poor that by the end I was hoping the 1-1 scoreline would hold. A great result for the US, who may consider themselves unlucky not to have taken all three points.

Some observations:

-Landon Donovan was excellent throughout and seems to be the only player at the World Cup so far who has figured out how to deliver crosses with the tricky new Adidas Jabulani ball. His free kicks and crosses from open play were very good; too bad Jozy Altidore and Oguchi Onyewu’s headers were so poor.

-Onyewu doesn’t appear to be running properly; he has a hitch in his stride that is going to lead to an injury. Totally exposed for England’s goal, he was much better in the second half with some timely interventions to deny England a go-ahead goal.

-England’s tactics were piss-poor. Despite having two of the best central midfielders in the world in Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, England defenders bypassed them at every opportunity and just whacked long balls towards Emile Heskey. Between the ball and the better organized defences that will come England’s way in the later rounds of the tournament, it would probably serve them well to practice playing the ball on the ground. With Gareth Barry expected back for Algeria on June 18th, Fabio Capello will be able to revert to playing Steven Gerrard on the left of midfield. I would like to see Jermain Defoe partering Rooney rather than Heskey or Crouch.

-As always, the US has no urgency or invention in the attacking third of the field. One of the few exceptions was when Altidore left Jamie Carragher in his wake and should have scored but ultimately scuffed his shot which was well saved by Robert Green and his friend Upright.

-Both goals came from atrocious defensive breakdowns. Both teams seemed scared to attack to much in the second half lest they be caught out on the counterattack. This revealed the managers’ attitudes that a draw would be a fine result.

Onward and upward. I have watched all five matches in sequence and aim to continue for as long as possible. Algeria – Slovenia will be interesting, here’s hoping for a 0-0 draw. Serbia look very good on paper and could be dark horses to win the tournament; I expect they will beat a weakened Ghana side. Finally, despite having some Bavarian blood I’ll be rooting for the Aussies to put one over on the German menace.

1.) Don’t write more than 300 words unless it’s really good content.  Your correspondent won’t claim to be as talented a writer as Christopher Hitchens (few people are), so it would have been good to have things like an outline, effective editing, etc. My bad.

2.) Don’t be derivative.  Something about imitation and flattery, but my writing style is not the same as Drew Magary‘s and shouldn’t be.  Kindly send defamation complaints to psbyrne at gmail dot com.

3.) Stick to the script.  I had intended to compare soccer fandom to Asian filial piety but ended up writing about mercantilism in 19th century Imperial Britain.  I know that’s about ten minutes you’re never getting back, and I’m sorry.

The second reason I love soccer so much is that, at the professional level, it’s much more meritocratic and capitalistic than American sports fans are used to.  Oh, your team finished in last place? I’m sorry, you do not get to draft Ndamukong Suh or Matt Stafford. Your beloved team gets relegated to the second division and you get to travel hundreds of miles to cold, depressing, dilapidated post-industrial shitholes in the backwoods of Europe to watch your team lose in some meaningless cup competition because your manager and all your best players left to join your most bitter rival.

If there was any justice in this world, the shitty Orioles and shittier Redskins would be playing in the local beer leagues by now.  I think I’m starting to hate all of the sports teams I used to love, but I still hate everyone else more so that makes it all OK… right?

The enormous market for soccer merchandise is also a lot of fun, especially at World Cup time. Let’s face it, all sports manufacturers exploit the labor of one set of brown people or another, but some people market their cheap overpriced schlock better than others and Nike does it better than anyone. H/T Seth Stevenson on the always brilliant Slate.

Personal preferences are important.  For example, I’m not going to start loving NASCAR anytime soon so it’s just not realistic or fair for me to expect NASCAR fans to put down their domestic light beer and methamphetamines and start cheering for people who are potential illegal immigrants and/or godless homosexuals.  Some people are beyond saving.

However, I have heard rumors that there are several million people in this country who have experienced the world outside the borders of Sarah Palin’s Real ‘Murica.  In that world, every four years the seemingly intractable problems of war, poverty, environmental degradation, and religious fanaticism temporarily take a backseat to a truly enormous celebration of sport, culture, and life.  Anyone who claims to be genuinely curious about the world really ought to pay close attention to the World Cup because it is a global cultural phenomenon.

