Tag: Sports

When I swam the Atlantic in the mid-1980s, I knew absolutely diddly about American sports.  Basketball?  Buncha tall guys throwing the ball into a net thingy, like the “netball” which girls played back home.  Football?  Large men running into each other with little to show for it, and when not doing that, forward passes (illegal in the game of rugby) and matches which featured short bursts of action between long commercial breaks.  Baseball?  Sorta like “rounders” (another girly game).

Then I got invited to my first baseball game.  The Chicago Cubs were playing at Wrigley Field, against some other team (don’t remember which one), and the “starting” pitcher was a guy named Greg Maddux.

Remember, I knew diddly about the game of baseball:  how it’s played, the terminology, the strategy, and what constituted a “good” player.  When it came to that last, though, I learned that really quickly, because watching Maddux pitch was like watching a skilled surgeon performing a routine operation.  I’d never seen anything like it before, and I’m not sure I’ll ever see it again.  Only other players in different sports come to mind:  Shane Warne (cricket), Michael Jordan (duh) and Lionel Messi (soccer/football) ever came close — and in the case of Jordan, it opened up basketball for me, but only as long as he was playing.

Back to Maddux and that game.  I had a good seat behind home plate, and was blessed by having my boss — a serious baseball fan — sitting next to me, who could explain the game to me.  I didn’t need any tutoring when Maddux was on the mound, because greatness doesn’t need much explanation.  I didn’t know a curve ball from a slider from a two-seam fastball;  all I saw was batters swinging the bats like little kids, and seldom hitting any pitch Maddux threw.  As I recall, he pitched seven innings, allowed zero runs and only had a couple of on-base hits scored on him.  Cubs win.  Cubs win.  Cubs win.

Of course, at that time the Cubs as a team sucked bigly because the loathsome Tribune Corporation (the owners) didn’t need the team to win, only to make a decent game of it.  They didn’t spend money on great players because the fans loved the guys they did have — admittedly, some very good ones like Ryne Sandberg, Mark Grace and Andre Dawson — but other than Maddux, their pitching sucked and nobody could hit the ball or even field the ball other than the aforementioned three players.

Of course, when Maddux’s (cheap) contract came to an end, the Tribune Corp. offloaded him like a bad smell, sending him to Atlanta where he amassed feat after feat, in the end winning 300 games, striking out over 3,000 batters, for a career ERA of some minuscule number, four Cy Young Awards and a first-round pass into the Hall of Fame.

I know all this about him because I wasn’t a Cubs fan but a Maddux fan — so when he was traded I quit watching the Cubs forever.

Anyway, this is not a post intended to promote a discussion of how other pitchers were “better” than Greg Maddux — I can hear the Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton supporters warming the engines as we speak — but an appreciation of the man himself.

When his Cubs contract ended, Maddux turned down the Yankees and went to the Braves for less money — because he thought Atlanta would be a better place to raise his kids than New York.

And who could argue with that?

Here’s a YooChoob video which does a better job than I have (unsurprisingly).

…here’s an example:

Argentina defeated France in the World Cup final in Qatar on Sunday in a penalty kick shootout following a 3-3 tie.

I know, I don’t care about this either (I follow club football, not international), but for our cousins Across The Pond, it’s one of those situations where, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it’s a pity that both sides couldn’t lose.

France (old enemies) vs. Argentina (enemies since the Falklands War in the 1980s).  No wonder the Brit response to the above was just a national shrug.

Oh, and for those Murkins who think that “soccer” is boring:  this one was a thriller.

As Longtime Readers know, I’m a huge fan of football (“soccer”) so I was quite distraught that Team U.S.A. was booted out of the World Cup last week.  This, however, got up my nose, big time:

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte trolled President Joe Biden on Twitter, poking fun at the U.S. men’s soccer team’s loss to the Netherlands in the World Cup during the first round of the tournament’s knockout stage on Saturday.

In a promotional video posted Saturday morning, Biden had wished the U.S. team luck as the players prepared for their match against the Netherlands. Holding a ball in front of the White House, Biden said that “it’s called soccer” before reassuring the team, “You’re going to do it!”

