Some days, the pain washes over you. You find yourself swimming in black seas. You know the feeling, yes? You go looking for any bright spot, anything, to light up the darkness.
Well, how about this: Tottenham Hotspur are playing in the Champions League (and beat Borussia Dortmund, 3-1, yesterday, hooray). Meanwhile, Arsenal are playing in the Europa League.
Go suck, Arsenal.
I watched the Champions League final more out of obligation than any sense of joy, which feels so very weird for me to say. There was a time, way back when, when I wouldn't miss a Real Madrid match on TV (of course there were far fewer of them back then), and the idea that I've stopped caring mightily about the Champions League final feels very very strange indeed. I didn't even know what sort of injuries Real was dealing with--I thought I remembered that Gareth Bale had missed the round previous--and I knew basically nothing about Juventus except that Gigi Buffon was their goalie.
The thing is, I'm finding it increasingly hard to care about soccer right now. It's not just that there are too many matches for a spectator to care about. It's that there are too many matches for the players to stay in top form, and so too much of a season is just a grind. I would ask, "Who has time to watch something like that?" but I guess the answer is many many many people. I mean, I used to be one of them.
Anyway, it turned out to be an enjoyable match. The first half saw well-matched, fluid play, and two goals of utter footballing wizardry. The perfection of Cristiano Ronaldo's pass to dead-sprinting Dani Carvajal for the first goal makes no sense to me. Surely Carvajal is screaming the whole way, but from what I can tell Ronaldo never once glances in his direction, and yet the pass is inch-perfect. Is bat-like echo-locative hearing also one of Cristiano Ronaldo's abilities?
And while Mario Madzuckic's bicycle kick lob goal was also a wonder to behold, it is the build-up play for that goal that blows my mind. Leonardo Bonucci hit a 40-yard diagonal to a streaking Alex Sandro, who volleyed his cross into the middle, where Gonzalo Higuaín chested it down and volley-passed it to Mario Mandzukic, who chested it down and then volley-bicycle-kicked it for the goal. I mean, what can you say about that but holy shit? The damn ball didn't touch the ground again after Bonucci sent it on its way. Amazing. Mandzuckic's goal also shows just how incredible the goal sensibility of top players really is, that he can be facing directly away from goal for a substantial period of time and still hit a ball with that kind of accuracy. Yes, there was some luck, but it wasn't just luck. His sense of where he was in relation to the goal and where Keylor Navas was likely to be in relation to him is simply that well developed.
(I would love to embed a video of the goals I'm speaking of, but I can't find one. If you have better luck than me, would you post a link in the comments?)
So it was 1-1 at halftime, and looking relatively even. And then the second half happened.
One wonders what halftime in the respective locker rooms looked like. I have to imagine that the Juventus locker room looked like every classic sports film we've ever seen (except in Italian). I imagine Massimiliano Allegri congratulating his squad on a well-played first half and exhorting them to greater heights in the second.
Meanwhile, over in the Real Madrid locker room, I imagine Zinedine Zidane standing in utter silence. All the players are looking at him, waiting patiently. The lighting is dim, indirect. No one says anything. It's cool in there, almost cave-like. And then Zidane says, quietly, "It is now time to show the world what you can do." And the players all nod their heads silently in assent, then return to the pitch, in order to display the incantatory power of those words.
Because the second half looked like a game of sharks-versus-seals. Real Madrid were just that much better. Juventus had given up three goals total through their Champion's League campaign to that point. Real Madrid scored four in 90 minutes.
And what are we supposed to make of Zinedine Zidane as a manager? He led Real Madrid's B-team to consistent mediocrity before being given the job of managing Real, which is merely the single most scrutinized managerial job in all of footballdom, and that's before trying to appease insane club president Florentino Pérez. After a season-and-a-half at the helm, Zidane has managed to win the league once and the Champions League twice. How the hell is that even possible? You could, I suppose, argue that the Champions League wins were just radical good fortune (but I won't--you don't take down Juventus' defense like that without playing brilliant football), but to finish ahead of Barcelona over a 38-match league season requires a level of consistency that can only be achieved by being actually, you know, really good.
