Sunday, July 15, 2018

2nd day q-finals

England beat Sweden handily.  2-0.

Croatia beat Russia in overtime penalties; tied 2-2 and then in penalties 4-3.

I want to talk about the keepers for a minute in these two games.  I mean, I WANT to talk about seeing some of the players on all four teams with the looming maddening darkness behind their eyes - look at Kane, from England, as the strongest example of this.  But quite a few of the other forwards are getting that haunted gallows look.

Who will survive the cup?  Will we ever hear from the Swedes again?  Perhaps their destiny is on the altar, tied up and sky-clad, waiting for the knife and the release from this world of insanity, corruption, and decay.

I would say that about Russia too but between Putin and the Great Bear and FIFA I think we know that none of them will survive the year.  The ones that take their own lives today will be remembered as the clever ones, the fortunate ones.

But about keeping!  Both of England's goals were scored on headers, as was Croatia's first goal.  Headers are tough to judge, as a keeper, and while good offense wins games and makes things exciting, good defense and magical keeping prevents losses and wins tournaments.  How exciting was Brazil to watch?  Pretty exciting - a lot of action!  How boring was Belgium?  But - who won?

Finally, even if you haven't watched any of the cup, please take 90 seconds and look at this, with an eye to the goalkeeping:


It looked worse from other angles; when Russia scored it looked like the Croat keeper watched it go by him.  Seriously - a jump and an arm and he could have gotten under it.  Both team's overtime goals looked the same; a keeper who allowed the ball to be kicked by him.

You might think that there's been a lot of games this cup decided by shootouts, but statistically about 20% go to the shootout.  You might also, realizing that FIFA brought in $4.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2014, with $2.2 billion in expenditures, think that by making the games go into overtime they have more time to sell ads.  I'm not saying that anyone is throwing the game or performing more poorly than they could in the Cup because of financial incentives, but I will say that almost all of the FIFA executives from the past 20 years are either in prison, currently under observation during trial, or cannot come to the US because they'll be arrested for corruption.

Who will survive the Cup?  The executives - the wealthy men who profit from it, and their masters from beyond consciousness, from the place where madness reigns.

I write this in the afternoon.  My children are playing upstairs; the adults in my family are resting.  I am even now filled with dread and restlessness, but the nights are worse.  The nights are worse now with the soccermen haunting and flooding my awareness.  This is a difficult Cup, a Cup of morbidity and decay, and I have drunk too deeply.

The next game is Tuesday, France v Belgium.  Probably Belgium.  After that is Wednesday, England v Croatia.  Almost certainly England.  Those are the semi-finals.  Then Belgium will defeat England in the finals - their defense isn't the kind that England's good at dealing with.  But anything can happen in the Cup!

  -Dave

Rob said: Well I’m as surprised as anyone.

Mike said:  I watched. It's true! It was good. I'd hate to be that Russian guy who missed the goal totally on the penalty kicks. His life is over.

Best part was tunneling to the UK in a VPN and watching for free on UK1.

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