Over the next five days I will attempt to convince you that soccer is one of the easiest, most accessible ways to learn about the world, that it is actually quite important that America becomes a global soccer power, and that you have a part to play in making this a reality.

Why I Love Soccer, Part One: Ancestor Worship

My first love was the Baltimore Orioles, not soccer.  By the time my dad came over from England, Washington had just finished first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League East for the last time.  The Senators fucked off to Texas in 1971, only eleven years after the original Washington Senators had fucked off to Minnesota!  Just in case you were wondering, D.C. is not a baseball town, never has been and never will be.  If you like the Washington Nationals you are either a tourist, a transplant, a phony, or a lobbyist. Die.

So, the only ballgame in town for my dad was the Orioles.  And goddamn, the Orioles used to be fantastic at baseball. One could argue they were the best team in baseball from 1966 to 1983 with players like Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, the unhittable pitching combination of Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson, and managed by a true one-off in Earl Weaver.  Nowadays, thanks to that notorious cockwallet Peter Angelos there’s no risk of the good times ever coming back for Os fans.  Seriously, fuck that guy.  Fuck him in the ear with the scaly cock of Michele Bachmann.

Anyway, like all responsible parents, mine indoctrinated me into the local religion.  It could have been worse.  It could have been Catholicism, or the Red Sox, or some other repellant nonsense.  Somewhere, the parental units still have pictures of me as a platinum blond two-year old decked out in infant-sized Orioles gear strolling around in the Inner Harbor. The pics are so adorable you’d just want to punch yourself in the dick, repeatedly.  That’s what I do!

I also love my Redskins (so much so that I give them $3k a year for virtually nothing in return. Yay!) but didn’t know what American football was until my family moved back to D.C. from Paris in 1988. Regrettably, I missed out on the glory years of Riggo, the Hogs, and most especially Doug Williams, Art Monk, Gary Clark, Ricky Sanders, Timmy Smith, and the rest of  the transcendent Skins team that crushed the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII.  It was still a good time to be a young fan, though.  The days of the Redskins being a functionally racist organization were over, the team was competitive, and Dan Snyder had yet to make his fortune peddling samples of hair care products that were probably inhumanely tested on domesticated animals, fetuses, racial minorities, and other historically under-represented segments of society.

Like most of the other lily-white kids in my de facto racially segregated part of the Dirty District, I played youth soccer on Saturdays. It was a great way for the little darlings of Ward 3 to get some exercise, be socialized, and learn how to bear the crushing agony of defeat (an important character trait for anyone growing up in D.C. at the time).  In addition it allowed the parents (all of them frustrated automatons of the contemptible federal machine) to re-live their High School All-Star years  through their oblivious, unwitting offspring. I loved every second of it.

Unlike most of the kids in the old Stoddert Soccer league, I stuck with the sport and became interested in the professional game in Europe.  By 1992 The Redskins’ glory days were over, it was still impossible to get a ticket at RFK stadium, and even the Orioles lost their charm after leaving Memorial Stadium for Camden Yards.  But part of my attraction to soccer was because I had a strong familial connection to Everton Football Club, from Liverpool in the northwest of England.

At one time, Liverpool was the second city in the greatest empire the world has ever known.  Although it was chartered over 800 years ago, the city only came to prominence in the 18th century as a strategic deep-water ship-building port and as the clearinghouse for a large fraction of the empire’s imports and exports.  By some accounts, the wealth of Liverpool even exceeded London and the Liverpool Customs House was the single largest generator of tax revenue for the Treasury.  Shall we gloss over the fact that until 1807 much of this wealth was generated by the slave trade? I think yes.

As a hotbed of the Industrial Revolution, commerce in Liverpool had a voracious appetite for cheap labor.  This led to a large, hyper-dense population of semi-skilled workers who lived in Dickensian squalor in the northern fringes of the city and worked at least 30 hours a day, 12 days a week in the docks and factories.  The people needed a recreational diversion, and once soccer was properly codified in the 1860s it spread through the northwest of England like the clap in a frat house.

