And DC United enters the fray ...

... not much time to post now, except to say that I've begun a DC United project in anticipation of co-posting with Fullback Files. And it's going astonishingly well - DC lead the league after 8 games.

There are significant reasons for this. The roster DC ended the season with - with DeRo and McDonald - is significantly superior than the one the actual Utd started with. I cleaned out the left-sided morass and started over with a Brazilian kid (Eron, who cost $950k) and Bob-bay Con-vay. Yeah, I traded a draft pick and Stephen King for Bobby Convey. On a flyer, I offered Woolard to Houston for Geoff Cameron, and they went for it - seriously? In short, the starting 11 is formidable, as I'll detail later.

So, huge advantages - everyone's healthy, for anoter one. I canned the entire front office staff; the physios and fitness coach I recruited are world class. As a result, Boskovic has been ever-present at his favored inside-left, deep creative role. Same for Jed Zayner at right back - he's been outstanding and reliable and freakin' healthy.

Charlie Davies has 7 goals and an assist in 8 games.

Hello again, frequently-forgotten blog

It's clear, by this point, that I'm not a nose-to-the-grindstone kinda guy. While I've learned to work around my millisecond attention span, it does cut me off from the Greater Levels of Awesome available to those willing to do some heavy lifting. Witness this blog; witness my D&D games; witness my lack of career. Yeah.

It's not like I've stopped playing football-oriented games (which was the point of this blog, at some level) - it's just that I've stopped writing about them. So here I am, starting something new, hoping that I can summon the discipline necessary to not only play a game routinely but also to write about it without fail.

To that end, I've recently discovered a fun community-centered Football Manager pastime: FM challenges. In these, FM players take on difficult or strange assignments and compare outcomes. There's something about the eerie life-likeness of the results generated by FM that makes this whole thing tasty - deep in a save-game, you start to imagine the world implied by it: If San Marino makes the group stage of the World Cup, what else is different? Superheroes? Oil crash? Regional wars? (This is a topic for another time, I think ... hmm.)

So, the challenge I'm going with is called "Loyalist - Opportunist - Masochist." I'll take over a specific, very-low-league team, and try to rack up as many points as possible in-game during a 10-year span.

The challenge title refers to the possible approaches: Does one stay loyal to the small club and hope for serial promotion, does one jump up leagues as quickly as possible by taking new employment, or does one shoot for the moon, building a promotion-specialist reputation by continuing to seek out new employment at the lower rungs?

Fascinating decisions. I'm guessing my team will be crap. More as results dictate.

Embracing history, with muted horns

From the sixth minute on - from the moment Rico Clark tried his one-and-only dribbling ploy (drag back, surprise-nutmeg!, burst-into-space-behind) and failed - I was watching this game with a phantom bone in my throat. The denouement seemed almost predictable: Boateng rifling in the first from 25 yards, Clark immediately trying to elbow someone in the face, getting carded, getting yanked, crying on the bench; I saw it all in that moment - hell, I felt it coming the moment I saw the lineups on the screen. Sarah was sitting on the couch and had seen them before me. Something in my face changed, obviously, because she said into the silence, "I knew you wouldn't be happy." Sometimes you see it coming. Usually it doesn't help.

Watching England capitulate to Germany today, though, I felt a twinge of satisfaction - not at their failure, really; more at the USA's spirit. England fans will talk today about what could have been, what might have been, if Lampard's strike was correctly judged a goal. They will paint pictures of the lands that lie on the other side of a correct call, of rolling meadows of green bathed in sunlight, a triumphant England resurrected from the ashes of a two-goal deficit.

And they'll be right, in a way. The game would have taken a different aspect had England tied - and Lampard later banged one off the crossbar; what might have been? And so on, and so on ... it felt that the Three Lions staggered out of the half still imagining other possible futures, still stuck inside their own heads, playing 11 separate games of football on 11 imaginations, while Germany grew more and more expansive and lovely. The difference between the history England's players were living, and the history they had dreamed of making, grew too great.

And it occured to me: How would USA have reacted? We don't have to look back far to wonder. To the injustices of the Slovenia game; to further injustice and frustration against Algeria; and finally, to managerial fumbling and defensive lapses - the response to difficulty from this USA side has been unyielding, resolute, confident and brave.

USA teams have a tradition of responding furiously to adversity - it is not exactly this I am lauding. Led by Donovan, Dempsey and Bradley, this group was defiant and full of craft. They reacted to the crush of events by thinking clearly about the tactical situation, by making the changes they had to make (even when doing so was a tacit admission of failure), and by outworking the other team when it counted. I am proud of the way this team played. I am proud of their hunger for work, their comfort with each other, and the intelligence of their decisions during the games.

For the rest of the day, mellow relaxation. Laundry. Argentina-Mexico. Dreaming of next time.

(If you're new to this, tell you what. Give Argentina-Mexico a chance. It should be beautiful beyond words, and will give you something to talk to that guy at work who wore a green jersey last week.)

On an island; brunch thoughts

I know I should be writing about USA-Ghana, and I will, but gently, gently ... the loss, coming as it did, has given me no end of frustration, and my subconscious has claimed the topic as its own, driving me to solitude so it can use all my energy in the digestion effort.

After the loss last evening, Sarah, Sue, the girls and I weeded and dressed the garden. 96 tomato plants, 50 peppers, row of beans, row of onions, row of carrots; eggplant, pumpkin, squash, cucumber. I picked some rhubarb which I'll turn into rhubarb crisp. My hands ache and throb today. I felt better once we were done.

So England and Germany are playing during my hand-throbby brunch, and it occurs to me that England are having the same problem I am: They're alone out there, lost in their own thoughts and fears.

Germany move as a group, and their most vivid attribute is the creativity of those runs - forget front post-back post; the Mannschaft swirl into danger zones like curls of smoke from a pipe of Turkish hash. And it is Turkish, isn't it? Looks to me like Ozil is the x-factor, the mover that prompts the movement, the open mind at the center of this flock instinct.

As I wrote this, England snatched one back on a German mistake, and suddenly is full of vigor. Can they translate this energy (which I suspect is still internal, all of them playing their ego-movies of joining '66) into enough? I guess we'll get to see how technical the German defenders are in the second half.

Damn.

Fuck.

End of regular time: A play in one word

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Can't breathe.

So close, so close.

What's the next move? Will tactics have any say in the final 30, or is this just gut check after gut check?

Hard to say sorry sometimes

I have to give it to Bob Bradley: It takes stones to admit you're wrong with the whole world waiting to comment. Starting Clark was a classic Bradley move, sticking with his guy'in a big situation against a chorus of disapproval from the 'fucking idiots' at home.

Sometimes you do the wrong thing for all the right reasons. I'm sure Rico Clark is a great guy, a team player, a worker; I know he covers a tremendous amount of ground. Problem is he anticipates the game like a U11 forward, and so a great deal of the ground he covers is just to make up for the previous over-run, and so on, and so on. It's like he's tacking in a heavy wind, zigging and zagging around the ball wildly. And in possession - ugh. He cannot dribble. He is uncomfortable with advancing the ball. He panics and freezes under pressure in possession.

I, for one, will simply take the 30th minute sub of Edu for Clark as the acknowledgement of the error. I hope all my fellow fucking idiots will just let it drop, should we not find the necessary magic in the second half.