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.)
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.
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.
Wondering why this didn't get published until nearly three years after the events it describes? Please see here.
I said it was the Bargaining stage, but my wife said it was pure Denial: if Andre Marriner awarded the obvious penalty to Gareth Bale in the 20th minute instead of making an ass of himself (Marriner) for booking him (Bale) for diving, then maybe just maybe Newcastle decide that having the opportunity to play the spoiler against Arsenal gets them fired up enough to at least hold the draw. I mean, Koscielny's goal was pretty ragged, to say the least. A team with something to play for doesn't give that up, do they?
Unfortunately, that's the kind of not-very-rational counterfactual you have to console yourself with when your team has slumped enough through the final two months of the season to find themselves no longer in control of their own destiny. It's painful, but is it surprising? I can't be the only Spurs fan who was hoping against hope that they'd avoid another late-season collapse, while at the same time watching each match with an air of dread, kind of expecting it. Because what had changed to prevent it?
Everything looked so good after Spurs beat Arsenal 2-1 on March 3rd, and then followed it with a total shellacking of Inter Milan, 3-0, on Thursday, March 7th. With ten games to play in the Prem, Spurs sat 3rd, two points ahead of Chelsea and seven ahead of Arsenal. They would be heading back to the San Siro without having given up an away goal. Things were looking good.
Three days later against Liverpool at Anfield, Spurs held a 1-2 lead going into the final quarter of the match. Liverpool looked on the ropes--and then in the 66th minute Kyle Walker got too casual and badly misplayed a backpass(?) to Hugo Lloris, which allowed Stuart Downing to easily steal the ball and beat Vertonghen on the line. (Breathe deep to quell your revulsion, then watch it here.)
Am I the only one who felt it, right then, that feeling of a switch being flipped? One minute, Liverpool are looking like a team beaten, Spurs are 24 minutes from an unbeaten run of 13 matches, including five wins in a row, and then the momentum shifts. As the match progressed, Spurs looked like they might be lucky enough to escape with a draw, but then in the 81st minute Jermaine Defoe made a dreadful backpass, Assou-Ekoto fouled Suarez in the box, and Spurs somehow managed to lose.
From there, the wheels came completely off: four days later at the San Siro, Spurs got totally outplayed and only advanced in extra time off a last minute Adebayor goal to win on away goals. Three days after that, they lost at home 0-1 to 11th-place Fulham. In their next tie in the Europa League, against Basel, they went out on penalties. Their draw against Everton on April 7th dropped them from third in the league to fifth, as both Arsenal and Chelsea passed them.
Going into the last weekend of the season, they'd gone unbeaten in seven, with four wins and three draws, but still trailed Arsenal by one point for the final Champions League spot.
So here they were on the last day needing help from Arsenal/Arsenal's opponent Newcastle to get into the Champions League, save their season, and not lose their best player. Their best hope was to get an early goal to put pressure on Arsenal and perhaps enliven Newcastle. They should have had that chance in the 20th minute, but Marriner shafted them, and after that the team looked subdued for most of the rest of the match. Arsenal scored, and little hope remained. A limping 0-0 draw looked like a real possibility. Then in the 89th minute Gareth Bale uncorked one last amazing goal (doubtless raising his transfer fee by another £5 million in the process) and Spurs finished
the season with a vapid half-triumph. One more collapse, one more fifth-place finish, one more impending loss of their best player.
(Video of Koscielny's goal for Arsenal and Gareth Bale's for Spurs here.)
Repeat a tragedy enough times and it becomes a farce.
But how I was hoping. Spurs played most of the season with a squad containing one-and-a-half strikers (and even that may be giving Adebayor too much credit), a didn't-make-much-sense amalgam of players brought in to fill the hole left by Luka Modric's departure for Real Madrid, and one player whose rise has been so meteoric, I've been continually terrified that one day I'd hear he'd failed a PED test.
If you're an Arsenal fan, Spurs' yearly farce is delicious (read this ESPNFC post to get a feel for the level of gloating we're talking about), but for the rest of us, isn't Spurs-to-the-Champions-League the better story? Getting third or fourth place with a limited, unbalanced squad, keeping the most exciting player in the Prem, finding out what AVB can achieve when he actually stays with a squad for more than one season (which he's never done) and with the greater transfer flexibility afforded by Champions League money and the appeal to outside players looking to join a squad in the ascendancy? If you root for any team besides Arsenal, tell me the truth: would you rather see one-dimensional Theo Walcott against Europe's best, or Gareth Bale? It can't just be Spurs fans who are tired of watching Arsene Wenger scowl on the touchline as his overmatched team--always punching above their weight, but still--crashes out of the Champion's League and finishes the Prem in 4th place.