Everton F.C. was Liverpool’s first major club, organized in 1878. They played in the southeast corner of Stanley Park and later moved across Anfield Road to the imaginatively-named Anfield Stadium.  After an internal dispute about how the club ought to be run, Everton was evicted from Anfield in 1891 and moved a few hundred yards away to a new stadium on Goodison Road at the other end of Stanley Park.  The landowner of the now vacant Anfield then created a new club, Liverpool F.C., thereby setting the stage for an enduring, unique sporting rivalry.

The rivalry between Liverpool and Everton is white-hot and rather unlike anything you will find in American sports.  As the two clubs play in the same neighborhood there is no geographic segregation of the fanbase. Contrast this, for example, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Giants.  Whereas in other places your neighborhood dictates what team you support, in Liverpool there is no particular reason to support one club or the other.  Unlike Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, the clubs never organized around a sectarian split between Catholics and Protestants.  Unlike AS Roma and SS Lazio in Rome, they did not split the population on political grounds either.

So, in Liverpool you support whatever team your parents indoctrinated you into supporting before you were old enough to know any better.  With the exception of my grandmother (who only supported Liverpool to be difficult), my entire extended family support Everton.  Many of them grew up in the narrow, crowded streets surrounding Goodison Park, and some of them lived on Gwladys Street in a house that was demolished in order to expand the stadium.

Taken together, the two clubs have won twenty-seven championships, nine European cup competitions, and nineteen other major trophies, eclipsing all of the honors won by London’s twenty professional clubs put together.  Strangely, the heyday of both clubs coincided with the decline of Liverpool as a major industrial city.  In the 1980s the clubs had a virtual duopoly on domestic competitions (and European competitions until Heysel in 1985) at the same time that Margaret Thatcher was sacking all of the dock workers and the unemployment rate was flirting with 25%.

Despite the fierce rivalry on the field, off of the field the rivalry among the fans is largely good-natured. This is probably because both sets of fans are uniformly distributed over the metropolitan area and in virtually every neighborhood; a more bitter rivalry would just cause the whole city to burn down.  In addition, between taking heavy damage from the Luftwaffe and from the city’s economic decline, perhaps people in Liverpool have had more important things to be bitter about for 70 years.

I always thought of myself as more of a Liverpool fan than an Everton fan. There’s probably some bandwagon-jumping here; Liverpool were the better team when I first became interested.  That said, neither club have won much for about twenty years, the sole exception being Liverpool’s mind-boggling second half comeback from three goals down to beat AC Milan on penalties in the 2005 UEFA Champions League final in Istanbul.

Getting tickets to see Liverpool play is relatively difficult; I only made it to my first match at Anfield in November of 2008 paying through the nose to see the Reds beat West Bromwich Albion 3-0.  However, over the years I’ve been to Goodison to see Everton play about five or six times.  Tickets are slightly easier to come by, and when I was younger no self-respecting member of my family would have escorted me to watch the filthy shower of bastards on display at Anfield anyway.

I can still vividly remember my first match at Goodison on April Fool’s Day in 1995, sitting in the newly-renovated Park End stand with my dad watching Everton take on a very good Blackburn Rovers side that eventually won the title under the management of legendary former Liverpool player-manager Kenny Dalglish.  I knew things weren’t going to work out well for Everton when Chris Sutton scored for Blackburn after thirteen seconds and added the second five minutes later, but Everton pulled one back before halftime through a cheeky lobbed goal from Graeme Stuart and nearly battled to a draw in the second half.  It was magic.

Going to Goodison is like stepping into a time machine. One of the oldest stadia in England, it was by far the best club stadium in England through the 1960s until other clubs began to make improvements.  Designed by the renowned Archibald Leitch, Goodison bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit and the old Comiskey in Chicago, with enormous overhanging mezzanine tiers and Tudor-inspired architectural details on the exterior cladding that have (sadly) since been covered over by advertising.  Here’s a photo of the imposing Main Stand which fronts Goodison Road.  Believe me, there’s nothing quite like sitting in the vertigo-inducing Top Balcony.  Depending on where you sit in the Top Balcony, you can see Anfield across the park.

