Dear Sports Fan - Page 108 of 133 - An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports

A Soccer Fan's Dream Come True

What happens when the manager of West Ham’s soccer team calls a heckling fan’s bluff and invites him onto the field?

From NPR’s Snap Judgement podcast comes the true story of one soccer fan’s dream come true. Steve Davies was your prototypical English soccer fan. As we know from the New York Times’ excellent study of when people form lasting fan-team relationships, many of us, especially boys, become fans of a team that wins a championship when they are between 8 and 12 years old. When the British soccer team, West Ham, won the championship in 1975 it began a “massive love affair” for Davies. He attends as many games as he can and has a “West Ham ’till I die” tattoo on his arm.

West Ham Fans — Find out what happens when the West Ham manager calls a fan out onto the field

One day, when Davies was 22, he and some friends went to a West Ham pre-season game. Even though it was only a pre-season game, Davies and his friends had high hopes and high standards for their team. Davies in particular didn’t think the team’s striker (forward most attacker) was trying hard enough, and like die-hard fans everywhere, was vocal and colorful in telling him so. The venting and exhorting went on into the second half but the striker did not. He got injured and was substituted out. At this point, something truly remarkable happened. The team’s manager, Harry Redknapp, turned towards the stands and asked the most belligerent fan there if he thought he could really do better than the striker.

That fan was Steve Davies and the rest was history. You’ve got to hear this one:

Snap Judgement is a wonderful collection of stories collected by host Glynn Washington. I enjoy it quite a bit and I suspect you would too. Check it out on npr.org and snapjudgement.org or subscribe on your favorite podcasting machine.

Dear Sports Fan Joins Fancred

Today, I’m happy to announce that Dear Sports Fan has been invited to join Fancred!

Fancred is the world’s fastest growing sports social network. Being a verified account there means Dear Sports Fan will be one of the publications suggested to new users to follow when they join. I joined Fancred myself during the World Cup and have absolutely loved it so far. I’m looking forward to engaging with the Fancred community even more over the coming months.

Welcome Fancred people!

Dear Sports Fan provides accessible explanations of fundamental elements of sports, like “What is Being Offside,” that mainstream sports media assume their readers already understand. We arm our readers to engage in small talk about sports with the Cue Card recaps of yesterday’s top sporting events and to take part in deeper conversations about trending sport stories through posts like “Plot in Football: A Case Study.” Essays that explore the cultural context of sports, like “Sports and the Star Spangled Banner,” and some of its more bewildering aspects, like “Can You Help Me Understand the Playoff Beard,” offer light-hearted, analytical, and nonthreatening avenues for curious readers to approach sports.

Although the match between content created for non-sports fans and the world’s fastest growing sports social network may seem unconventional, we sports fans universally have people in our lives who don’t share our love for sports. Dear Sports Fan posts are safe to share with your boyfriend, girlfriend, moms, dads, siblings, cousins, and aunts! I’ve also found that some people who enjoy Dear Sports Fan the most are themselves sports fans. They enjoy our writing for its simple explanations of complicated concepts in sports they know less well, or our summaries of what’s happening in sports that don’t assume a whole lot of existing knowledge. After all, it can be hard to keep track of it all, from the changing distinction between a block and a charge to the current state of the Tour de France.

Whatever your reason for coming to Dear Sports Fan, I hope you enjoy it! Take you shoes off, put your feet up, and stay a while. If you’d like to ask a question or send me some feedback, you can email me at dearsportsfan@gmail.com or hit me up at Fancred!

Thanks,
Ezra Fischer

Understanding Tour de France TV Graphics

I’ve been watching the Tour de France since I was a little kid and it’s still often hard for me to figure out what the heck is going on during its television broadcast. A bicycle race is a complex thing. There are dozens of riders, riding in teams of nine, each with different uniforms and riding with different goals in mind. The riders start each day in a big clump, called the peloton, but before long, they have split up into groups that may be miles apart from one another. The television coverage jumps from group to group with cameras on motorcycles and helicopters. The announcers do their best to keep viewers informed about who and what they’re watching at any given moment, but even they sometimes have a hard time (remember that they, like us, are elsewhere watching the race unfold on screens,) telling the difference between one powerful tiny cyclist and another powerful tiny cyclist. Added to all this chaos are graphics on the top and bottom of the TV screen packed full of information. If you learn how to read these, they can actually help you keep track of what’s going on. Let’s go through a couple screenshots from yesterday’s stage.