How much of the credit do you give to Zidane? After all, it's not like he's actually one of the people kicking the ball around. The squad is full of world-class players. But results of this consistency would seem to suggest that Zidane's years being one of the greatest players in the world equipped him to be one of the greatest managers as well.
I had the idea earlier this year that I would simply take my desire to take a trip to Europe this spring to cover part of the tennis clay court season--maybe Madrid and Rome--and simply make it happen. I added in the possibility of going to London to see one of the last ever matches at White Hart Lane before Spurs leave for a year at Wembley before moving into their new stadium for the 2018-2019 season. I looked at the calendar. Holy crap. The North London Derby could fit into that trip.
Did I dare? At the time, I was reading books about manifestation and considering just how much I wanted to believe them. I could make a case that I had the money. I could argue that this was a perfect opportunity to act "as if": I want to write about tennis. To do that, I should attend major tennis tournaments, right?
I decided against it. I put my powers of manifestation into other parts of my life. These parts don't have the same immediate gratification as "Trip to London to see Spurs play Arsenal at White Hart Lane! Trip to Madrid to see Rafa Nadal at the Madrid Open!" but one hopes what I am working to manifest now will in the future pay even greater dividends.
So I watched the match on TV.
Spurs have been on a massive upswing since Mauricio Pocchetino took over, but they have had to work to overcome a tendency to capitulate mentally when the going gets tough. Last season, you might recall, they chased Leicester all the way to the last matches of the season. Spurs held a 2-0 lead over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the antepenultimate game of the season--Spurs needing a win to keep themselves alive in the title chase--then gave up two second-half goals to draw and give Leicester the title. They followed that up with a loss to Southampton at the Lane and a final-game loss to already-relegated Newcastle at St. James' to manage to finish third behind goddamn Arsenal. I was so disgusted by the abjectness of their late season performance last year (which I wrote about here) that I've only watched desultorily this season.
Which means I have only been partly aware that somewhere along the line, Spurs have become a group that go into most matches believing themselves to be the better team.
When you've been a Spurs fan for the period I have been (a bit more than ten years, starting when Prem games began to appear regularly on TV), you have probably come to view the North London Derby with a mixture of excitement and deep trepidation. You want Spurs to win so bad because you hate Arsenal, as is proper, but you know--you have witnessed--that most of the time, Spurs will somehow find a way to fuck it up.
So I won't claim that I watched yesterday's match from the position of smug superiority that I imagine Arsenal fans have watched most North London Derbies during the last twenty or so years, knowing both that they have the better squad and that their opposition are furthermore bound to discover a new way to lose. But I did witness a Spurs side that outclassed and outplayed Arsenal pretty much everywhere on the pitch. In the last ever North London Derby held at White Hart Lane, they looked like the better team, they looked determined to win, and they won.
I wasn't there to see it. But I watched it on TV, and it was still pretty great.
With that win, Tottenham assured themselves, for the first time in 22 years, of finishing above stupid Arsenal in the table. Perhaps unfortunately, this doesn't feel magical. It doesn't feel like some major victory. We still lost to Chelsea a week ago in the FA Cup semi-final, and with four matches left to play, we're still four points behind Chelsea in the table. An FA Cup victory would have made the season special. A Prem trophy would make it amazing. But finishing above Arsenal? I love it. But it feels only like the start of something, not its finish.
I've been talking a lot about how we as sports fans seek the remarkable in the sports we watch. The remarkable things become a part of us, we carry them with us--but sometimes details slip our minds until prompted.
The other day, I was cleaning up space on my DVR and found that I'd saved the Netherlands-Costa Rica match from the 2014 World Cup. I couldn't for the life of me remember why, but I figured there had to be a reason, probably a great goal or something, so I fast-forwarded through it. No goals. 0-0 at the end of extra time. On to penalty kicks. Wait a minute, I said. I remember this match. This was the match that the Dutch dominated, doing everything but scoring--they put several shots off the post or crossbar. And then in the 120th minute, just as extra time was about to end, Dutch coach Louis Van Gaal substituted first-choice keeper Jasper Cillessen, sending on Tim Krul, ostensibly their penalty specialist. I'd never seen anything like it. According to the announcers, Krul had only saved two of twenty PKs he'd faced in the last two seasons, but on this day, he certainly believed in himself. He got in the face of each of the Costa Rican kick takers, clearly talking trash. He indicated that he knew which way they were going to go with their kicks, and apparently he did. He faced five kicks, diving the right way all five times. He saved two of them. His teammates didn't miss, and the Netherlands advanced, 4-3. Remarkable.
(Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the Dutch finished their semifinal match against Argentina at 0-0 as well. This time Van Gaal had used all three substitutes. In the shootout, it was the Argentine keeper, Sergio Romero, who made two saves. Cillessen made none. Argentina advanced to the final, 4-2.)
Clinton and Trump are obviously both horrible candidates, so today I am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States. My campaign slogan will be "Make America Great for the First Time." The gist being that no country that hasn't won a World Cup, or at the very least isn't legitimately competitive at the international level, can truly be considered great. I mean, after the beating they handed us last night, we're practically a protectorate of Argentina.
Tottenham Hotspur went to St. James's Park needing only a draw against Newcastle United to end a 21-year streak of finishing behind their arch-rivals Arsenal in the Premier League. To be more specific: they needed only a draw against already-relegated, nothing-to-play-for-but-pride Newcastle United.
Would you like to guess the final outcome?
Spurs completely humiliated themselves, losing 5-1. Arsenal, meanwhile, handled their business comfortably, beating Aston Villa 4-0 and stepping over Spurs to finish the season in second place.
I could offer analysis but I won't. Today my disgust as a fan reigns. The players and coaching staff seem to have forgotten that they make millions of dollars a year not because they're terrific athletes and tacticians but because people like me find watching terrific athletes entertaining. And when they can't even be bothered to try to be terrific, well...
At least Mauricio Pochettino had the decency to say he was embarrassed by the result: Mauricio Pochettino apologises to Tottenham fans for Newcastle shambles.
Of course the main story from this weekend's Premier League action was the trophy presentation for Leicester at the King Power. The overture, a 3-1 victory over Everton, was their victory lap, and the fans sang and celebrated the whole game. Yea, there was much rejoicing. Congrats to Leicester for their amazing accomplishment.
In the meantime, other teams still had stuff to play for. The most important matches featured the teams still battling for Champions League spots. In terms of both a club's finances and prestige, the difference between a 4th-place finish and the spot in the Champions League playoffs that go with it, and 5th place and having to settle for the Europa League, is huge. To a lesser extent, the difference between 3rd and 4th, and direct entry into the Champions League rather than needing to play a playoff, matters too. While I can't think of a season in which the British 4th-place team failed to qualify for the group stages--the 2nd place team from Armenia, or whatever, rarely poses too stern of a challenge--there's still the not-insignificant energy expended on the home-and-away tie.
Thus ManU's 0-1 win at Norwich, coupled with Man City's 2-2 draw at home to Arsenal, could add up to major repercussions for next season. Man City remain in 4th place, two points ahead of ManU, but because ManU have a game in hand, Man City have lost control of their own destiny. If ManU wins out against West Ham and Bournemouth, and Arsenal beat dreadful Aston Villa--a near surety--then Man City would find themselves in 5th place and playing in the Europa League next season. Not exactly where City were supposed to be in advance of Pep Guardiola's arrival. Oops.
My beloved Tottenham Hotspur went into the weekend with a vastly superior goal differential over both Arsenal and Man City, meaning that there was no realistic scenario in which Spurs could fail to finish at least third. From a certain perspective, the difference between second and third is negligible--2nd earns the team a bit more money, but both positions earn direct entry to the Champions League and the riches that go with it.
But I don't share that perspective. I'm a die-hard fan. To me, the most important thing, now that Champions League play is assured, is that Spurs finish ahead of Arsenal. We need to finish 2nd. We need to finish 2nd.
Unfortunately, for the third week running, Spurs dropped points from a winning position, this time holding a 1-0 lead at White Hart Lane over Southampton before giving up two goals to lose 1-2.