Yes, I'm a diehard fan, and yes, I'm biased, but Spurs in the Champions League would have been the better story. We've already seen the movie (just last year!) where Spurs finish fifth and lose their best player. But here it is: Hello Europa League for Spurs, Hello Real Madrid for Spurs' Best Player: The Sequel. So sure, I'm making my way through the five stages of grief. But how many stages of boredom are there?
It's not that I can't speak rationally about Tottenham Hotspur. It's just that doing so is like trying to describe a vibrantly colored oil painting in terms of whites, blacks and grays.
For example I could describe Spurs' inability to put Saturday's match away in terms of accumulated fatigue, both long- and short-term. It's a long season, and Spurs played in four different competitions this year (the Premier League, the League Cup, the FA Cup, and the Europa League), only recently got knocked out of the FA Cup, and still are participating in the Premier League (obviously) and the Europa League. Furthermore, before Saturday's game, they played on Wednesday, the previous Sunday, and the Thursday before that. Having watched more high-level soccer than any normal human should, I can assure you that the outlier physical specimens that are professional soccer players still need 96 hours between games to (more or less) fully recover.
So a young team, facing a shocking level of pressure (Spurs haven't won the top level of English football since the '60s), after a ridiculous four matches in ten days, took a one goal lead while playing up a man and somehow let off the intensity a little. Speaking rationally, is that really a surprise?
It isn't. In black and white, clearly that's part of what happened.
But let's bring some color back to the discussion. The other part is that Tottenham Hotspur are cursed.
I awoke Saturday feeling great excitement while trying to ignore an equally great trepidation. That morning, my beloved Tottenham Hotspur were playing their most heated match of the year, the North London derby against their arch-rivals Arsenal. This specific iteration of the derby was arguably the biggest league match between the two teams since the advent of the Premier League. Tottenham started the day in second place in the league, three points behind surprise league-leaders Leicester City. Arsenal sat in third place, three points further behind. No one seems to believe that tiny Leicester can possibly hold on to win the league, so pundits have started saying that this Tottenham team, playing the best football seen from a Spurs side since perhaps the '60s, with the youngest squad in the Premier League, allowing the fewest goals, and holding the best goal differential--these are not the sort of descriptors normally given to Spurs, by the way--should be considered favorites to win the League.
Everyone picking Spurs as favorites to win the Prem clearly hasn't really watched a whole lot of Spurs over the years, and so they're failing to take into account a very important detail. I have, and I know better.
You see, Spurs are cursed.
Here's one example: Spurs went into the final game of the 05-06 season up a point against Arsenal for the final Champions League spot, only to have literally half their squad get violently sick the night before with what was initially reported as food poisoning. They lost their match, Arsenal won theirs, and Spurs ended up in the UEFA Cup.
(The illness turned out to have been caused by a particularly nasty virus, but still, it's fair to call that ridiculously bad luck.)
Here's another: The 2011-2012 Spurs side was in third place for most of the season, but then took a dreadful six points from a possible twenty-seven from late February until late April to fall to fourth--still usually good enough for Champions League football--and then got booted from qualification because stupid Chelsea, outside the top-four in the Premier League that year, won the Champions League. Need I even mention that the third-place team, only one point ahead in the table, was Arsenal?
Here's one more: When a player hasn't scored in a long, long time, a match against Spurs frequently puts an end to that streak. I've lost count of the number of times that an opponent has scored, after which the commentator says something along the lines of, "That's his first Premier League goal in 216 games!"
So when Saturday's pre-match commentary mentioned that Arsenal's Alexis Sanchez hadn't scored since October, a run of eleven straight games, his longest drought since he came to the Premier League, can you understand why my trepidation took on a hue of terror?
But let us not forget that I am a fan of Tottenham Hotspur in the purest sense of the word. Thus while I was desperately afraid, as experience would dictate, I was simultaneously stupidly optimistic, because love makes you stupid.