Okay, there’s a lot going on here. Start with the obvious. We’ve got two dudes with their shirts undone, wearing spandex, and bicycling really, really hard. Forget all that, let’s focus on the information at the top and bottom of the screen.

On the top left is a black and white checkered flag and a distance, 5.9 miles. The checkered flag denotes the finish line, just like it does in car racing, and the distance is how far the cyclist leading today’s stage of the race is from the finish line. The Tour de France is broken up into 21 days or stages of racing. Each stage has its own winner but the person with the lowest combined time at the end is the overall winner.
Continuing on from the top left, the rest of the information at the top shows how the riders have broken up during the day of racing. We can tell that two cyclists (maybe these two guys,) are leading this stage of the race. The next group of riders is fourteen strong and includes a rider wearing a yellow jersey, which is an honor only the leader of the overall race (at the end of yesterday’s stage) is given. A minute behind the front pair, and somewhere behind the group of fourteen (usually they’re pretty good at getting timing on all the riders, but this was going up a steep, winding mountain, and I guess they lost track of some of it) is another group of three riders. Behind them is poor Mister Gadret, cycling all alone, and behind him is the peloton. The peloton is a name used to refer to the biggest group of riders on the road. At the start of each stage, there is only the peloton and everyone is in it. Sometimes though, by the end, there isn’t a group big enough to be referred to in that way. The race has broken the peloton.
I mentioned at the start that not all the riders in the Tour de France have the same goals. In addition to the yellow jersey of the overall winner, there are other prizes to fight for. One of them is the white jersey competition for the best young rider. How young do you have to be to qualify for this competition? You must be under 26. At the bottom of the screen, the scroller is showing the standings for the white jersey. Michal Kwiatkowski is in third place, only a minute and thirty eight seconds behind the leader. That’s a minute and thirty eight seconds overall, not in today’s stage.

Let’s try another:

This is earlier in the race — there’s 42 kilometers left, which even I know is more than 5.9 miles.
The race has yet to develop and there are a string of solo riders out in front of the main group, the peloton, which still includes the yellow jersey clad overall leader of the tour.
In this shot, you can see that each of the riders has a time next to his name at the top. The times are all how far behind they are from the rider leading this stage. So, L. Mate is only 13 seconds behind J. Bakelants and a 1:34 behind the lead not 1:34 behind J. Bakelants and 2:55 behind the leader.
Down at the bottom, the scroll is simply reiterating the information at the top, showing that the third chase group, which we know from the top consists of J. Pineau, is 2:40 behind the leader, A. De Marchi.

The Tour de France is the ultimate challenge for its riders but it doesn’t have to be for its viewers. I hope these pointers about how to make sense of the TV graphics will help you enjoy watching the Tour de France.

DSF Podcast Episode 1: Dennis Shaw Talks Soccer

In this, our first Dear Sports Fan podcast ever, I’m joined by old friend Dennis Shaw. We talk about the World Cup and the professional soccer league in the U.S., the MLS.

How to Watch the World Cup Championship Game

A month and a day after the World Cup began, we’re down to two teams, Germany and Argentina. It’s been the most exciting World Cup I can remember and I hope they produce a championship game today worthy of the tournament. I put together a few notes about the game for those of you who have been following the tournament and for people who are planning to tune in today for the first time.

If you’ve been following the tournament:

The game starts at 3:00 pm on ABC. WARNING WARNING WARNING — this is an hour earlier than the games have been starting. Adjust your routine accordingly lest you miss the first half. Why they changed the time, I have no idea, but it’s probably JUST TO TRICK US.

