The Importance of Sport (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

World Cup Of All The Talents

This year we're going to have lots of national teams that aren't very 'national'. We used to understand what a national team ought to be: eleven players, born and bred in the country they play for, who played in the country they play for, who will in all probability die in the country they played for. That has changed.

For a start half of them play in the English Premier League. But what might be called the 'extended national team' really started with Jack Charlton (a monumentally English man who won the World Cup in England with ten other parochial Englishmen) who, after his playing days, found himself managing the Irish team.

He quickly discovered that Ireland doesn't produce many good footballers -- they play lots of other games, some only the Irish play -- but Ireland holds the world record for producing emigrants to England. Those emigrants had interbred with the natives to produce sons and grandsons (and great-grandsons if it was really necessary) who were good footballers. It was a statistical certainty there were so many of them.

Some of them were about as Irish as I am but it didn't matter. Ireland was so thrilled at qualifying for the World Cup finals in 1990 (after failing to twelve times between 1934 and 1986) they didn't care about the English accents of their players, only the colour of their shirts.

The problem with this particular method of national aggrandisement is that not many countries find themselves in the Irish situation. But some at the 2026 finals do. Morocco, for example, has been scouring the French and Belgian leagues for the sons and grandsons (no great-grandsons as yet) of Moroccans. Curaçao and the Côte d'Ivoire are on similar Euro-quests. /more

[Mick Harper]

Arsenal 3 Fulham 0

The good news was, the pundits assured us, Arsenal had established a six-point lead over Man City and that constitutes a psychological burden for any team with two games in hand. They have to win them both.

"I'm so depressed, Erling, I can hardly kick a ball straight."
"So no change there then, Phil."

The bad news is that, since it's a racing certainty City will get six points from those two games (they're on a run), it will all come down to goal difference.

"I'm so depressed, Erling, we'll never match Arsenal on goal difference after that three-goal win over Fulham."
"Look at it this way, Phil. For goal difference to kick in, we must have won those two games in hand. So that's two goals off the goal difference automatically, right there. Plus, we've got two more opportunities than Arsenal have, to win by more than a one-goal margin."
"How come you're so intelligent, Erling?"
"I was born and bred in Yorkshire, Phil."

[Mick Harper]

Cocklecarrot Weighs In

You're probably thinking hair-pulling is rightfully punished with a straight red. You're probably thinking there seems to be a lot of it about lately. You're probably thinking it's a particularly daft offence since it always gets picked up by the cameras. You're wrong, as usual. This is what is actually happening:

* Refs have been giving a lot of leeway to illegal but not dangerous pulling and shoving in the close contact sport that the Premier League has become.
* Players have got used to tugging at any part of their opponent's anatomy or kit that comes to hand.
* Sometimes it happens to be their luxuriant coiffure.
* It is, as it were, accidental. Incidental, anyway.

Conclusion
The British should adopt the American attitude: if players want to wear their hair long that's fine by the NFL, but they have to take the consequence, not their opponents. Unless the offence is spiteful or in any other way egregious, pulling an opponent's hair should be treated as any other sort of pull, like for instance, their shirt. A free kick and a yellow card.

[Mick Harper]

More on the London Marathon.

[Mick Harper]

They Could Be Good In The Air

[Mick Harper]

Everton 3 Man City 3

City were unlucky. They should have won 5-0 on the play. They showed what they could have done when they went 3-1 down with minutes to play.

Even so, one point is tantamount to none if Arsenal do the needful. Unless we drop a draw in the run-in, in which case City's point and scoring three goals getting it is a bastard.

[Mick Harper]

My new hobby of collecting African-American first names (I had to give up the old one, 'variants of Cohen' for Jewish last names, on doctors orders) is going great guns. Here's a bumper paragraph from The Athletic

[Mick Harper]

Cocklecarrot on 'That Match'

1. Bayern winger beats PSG defender on the outside. Defender kicks winger's knee to bring him down. Lands but fails. Defender uses other leg to stamp on winger's foot, succeeds. Ref blows, yellow card. Wrong! Two yellow cards and a red.

2. Bayern defender makes legal sliding tackle on PSG attacker. In the follow through the Bayern player's head collides with the PSGer's nether regions who is reduced to a comatose position on the ground. Should the ref stop the game? No, it is case of 'nut nuts nut's nuts'.

3. Would Arsenal have preferred to play Bayern? Yes, but it is more appropriate that champions dethrone champions.

[Pete Jones]

Compare your Arsenal fandom to your Patriots fandom? I assume its on the lines of 10:1, but I'm surely wrong.

[Mick Harper]

It's hard to judge. Both were adopted around the same time, when I was advanced in years, so neither have any atavistic baggage. It is simple 'soap opera syndrome', becoming addicted via familiarity. I only watch (whole) matches when either is playing and the Premier League and the NFL overall take up similar amounts of my time. So I would put it more like 3 : 2.

An interesting conflation occurred last weekend. An ex-Patriots quarterback I watch every day on his TV talkfest visited England for the first time and went to the Emirates for Arsenal vs Fulham. Him and his wife were initially jeered by the people in the seats around them for being American & NFL, latterly warmly embraced for now being Arsenal & soccer fans.

He was so enamoured he returned for the semi against Atletico Madrid. Though the experience was enhanced by spending it in the owners swanky box since it turned out they had arrived with a personal friend of his, the Head Coach of the LA Rams (who they also own). My guy commented, "The Brits always invite the other team's owners to share their box on gameday, something that would never happen in the NFL."

He did not mention one of the great fan differences--that whole sections of British stadiums are reserved for visiting fans--though he did confirm something I said in one of our Zooms. That Brits in general are much less angry than Americans.

[Mick Harper]

The above does point to one great distinction between professional American sports and sports elsewhere. The international dimension. Whether it is football (both kinds), baseball, basketball or ice hockey, the Americans only watch American teams playing American teams. There are tiny exceptions to do with Canada, the World Baseball Classic and the Olympics, but that is the determined pattern.

Everywhere else and in all sports there are frequent matches involving foreign competition, for both club and country. This is undoubtedly a good thing. (As is, by the way, promotion and relegation--observed mostly elsewhere, never in America.)

[Mick Harper]

This Season's Bike Quiz

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]