So it comes down to this: unless Arsenal beat Aston Villa by 14 goals, a Spurs draw against at Newcastle earns them second place. The mid-season Spurs side would be a shoo-in for at least a point against Newcastle, but the team we see now is a lot different.
Mauricio Pochettino continues to say that the problem is that Spurs are young, that they haven't fully developed the mental/emotional toughness that will give them the tenacity to close out matches. And while some results from earlier in the season support this hypothesis--their 2-2 draw against Stoke at White Hart Lane back in August, in which Spurs held a 2-0 lead, and their 1-1 draw against Leicester at the King Power a week later, in which Dele Alli's 81st minute goal was negated by a Leicester equalizer only a minute later, both come to mind--that's not what we're seeing now. In each of the last three matches, the same thing happened when Spurs took the lead: their intensity fell through the floor.
The main players for Spurs are clearly exhausted. They literally cannot maintain full competitive intensity for 90 minutes. To say that they're showing cracks under the strain downplays what's actually happening--consider that both Dele Alli and Mousa Dembélé have been suspended for the rest of the season because of violent conduct charges, in both cases the incident in question being far more petulant than actually dangerous, a loss of discipline and control.
I was hoping that I could get to the final weekend or two of the season with only a relaxed interest in the results--"Oh, look, ManU lost"--but it hasn't turned out that way. Now, I go into the final week worried that Spurs are going to fail to get that final point against Newcastle, and that Arsenal will finish ahead of them in the league for the 21st straight year.
Which fuck that. COME ON YOU SPURS.
Leicester City are champions of England. Tottenham Hotspur's ill-tempered 2-2 draw at Chelsea yesterday gave Leicester an insurmountable lead atop the Premier League table with two matches remaining. The 5000-to-1 Foxes have completed the greatest sports underdog story of all time. Congratulations to them.
It's an amazing story, and I don't want to diminish it, but as a fan of sports I can't help but feel a little disappointed. The end was something of an anti-climax. The better story would have happened had Spurs won at Stamford Bridge. Then Leicester City would have needed a draw or better at home to Everton on Saturday to clinch the title. Imagine 32,000 fans at the King Power Stadium absolutely losing their minds, witnessing something they never would have dared believe were it not actually happening. It would have been insane.
Instead, Spurs blew a 0-2 lead and the title fell into Leicester's lap.
I need to remember that Leicester controlled their own destiny this past Saturday. Had they beaten ManU at Old Trafford, the title would have been theirs. I shouldn't lay all or even most of the blame at Spurs' feet. But I'm struggling not to.
For Spurs, there was a lot more on the line than just the prospect of an emotionally thrilling Leicester City-Everton match on Saturday. With the draw, Spurs clinched no worse than fourth place in the league, guaranteeing themselves a spot in Champions League qualifying for next season, but no Spurs fan will be satisfied unless Spurs take second and finish ahead of their arch-rivals Arsenal for the first time in forever. Every year that I've been a Spurs fan, I've been forced to watch as Arsenal supporters celebrate St. Totteringham's Day, the day Arsenal's league finish ahead of Tottenham is assured. I don't know if there's a commensurate celebration for when the tables are turned, so I want to create one. We'll call it St. Arsenhole's Day, and I really want to celebrate it.
On paper, Spurs should be able to put this thing to bed. They have a three-point lead and a gigantic goal differential, with matches against mid-table Southampton (home) and fighting-against-relegation Newcastle (away) to finish the season. It seems reasonable to expect that Spurs could simply assert themselves as the superior side, beat Southampton on Sunday, and lock up second place.
But Spurs have had multiple opportunities to do so (or even grab first) this season already, and they've failed to take them. Back on March 5th, they were up 2-1 against 10-man Arsenal with 30 minutes remaining but only managed to hold on for the draw. (Had they won back then, they'd have 2nd place locked up now.) Last week, they were up 1-0 against a pretty sorry West Bromwich Albion side, but again let down and settled for a draw. Their collapse against Chelsea yesterday was particularly ugly. Not only could they not close out the match with a 0-2 lead, they couldn't hold their discipline at all. Their players received nine yellow cards, the most ever in a Premier League match. They might still lose Mousa Dembele and Eric Dier to retrospective action. Last week Dele Alli lost his shit and got himself suspended for the rest of the season for a petulant punch to a West Brom player's midsection. This week, it was like, instead of learning from his mistake, the team decided to follow his lead.