I watched the match through my fingers. Spurs had all the early possession, but you could clearly see their relative lack of experience. All they could do with their possession was take bad shots and made bad decisions. Everyone wanted to be the hero. Still, they were, for the first part of the game, clearly the better team. I prayed that they'd score and settle down a little.
Predictably, it was Arsenal who scored first. Aaron Ramsey took advantage of some poor defending and put Arsenal ahead in the 39th minute.
Arsenal carried their 1-0 lead into the second half. But then in the 55th minute, Francis Coquelin got a stupid yellow card--his second stupid yellow card--for a reckless, pointless foul on Harry Kane. Match referee Michael Oliver literally shrugged as he pulled the card out his pocket, like What choice do you leave me? And suddenly Spurs were up a man with 35 minutes left to play. And then Toby Alderweireld scored off a corner kick in the 60th minute, and Harry Kane scored a gorgeous goal in the 62nd, curling the ball in from the side of the box, and just like that, Spurs had a 2-1 lead.
And what happened next? Did Spurs, the better team, playing at home, up a goal and a man, with a style based on high pressure and ball possession, take over the game and calmly dispatch the weakened and demoralized Arsenal side? Did they quickly get another goal and put the game away?
Do I really need to answer that?
No, they did not. Instead, I had to watch the sad spectacle of Spurs trying to kill off the clock like there were four minutes left instead of thirty. I watched them waste time, cheaply give possession away, and defend desperately. Anyone who turned on the game during the last twenty-five or so minutes would have been hard pressed to believe that Arsenal were down a man--they had most of the possession and all of the thrust.
And of course--of course!--it was Alexis Sanchez who scored the equalizer in the 77th minute.
It had to be. This is Spurs, after all.
A rational person would tell you that there's no such thing as a curse, that this is the kind of weird confirmation bias that sports fans so regularly participate in. But being a sports fan has nothing to do with rationality. Really. Ask any true fan. If he's being honest, any true fan will tell you that rationality doesn't hold sway because in sports you are dealing with a realm of magic. It is because of the power of this magic that we watch grown adults run around playing what should be children's games, except in front of thousands of people for millions of dollars. We plan our days around watching. We sweat and we scream. Rational? Good god no. But once you have seen that there is magic in the world and it is on display on the sports field, its power can be too much to overcome.
So yes of course Alexis Sanchez scored the equalizer. Only a desperation tackle by Kevin Wimmer against Aaron Ramsey in the final minutes kept Spurs from losing the game outright. And thus Spurs squandered yet another chance. Of course they did. It had to be that way.
So now will I finally do the rational thing and pull my energy away from this fruitless endeavor? Will I watch only idly for the rest of the season instead of opening my heart and pouring myself into something over which I have no control? Of course not. This is not the realm of rationality. This is the realm of magic and of love, and in the face of such forces I am powerless.
I once likened being a Real Madrid fan to being in a dysfunctional relationship with a supermodel. But during the Florentino Pérez years, it's been more like an abusive relationship. Sure, she's super-hot, but you get a little tired of getting gut-punched all the time.
At least I did. My interest in Real Madrid has waned to the point that I pretty much only watch the Clásicos and maybe some late-stage Champions League matches--the equivalent of checking out the supermodel's exploits on Facebook from time to time.
Up until right now, when they hired Zinedine Zidane to replace the never-likely-to-succeed Rafa Benitez as manager, Rafa Benitez whom they hired because they fired Carlo Ancelotti for reasons that only make sense to an abusive supermodel. Zidane seems almost certain to fail, even if he is actually ready to manage a team of superstars like Real Madrid. He may be, but talk about a trial by fire. But for him to succeed would require the crazy abusive supermodel to stop being a crazy abusive supermodel, and on the evidence, she's never going to get the therapy she needs until Pérez is gone.
Zidane remains the most beautiful player I've ever seen, so I'll have to watch, for a while anyway, because I want to know: Can he translate the beauty he was able to create on the pitch as a player into a similar beauty as a manager?
So I'm getting involved with Real Madrid again. I'm not quite sure how to extend the analogy in this case. Maybe it's like the supermodel has started hanging out with someone who's even hotter. When the supermodel proves too insane, maybe the hot friend will move on to something better.
Only the entire soccer world is watching. Zizou, I wish you well.