The game is being billed as “the best team against the best player” with Germany being the team and Argentina’s Messi being the best player. This is a clever analysis because it manages to insult literally every player on both teams except Lionel Messi. “Hi, German player,” it says, “you are not as good as Messi.” “Hi, Argentinian player,” it says, “you are an afterthought being supported solely by Messi’s brilliance.” Another way of expressing this would be to say that both teams are great, but that if you were to rank the individual players by skill, Messi would be the clear first on the list. After him would be five or six Germans before you finally saw another Argentinian. Soccer is one of the most collective games, so I won’t be surprised if the team with more better players beats the team with the best player.

Am I the only one who always feels a little let down before a championship game? Maybe it’s because the teams I have been rooting for (the United States and the Netherlands) are eliminated. Or maybe it’s because the World Cup, which I love so much, will be over in just a few hours. Or maybe it’s just because by the time you get to a final game there are only two potential winners which is so much less fun than four, eight, sixteen, or thirty two potential winners.

If you’re just tuning in now:

Today’s game is the sixty fourth and last game in the World Cup. The World Cup starts with thirty two teams who play a round robin in groups of four to determine who makes it through to the knockout round of sixteen teams. Those sixteen teams play a single elimination tournament, like March Madness but smaller and arguably more mad, until only two remain. Those two teams, Argentina and Germany, will play today to determine a World Cup Champion that gets to rein over the soccer playing world for the next four years. In 2010, almost a billion people watched the Championship game which dwarfs the 111 million who watched the Super Bowl this year.

You may be wondering why people like soccer. The reasons vary, of course, but I think it’s because it is really hard to score, and because of that you often get a tremendous buildup of tension as a viewer before an enormous eruption of joy when your team does score, and because it has the most teamwork and free-flowing movement of any game.

That’s all very good, but why is soccer so liberal and why do the players dive so much? The connection between liberal politics and soccer is mostly confined to the United States. In other countries, like Argentina and Germany, for instance, soccer spans the full political spectrum. In many countries, soccer is a political forum, but various professional teams will often be lodestones for different political parties. As for the diving, there are two main factors that play into it. First, there’s only one ref on the field to watch 22 players. Compared to three refs for 10 players in NBA basketball or seven for 22 in NFL football, the soccer ref has a nearly impossible task. Because it’s so much harder for a ref to see everything, players are more likely to be able to trick them by pretending to be fouled. Fouls also play a bigger role in the outcome of a soccer game than most other sports because soccer is so low scoring. If you can win a penalty kick by pretending to be fouled in the penalty box, or convince the ref to give an opposing player a red card, that may very well be the difference between winning and losing. Diving in soccer is more effective and more important than in other sports.

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Whether you’re a die-hard soccer fan, someone who has been casually enjoying the month-long World Cup, or someone who is planning on watching the game today just to feel united with 1/7th of the world’s population, I hope you enjoy the game!

Top Three Reasons Why You Should Watch the World Cup Third Place Game

Maybe the title of this blog post should really be “three reasons why the sports fan in your life wants to watch the World Cup third place game that might be good enough to convince you to watch it too.” It’s admittedly a thin line I walk, as a sports fan writing about sports for people who are more curious about the sports world than obsessed by it and who like to know enough to be conversant in sports but perhaps don’t really want every conversation they have to be focused on sports. I do, however, have some record of telling it how it is when I absolutely do not think a game is worth watching, and I happen to actually think the World Cup third place game between the Netherlands and Brazil on July 12, 4 pm, on ESPN is well worth the time. Here are some reasons why:

1. Third place games are usually great.

I will not go as far as to argue that the third place game is “often the best game” as the New Yorker does, but I will say that it’s often one of the most enjoyable games.

One of the unavoidable truths about soccer which influences almost every facet of the game is that every offensive move a team makes leaves it more vulnerable defensively than if it had not attacked. This is one of the reasons why soccer is so low scoring. A team that commits itself thoroughly to not being scored on, like the Netherlands did in their semifinal against Argentina by keeping as many players between Messi and their own goal as possible, can make it nearly impossible for the other team to score. In the third place game, there’s less reason for anyone to care that much about whether or not their team gets scored on. It’s for this reason that the third place game can be very high scoring. Since 1990 the World Cup championship game has averaged only 1.5 goals scored but the third place game has averaged 4 goals.