It's clear that the energetic cost of the season--38 matches in the league, two domestic cup competitions, plus all the matches (and the travel) in Europe--has ultimately become too much to bear. The letdowns against West Brom and Chelsea show that Spurs couldn't maintain competitive intensity. Their season isn't over yet. I think of a 2016 St. Totteringham's Day and I shudder. I won't be comfortable until second place is officially in the bag.
If you are a fan of sports at all and you aren't putting some energy into paying attention to the English Premier League this year (for the uninitiated, I'm talking about the sport we call soccer), you are missing one of the great sports stories of all time in Leicester City and their run at the Premier League title.
At the beginning of April last year, Leicester sat last in the Premier League on 19 points with nine games to play. The bottom three teams get relegated; Leicester were seven points behind the 17th-place team. Over those last nine matches, Leicester won seven and drew one, a remarkable run, and finished the season in 14th place.
A little more than a year later, they sit atop the Premier League table. They have a seven-point lead over my beloved Tottenham Hotspur. Assuming Tottenham are perfect the rest of the way, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games to win the league.
Is it possible for a team, rather than the players on it, to take performance enhancing drugs?
This is a Cinderella story like nothing anyone has ever seen. No analogy I've been able to come up with does it justice. Some cupcake 16-seed winning the NCAA tournament? That's not even close to an adequate comparison. Even the best teams in the NCAA, teams comprised entirely of future pros, are still teams of amateurs in their teens and early 20s. No matter how good a top team is, it's still incredibly green and unformed. The top teams in the Premier League are comprised of seasoned professionals, some of the best players in the world.
Furthermore, to win the NCAA, that storied cupcake 16-seed Cinderella only needs six wins in a row. Whereas I would argue that league soccer is the best, fairest competition in sports. Every team in the league plays every other team home and away, and the winner is the team with the best overall record over the course of the entire season. No one gets an easy path against weaker teams. There's no series of playoffs. There's no way a lucky streak can bring, for example, a sub .500 team into March Madness, as can happen in NCAA basketball. There's no way a terrible division can allow an 8-8 team into the playoffs, as can happen in the NFL. In league soccer, a six- or eight-game hot streak is lovely, but it won't make up for poor play for the rest of the season. The league rewards consistent form from the start of the season until the end--a season that lasts from mid-August until mid-May, by the way. Over a 38-match, nine-month season, there's no choice but to navigate inevitabilties like accumulated fatigue and injuries.
Leicester City were given odds of 5000-to-1 to win the Premier League. By contrast, the Philadelphia 76ers were 250-to-1 against winning the NBA Championship in 2015-16. Read that again. The Philadelphia 76ers, a team that literally sometimes plays a cardboard cutout of ex-US Men's National Team member Mike Burns1 as its fifth player[citation needed] and has gone 25-631 over the past eight seasons,[citation needed] were considered twenty times more likely to win their championship than Leicester City was.
The closest analogy I can come up with to what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing is this: Imagine an NBA where, instead of us having to put up with shitty teams in the NBA East like the Knicks and the 76ers embarrassing themselves and professional sports and all of America every year, each year the worst three teams get sent down to play in the D-League, and the top three teams from the D-League get to take a shot at the NBA. I have no idea what cities are in the D-League and neither does anyone else, so let's pretend that at the end of the 2013-2014 season, the Knicks, the Nets and the 76ers all got sent down to the D-League (as they should have been) and the, let's say, Des Moines Flamethrowers, the Huntsville (Alabama) Stilettos and the Boise Waterboarders all got to come play against Golden State and San Antonio and the rest. Let us further posit that the NBA had done away with the salary cap and just let the market dictate who played where, which would mean that top teams would regularly raid lesser teams for quality personnel, creating a self-perpetuating system in which the top teams make the most money so they have the most money to spend on the top players who then go play for the top teams.