I’d venture to guess that the entire footprint of Goodison Park is no greater than the average new NBA or NHL arena, yet it seats over 40,000 people. With that many passionate fans cramped into such a small space and with a roof over all of the seats, “loud” does not do the place justice.  Before all of the large stadiums were converted from having standing sections to all seats, they once crammed 78,299 people into Goodison Park.  Unfathomable.

Now that Liverpool F.C. has been well and truly driven into the ditch by its incompetent, overburdened American owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, I find myself questioning my loyalties.  In a way, going to Goodison feels like returning to my ancestral homeland in Ireland. It feels like I have been there many more times than I have, and even in more lives than I have had.  I sit where my dad stood as a teenager in the Beatles-drenched swinging sixties, which is also the same place my grandfather stood after emigrating from Dublin (they say that all of the Irish diaspora came through Liverpool, and only the daft ones stayed).  I can still visualize where my family’s house was, and the hole in the wall that allowed them to see half of the pitch from their dining room.

Both Liverpool and Everton need new stadia. At 40,000 – 45,000 seats, neither Anfield nor Goodison are large enough to accomodate the rabid fanbases.  Expansion is not a feasible option as both grounds are completely hemmed in by dense residential neighborhoods and Stanley Park.  For a while it appeared that Everton would move to a new stadium on one of the old docks on the River Mersey.  That would have been very cool, but the financing fell through.  Then it appeared they were on the verge of moving to a suburb called Kirkby and sharing space with a big-box supermarket called Tesco.  That would not have been as cool, and evetually the planning permissions were shot down by the government.

In the meantime, Liverpool managed to secure planning permission to build a new stadium in Stanley Park, across Anfield Road from the current stadium and on the same site on Priory Road where Everton began to play 132 years ago.  The first design was rather shit, and to their credit the American owners had the whole thing redesigned as soon as they bought the club. Here’s a good rendering:

Unfortunately, by using a leveraged buyout to acquire Liverpool F.C. very soon before the 2008 financial crisis, Gillett and Hicks found themselves completely unable to finance the new stadium even though it would be an attractive financial proposition to anyone with a healthy balance sheet.  Assholes.

The only realistic way forward now is for both Everton and Liverpool to share a new stadium.  Neither set of fans want to hear this; they’re too wrapped up in their respective clubs’ unique histories to see the compelling financial reality. But that is what will happen, sooner or later.  And there’s nothing wrong with it.  It works for the Jets and Giants, and for the Lakers and Clippers, and for Bayern Munich and 1860 Munich, and for AC Milan and Internazionale Milan, and for Roma and Lazio.

I’d still prefer to see the stadium on the docks, but most of that real estate has already been bought up for the very exciting Liverpool Waters redevelopment.  So in ten years or so there will probably be an 80,000 seat monstrosity in Stanley Park, shared by the two sibling clubs of Liverpool.  It will surely be an immaculate cathedral of football, maybe with a utilitarian feel since there won’t be any distinctly Liverpool F.C. or Everton F.C. architectural detail.  And that’s OK.

Whereas the Redskins severed their historical link with D.C. and moved to the shitty FedEx Field in shitty Landover, Maryland, Everton F.C. and Liverpool F.C. will be moving back to where it all began in Victorian times: the southeast corner of Stanley Park.  Of course, something will be lost simply because Anfield and Goodison have both been standing longer than any living person.  However, I’m optimistic that something else will be gained: a bright future for both clubs, and a few more generations of ancestor worship on Merseyside until we are all incinerated by the glorious, holy nuclear fireball.

At today’s meeting of the Colorado General Assembly’s Long Term Fiscal Stability commission, members of the public were invited to give brief remarks before the commission regarding what to do to help solve the perpetual fiscal crisis caused by Colorado’s constitutionally-enshrined Gordian knot of competing, internally inconsistent, arbitrary, and meaningless fiscal formulas.