As long as a team you root for has a chance to win the World Cup, most fans are happy to make the trade-off of watching defensive soccer for the excitement of imagining that your team will actually win the World Cup. Once that possibility is gone however, it’s nice to watch soccer for its essential beauty — great athletes doing things with a ball and their feet, head, or chest, that given a million years you would not be able to replicate.

2. Brazil is like a roller coaster baby, I want to watch.

There have probably already been millions of words written in reaction to Brazil’s 7-1 loss to Germany in the semi-finals. My favorite article about it is from Grantland’s Brian Phillips. Here are just a couple of choice bits:

This wasn’t a match like other matches, wasn’t a loss like other losses… You could feel it wherever you were. It was the sense — obviously irrational, tautologically irrational, but still strong — that we were outside the realm of things that can occur.

Comparing it to an NFL game doesn’t work, for instance, because no NFL team is fanatically supported by a nation of more than 200 million people… And then, I’m sorry, but the scene in that stadium after the match, the intensity of the weeping — and not just the crowd’s, the players’ — did not, in deep and basic ways, resemble a big home playoff loss at Sports Authority Field. You knew as you were watching that Brazilian soccer’s idea of itself would never be quite the same, that the lives of these players would never be the same.

Knowing that Phillips is potentially underplaying the impact of that game on Brazilian players, coaches, and fans, how can you not be interested to see how they look and act and play a mere four days later, playing in the consolation game of a World Cup that they wanted to win so badly?

3. Swan song or cygnet chirp

First of all, baby swans are called cygnets. I have no idea how this is possible, but the internet tells me so. There’s always a little sadness in sport because players have such short careers. Soccer players are a little long in the tooth by 30 and well past their prime by 32. By 35 they are unlikely to be playing at the highest level anymore. (In fact, they are more likely to be playing in the U.S. professional league, the MLS, but that’s another story.) Events like the World Cup and the Olympics only heighten this bittersweetness because they only happen once every four years. I certainly felt a little sad thinking that their wonderful effort against Belgium might be the last time we see Clint Dempsey, DaMarcus Beasley, and Tim Howard play at a World Cup. For Dutch fans, the trio that they are feeling sad about is a trio of great players, Robin Van Persie, Arjen Robben, and Wesley Sneijder. This trio has lead the Orange attack for the last decade but seem sure never to win a World Cup. The closest they got four years ago when they lost in the championship game to Spain.

On the other side of things, time and age are also one of the reasons why hope springs eternal in sports. Again, because winning the third place game is not so important and because some of the more outspoken veteran players have openly groused about the existence of the game, we may see younger players in this game whose talent has been just raw enough to keep them on the bench for the tournament so far. You never know who might explode onto the scene.

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To celebrate the World Cup in Brazil, Dear Sports Fan is publishing a set of posts explaining elements of soccer. We hope you enjoy posts like Why do People Like Soccer? How Does the World Cup Work? Why Do Soccer Players Dive so Much? What is a Penalty Kick in Soccer? What are Red and Yellow Cards in Soccer?, Why do World Cup Soccer Players Blame the Ball? and Reflections on the 2014 World Cup for the United States. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil begins on June 12 and ends on July 13.

How to Watch the World Cup Semifinals: Argentina vs the Netherlands

Did you watch the 7-1 can of whoop-ass that Germany opened in Brazil’s home field? I may not be able to predict much about the second semifinal between Argentina and the Netherlands but I will give you a money-back guarantee (luckily this site is free) that it will be closer than the first one. What’s at stake is a place in the final game versus Germany. If Argentina wins, hope for the streak of South American World Cups being won by South American teams is still alive. The only thing worse for the Brazilian fans than seeing their team lose 7-1 might be seeing neighbor and rival Argentina win. If the Netherlands win, it would create a matchup between one of the most heated set of rivals in history. For perspective, in his excellent book, Brilliant Orange, the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, David Winner writes this about the World Cup finals in 1973 which the Netherlands lost to Germany:

The events of Munich, July 7, 1974 are burnt into the Dutch soul the way Dallas, November 22, 1963 haunts America. It may be obscene to suggest any precise equivalence between the horrific murder of President Kennedy and the losing of a mere football match; yet all over Holland grown men wept the day the Dutch lost the World Cup final to their neighbors. A TV poll conducted on the twentieth anniversary of the episode revealed that every sentient Dutch person recalled precisely where they were and what they were doing. Playwright Johan Timmers studied the calamity and its aftermath and concluded: “The defeat of 1974 is the biggest trauma that happened to Holland in the twentieth century, apart from the floods of 1953 and World War Two.”

So, there’s that. Either way, the fans win with a culminating contest between Europe and South America over world domination, or a rematch with deep, deep historic and psychological intrigue. Before all that though, there’s a semifinal to be played.

Argentina vs. the Netherlands, Wednesday, July 9, 4 p.m. on ESPN

Krul Oranje — Dutch manager Louis van Gaal made the right choice by subbing goalies before the shootout in the quarterfinals. Will his lucky streak continue?

Argentina looked great in their quarterfinal matchup against Belgium. Even though they only scored one goal, I thought they looked quick and decisive on the attack. Belgium, as we United States soccer fans now know, is no joke on defense. The Argentinians also looked stout on defense, particularly in holding off a desperate late Belgian surge. Argentina is led by a diminutive star midfielder, Lionel Messi. Messi plays fearlessly and far more often than should be possible for someone his size, shrugs off hard tackles to keep running towards goal. His talents are going to be tried more than ever in this game because his midfield partner, Angel Di Maria, will likely miss the game with a thigh injury. The Dutch have been known to play “cynically” or “pragmatically,” both terms that mean, “with a willingness to kick, trip, and bully an opponent star player into submission,” so Messi may be in for a rough day.

The Dutch team is an historic enigma but a relatively straightforward story if viewed without context. These days they are a solid team with good defenders, tireless midfielders, and a pair of clever and skilled strikers, Arjen Robben and Robin van Persie. What’s weird about that is that for generations, the Dutch have played soccer differently. Starting in the late 1960s and coming to its apex behind star Johann Cruyff in the 1970s, the Dutch played a brand of soccer called “Total Football” that emphasized a free flow of players who would interchangeably take up each other’s positions depending on the context of the game. This ideal was so powerful that it remained, altered but lodged in Dutch tactics until their current manager, Louis van Gaal, changed things. Grantland’s Mike L. Goodman writes about this transformation:

Before Van Gaal, the Netherlands played a 4-3-3. That wasn’t a choice, it was an immutable fact of nature. Death, taxes, and the Oranje play a beautiful, interchanging, possession-based 4-3-3.

Van Gaal looked at all that history, took it out back, and put it out of its misery. He sold his team on an idea of playing defensively and directly, no matter what critics back home might think. Speed and man-marking suited this particular group, not possession and positional interplay. Imbuing a side with an “us against the world” mentality is nothing new. Doing it when the world is, in this case, your own fans and history — well, that’s something else entirely.

It’s a hard choice to go against decades of history but van Gaal seems to enjoy making tough and controversial decisions, like he did in the Quarterfinals against Costa Rica when he substituted goalies for the shoot-out. That choice worked. What choices will van Gaal make in this game against Argentina? It’s almost time to find out. Enjoy the game!

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How to Watch the World Cup Semifinals: Brazil vs Germany

Neymar injury — How will Neymar’s injury affect the semifinal game between Brazil and Germany?

After all the sturm and drang of the first three weeks of the World Cup where it seemed like anything could happen, the four last teams left standing are all ones that have done it before. Between Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and the Netherlands, are 10 of the 19 World Cup winners ever and 19 of the 38 teams to have ever made the World Cup championship game. By my rough calculation, that’s 50% or more either way you look at it! The only team that has never won the World Cup is the Netherlands and they’ve made the finals more times (3) than any other team to not win it.