(Quick aside: Have you ever found it interesting that in America, where, notwithstanding Bernie Sanders' presidential run, the word socialist is pretty much a slur, we choose to enforce salary caps in most of our professional sports in order to maintain "a level playing field?")
Now imagine that Boise, featuring players no one else even dreamed of wanting, had a 3-0 series lead and a 15-point lead at halftime in game four of the NBA finals. Imagine the bricks you would be shitting.
To call this story "unlikely" doesn't do it justice. If it weren't actually happening, it would sound like a story that had been rejected by Hollywood as too maudlin.
That's what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing.
Speaking of Hollywood: Leicester City's biggest star is their forward, Jamie Vardy. Just four years ago, he was plying his trade for non-League Fleetwood Town. Now, he is the second-top scorer in the Prem, currently just one goal behind Harry Kane. The conversation piece of, "If they made a movie about your life, who would play you?" is in his case not academic: right now the rumored names include Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio. (All of whom, you'll note, are North American. But maybe that isn't as outrageous as it sounds. Currently topping the list to play me in the movie version of my life are two Brits, Sir Ben Kingsley and Idris Elba.)
And if I were Hollywood, why stop there? A rags-to-riches biopic about handsome, hardworking Jamie Vardy is pretty obvious. Why not a movie about the unlikely triumph of the team as a whole? We'll frame it within a rom-com and give it a name that's a trying-to-be-clever pun on some football term. Off the Bar or something like that. I'd cast Rosario Dawson as a plucky, slightly scattered and strangely nationalistic American graduate student who initially abhors what she derisively calls "soccer," declaring early in the movie that "properly speaking, football is a game played by armored gladiators carrying the ball with their hands." But she discovers an unlikely love for the game via her equally unlikely relationship with a diehard Leicester City fan, a charming, hangdog pub owner played by Colin Firth. I see dollar signs, Hollywood, and I know you do too. Call me.
But I digress.
As of last weekend, Leicester officially qualified for next year's Champions League, which means that next fall, several teams from the most rarefied stratum of world football--teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and AC Milan--will come to tiny Leicester to do battle in the King Power Stadium.
At this point, only a collapse more complete than Jordan Spieth's will keep them from winning the title. As I said above, assuming Tottenham are perfect from here, which includes a game at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games. That's three wins or two wins and three draws. Admittedly, they have a tricky schedule the rest of the way. They play against West Ham this weekend, then have a relatively easy game against Swansea at home, a somewhat trickier match against Everton, before finally finishing the season with tough matches away at ManU and Chelsea. But the assumption of perfection from Spurs is, shall we say, a difficult one. And Leicester's path got a little easier when West Ham, holding an outside chance at qualifying for the Champion's League, had a bad call in their game against Crystal Palace two weekends ago lead to a player being sent off, after which Palace equalized, and then last weekend against Arsenal saw blown offside calls incorrectly negate a goal for them and allow one for Arsenal. Both matches ended in draws. Then West Ham lost at home to a mediocre Manchester United side in a quarterfinal F.A. Cup replay yesterday. They're looking a bit demoralized.
I am a die-hard Tottenham fan. This is Spurs' best chance of winning the league since 1961, and I'm nevertheless excited at the prospect of Leicester winning the league. You should be too. You should watch. It's gonna be great.
1 Mike Burns played defense for the USMNT during the 1998 World Cup. The USMNT played Iran in the first game of the U.S.'s ignominious 32nd-out-of-32-teams performance. On one Iranian corner, Burns had the defensive role of covering one of the posts. Iran scored between him and the post, leading some clever commentators to point out that on that play, actual flesh-and-blood Mike Burns would have been outperformed by a cardboard cutout of Mike Burns.
In response to the USWNT's outrageous lawsuit against US Soccer, in which they assert wage discrimination because they only get paid a quarter of what the men make:
The women play on a pitch half the size of the men and their games last half as long. As there are no factual errors in my analysis, it's clear they only do a fourth as much work and therefore should get one-fourth the pay.
It's science.