One of the citizens who gave testimony was Herb Fenster, a recognized Colorado Super Lawyer with a freakish academic CV and professional record.  He first suggested that the University of Colorado at Boulder ought to be set free to operate as a private institution with a public charter à la Cornell University.  This would normally be thought of as controversial (although as a CU-Boulder class of ’02 alum, I think it’s a great idea), but what he announced next will make life interesting in Colorado for years to come.

On behalf of several yet-to-be-named plaintiffs (including several state legislators, apparently), Fenster’s firm (McKenna, Long, and Aldridge, a high powered firm with a presence on K Street) will be suing the State of Colorado in the  United States District Court for the District of Colorado on the following complaints:

1.) The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) violates Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution (and, by extension, the Enabling Act of Colorado) because, by taking away the power to tax from the General Assembly, Colorado is in fact a direct democracy in violation of federal guarantees of a republican form of government; and

2.) The General Assembly violated the federal False Claims Act by transferring privately donated funds and restricted federal funds to Colorado’s General Fund.

As you may imagine, the entire room was stunned.  For perhaps the first time since he was in diapers, Senator John Morse (D-Jesusland) struggled to speak in well-articulated, complete sentences.

The complaint, which will be filed sometime this fall, will be sealed for sixty days so as to allow the United States Attorney General the opportunity to examine the complaint and decide whether to join as a plaintiff.

From a quick discussion with several lawyer friends who shall go nameless, it appears the plaintiffs have an uphill battle.  There is case law in Oregon regarding challenges related to a “republican” form of government; basically, they fought the law and the law won.  In addition, this could be the kind of case where the Judicial Branch completely steps aside (as happened recently in the ongoing New York Senate coup d’etat clown show power struggle).

As far as I am aware, this is the first time a Colorado constitutional amendment has been challenged in the federal courts since Senator Pat Steadman took down Amendment 2.  Regardless of the outcome, prepare to be thoroughly entertained.

I submitted the following update on my personal Facebook page:

“is fascinated by the President’s stand on Israeli settlements. First time in 8 years that the U.S. is a neutral player in the Israeli-Palestinian discussions. This can only help U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another demonstration of the futility of neoconservatism.”

That wasn’t censored, which is nice.

However, I then commented on my own post and wrote something to the effect of:

“This also is a refreshing change from eight years of cynical pandering to Israel by the pathetic Bush-era Christian Right.”

It was probably less eloquent than that, but whatever I wrote was censored because the comment vanished from my page.

Note that at no point did I say anything bad about Israel, explicitly or implicitly.  I don’t think a truly reasonable person could have found otherwise, but I’m not sure because I didn’t memorize my comment.  I wasn’t exactly expecting the Facebook thought police to rein me in.

I can understand Facebook’s actions here.  Their product is unusually useful for spreading viral messages, and could be easily used to spread antisemitism or other intoxicating faith-based nonsense.

Facebook is playing a serious game of Cover Your Ass, and I can hardly blame them.

I’m just disappointed that I became the collateral damage of Facebook’s conservatism by making (as far as I can tell) a true statement.  I think “cowardice” may be too strong a word, but whatever it is, it’s not endearing.

Net effect: Facebook is doing the know-nothing Christian Right a huge favor by filtering out all criticism, legitimate or otherwise.  Sadly, this cop-out will continue until that demographic is so small that it’s commercially irrelevant.

So, the forces of reason and common sense fight on with a handicap.

In increasing order of awfulness:

1.) GM, We Hardly Knew Ye - Years of mismanagement, short-sighted overreach by the UAW, and inferior vehicles finally caught up with Government Motors today. I am one of those people who argued that any public money spent subsidizing GM would just forestall the inevitable, and at the highest possible cost.

I’m encouraged that GM is shedding Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, and especially Hummer.  I hope Saab finds a European buyer, and wish that they would have killed off Buick and GMC and just rolled with Chevy and Cadillac.  Just as BMW owns Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, and Mercedes owns Maybach, we could have an American car company with a solid product lineup and an upscale alternative for those who like to travel in style.

If President Obama’s experiment in industrial policy doesn’t turn out very well (which is what I, the cynical pessimist, naturally expect), we should wind GM up so that Ford can be more competitive with the Japanese and German automakers.  At the moment, foreign competition is too strong for three (or even two) U.S. car companies to survive, and that is actually a good thing for America in the long run.  