Lucky for us, predictable does not mean unexciting. Let’s start with the first semifinal:

Brazil vs. Germany, Tuesday, July 8, 4 p.m. on ESPN

Brazil is going to need the full power of all 200 million of its citizens pulling for the team in this game because it is decidedly short-handed on the field. Brazil’s captain, Thiago Silva, will miss the match with a suspension after receiving two yellow cards in the tournament so far. The bigger, or at least more written and talked about, loss is that of Neymar, Brazil’s star midfielder. Neymar will be out for the rest of the World Cup with fractured vertebrae after being on the business end of a flying Colombian knee during Brazil’s quarterfinal game. Neymar was Brazil’s best offensive player and their team talisman, if not leader. He is a playmaking midfielder whose skill handling the ball helps Brazil earn free-kicks and keep possession. His also has four of Brazil’s 10 goals during the tournament. He’s also, like Jozy Altidore was for the United States, somewhat irreplaceable. There isn’t another player on Brazil’s roster who can do what Neymar does. How much will these absences hurt Brazil? According to Nate Silver, not that much, it simply brings them down from a decisive favorite over Germany to a slight favorite.

Germany, on the other hand, is a very deep team. They’ve been a machine during this World Cup, winning four of their five games and giving up only a single goal in their victories. Their one hiccup was against a desperate, attacking Ghana in the second game of the group stage. Germany is so deep that they have been bringing star players like Miroslav Klose, who is tied for the all-time lead in World Cup goals scored, and Bastian Schweinsteiger whose name means “pig overseer,” into games as substitutes. Germany has been impressive but not particularly exciting except when pushed to be so by a fiesty opponent. I hope, for the sake of the millions who are planning to watch this semi-final, that Brazil pushes Germany and creates an exciting game.

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How Healthy is Soccer in the United States as a Brand?

US Fans — Fans gathered to watch the World Cup in great numbers but what will they do for the next three years?

One of the topics I’ve heard and read about the most since the United States team was booted (pun intended) out of the World Cup last week is what the team’s performance and our country’s World Cup fever might mean for the future of soccer in the United States. Cynics on the subject say that the country gets into the World Cup every four years and then studiously ignores soccer for the next three years and 11 months until the World Cup begins again. Soccer optimists (who owns soptimists.com???) claim that this year is different, that the interest in the World Cup is stronger than it’s been in the past and that we are closer than ever to joining the rest of the soccer loving world.

My friend Brian Reich of thinkingaboutsports.com falls somewhere between those two groups. Brian set out and sat down at the start of the World Cup to “watch every game of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, review every ad, and read/watch/listen to every bit of coverage and analysis I can find” and write about it on www.clumsytouch.com. His writing has been great fun to read and I admire and envy his dedication! His post on the question of soccer as a brand in the United States was innovative and insightful and I encourage you to read it in full here. His conclusion on the topic? That soccer’s current “resonance is deeply connected to the World Cup – a unique tournament, staged every four years” and that the “experience, the connection that people feel right now – cannot be sustained. A new and different approach to creating a ‘brand’ for soccer needs to be considered – before the energy is lost completely.”

What do you think? Is soccer gaining steam or slowly deflating? What would make you more likely to follow soccer between World Cups?

Wimbledon Men's Finals 2014: Federer vs. Djokovic

We all know the story: can the aging great champion hold off his younger competitors for just one more day? The thing is, that story was done for Roger Federer years ago after he was caught and surpassed, first by Rafael Nadal and later by Novak Djokovic, his opponent today. At age 32, which in tennis years is old, old, old, that classic plot just doesn’t work for Federer anymore. It’s actually hard to find sports parallels for what he’s doing in this year’s Wimbledon. Now Federer is John Glenn returning to space at age 77; he’s Miss Marple solving crimes in her dotage; he’s Sean Connery headlining action movies into his late sixties. Just by getting to this year’s finals, Federer has done the remarkable. If he were to win, he’ll propel himself straight into the inconceivable.

Tune in (or click in if you’re one of the millions of people who no longer tune their televisions…) to ESPN to see what happens. The match starts in a few minutes at 9:00 a.m. ET but could go for as long as four or five hours. I’ll be rooting for Miss Marple. Will you?