These days, it makes no sense to think of car companies as being domestic or foreign anyway. We already make excellent cars in America, they just happen to be Toyotas and BMWs.  

The sooner we stop thinking that politicizing business decisions will somehow make America better off, the sooner we can spend billions of dollars on public policies that actually make sense, like comprehensive, universal healthcare for all children and pregnant women.

Let’s encourage President Obama to restructure GM as quickly as possible and then sell it. I fear GM turning into what British Steel was in the 1970s.  The sooner the politicians are rid of GM, the better for all of us.

2.) Air France 447 Goes Down in the Atlantic – The same day that the last survivor of the Titanic died, a freak natural occurrence destroyed another vessel thought to be superior to the challenges posed by the weather, taking hundreds of people to premature deaths.  As horrible as this must have been, we should remember that 40,000 people die on American roads every year and that commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the U.S.

Rail travel should be the safest mode of transportation in America, but we’re decades behind the Europeans in rail safety. 

3.) Religious Terrorism Strikes in America – Although only one person was killed this time, the assassination of George Tiller by someone unworthy of distinction who probably sleeps with the flag in one hand and the cross in the other was a reminder that the poisonous mixture of government and religion creates a lot of collateral damage.  

The best article I’ve found today on the Tiller assassination was William Saletan’s piece in Slate.  I agree with it completely, and would add the following:

For many years, our first Marionette President George W. Bush and his puppetmaster Dick Cheney insisted that, by invading sovereign nations without provocation, we were fighting the ubiquitous terrorists on their turf.

Unfortunately, their turf is Iowa and Florida, not just the hills of Afghanistan.  It is clear now that the terrorists who pose the greatest day-to-day threat to America are people who look and sound just like us, seem to care about America (in a misguided way), and who are completely convinced that the best way to do something about America’s slow decline is to kill people who commit various religious sins.  

Not good.

Regardless of how one feels about abortion, shooting doctors is not a smart tactic to win the hearts and minds of the American people.

It’s time to call a spade a spade: There is a slowly-burning fuse of sectarian violence in America which if left unchecked has the potential to blow up, Northern Ireland style.

To be clear, I’d rate the likelihood of this at less than 1%.

However, that’s more than enough risk for me.  If things deteriorate in America, I can just use my British passport to live and work anywhere in the European Union.  Most of you don’t have that luxury, so I’d encourage you to get involved with the forces of sanity and decency and defend America from benighted sectarian nonsense.

np: My Dying Bride – Thy Raven Wings

One of my fellow candidates mentioned in his speech that “TABOR isn’t rocket science”. 

I beg to differ.

In order to truly understand how government works in Colorado, you must have an analytical understanding of the fiscal, economic, and social impacts of several mathematical funding formulas set forth in the following:

1.) The Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR);

2.) The Gallagher Amendment to the Colorado Constitution;

3.) The Arveschoug-Bird General Fund allocation formula;

4.) Senate Bill 09-228 (The replacement for Arveschoug-Bird)

5.) The urban renewal statutes of Colorado;

6.) The Tax Increment Financing (TIF) ordinances of several municipalities across Colorado; and

7.) The Colorado Public School Finance Act

When taken together, these arbitrary formulas create a nonlinear system of interrelated equations whose impacts cannot be properly understood without doing some fairly straightforward vector calculus. 

Vector calculus happens to be one of the tools used to understand the dynamics of the position, velocity, and trajectory of rockets. Regardless of what anyone else may say, you really do need to know rocket science to completely understand everything that TABOR does.

It’s not realistic to expect everyone in Colorado to be a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics, yet we expect rank & file Coloradans to be well-enough informed to vote on twenty ballot issues every year.

It’s time to admit that Colorado’s experiment with direct democracy is leading to suboptimal, schizophrenic public policy that wastes money, demoralizes elected officials, and denies Coloradans the republican form of government guaranteed by the federal Enabling Act of Colorado.

np: Porcupine Tree – II