Following America’s 3-1 loss on Saturday, Rutte responded to Biden’s tweet, saying, “Sorry Joe, football won.”

No, Dutchie… soccer won.  Had your little nation of Heinekenners fielded a team of NFL-type footballers and played us at, oh, Lambeau Field in late December, you would have lost by a lot more than 3-1.

We’re not that good at soccer because we just don’t care about it.  It’s pretty much the same as Formula 1 — we have perfectly-good alternatives right here.

Oh, and now that the Germans have been eliminated, you may actually have a chance of winning the Cup, instead of being beaten like a drum by them since, errrr, 1939.

And speaking of the disturbances in the early 1940s… you’re welcome.

I know that many of my Murkin Readers turn up their noses at football (okay, “soccer”) because it’s boring, full of fainting goats errr histrionic players and so on.  In many cases, these opinions are justified, but often they are not, when you know the context and background to the action.  Allow me, then, to give you an example.

The English Premier League (EPL) is justly regarded as the toughest upper-rank division in football, far ahead of similar leagues in Italy, Spain, Germany and even Brazil.  EPL footballers are recruited from all over the world, as you will see, and in many cases these guys may play for their national teams, but often struggle to shine in the talent-studded EPL.

The competition among the EPL teams is intense because unlike America’s NFL, where franchises can change cities and therefore fan bases pretty much at will, football clubs are forbidden by law to move around, and thus the supporters’ loyalty could be rooted in over a century’s tradition.  (Hence, by the way, the frequent affrays that occur between the various teams’ fans when they come up against each other.)

The EPL is also expensive, as players cost many millions of dollars to acquire, and their weekly salaries are sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.  Thus the pressure to perform at a high level for both teams and players is intense, and can be cold-hearted when the standards aren’t met.

Let me give you just two teams as an example of all the above, and highlight a couple of players as well.

Tottenham Hotspur is a London-based team, and their results over the past several years have been disappointing to their fans.  Seldom in the top four at season’s end, there’s actually little reason for them not to be near the top, except maybe for bad management or, as in recent times, indifferent tactics and performance by their midfield and defense.  (I should point out that Spurs’ brilliant goalkeeper Hugo Lloris plays for the World Cup-winning French national team.)  Tottenham’s attack is almost without peer, not just in terms of individual skills, but also in their ability to pair up and create goals and assists for each other.  The two mainstays of the side are England’s #1 striker Harry Kane [sic]  and South Korea’s equally-skilled Son Heung-Min (who’s captain of the Korean team).  At the end of the past five seasons, Son and Kane have not only amassed dozens of individual goals, but also a dizzying number of assists for each other — the combination of goals and assists for this pair is, and has long been, consistently higher than any other EPL team has been able to match let alone beat.  The duo is not only supported but worshiped by Spurs fans.

Sadly, though, Son has had a drop-off in form for the opening half-dozen matches of the 2022/23 EPL season — there seems to be no apparent reason, because he’s pretty much at his peak in age, ability and dedication — but his recent slump caused Tottenham’s manager to bench him for their last match, against Leicester City.

Which brings me to the other team.

Leicester City (pronounced “Lester Sitt-eh” for the Murkins) has been around since 1884, and has seldom won many competitions — sometimes even relegated to the lower leagues — but in the past half-dozen years has become a powerhouse, even winning the 2015/2016 EPL championship.  Since then, Leicester has settled down as a tough middle-order club, with occasional stunning victories over much stronger clubs.  They have not been a pushover, in other words — until the beginning of the current season, where they have been languishing near the bottom of the EPL table.  So Leicester’s next match, against Tottenham, was going to be fought as underdogs — but always with the knowledge that Leicester are a lot better than their lowly position on the table would indicate, even without their star England striker Jamie Vardy through injury.

So on to the match (match #8 in the 35-match season), played two weeks ago.

Despite the disparity in league position, the two teams were fighting on equal terms, goals being scored freely and almost all resulting from great performances and masterful tactics from both sides.  At the 60-minute mark, Spurs were leading 3-2, but the scoreline flattered them because Leicester was not only controlling much of the game, they’d also missed a couple of goal-scoring opportunities which could easily have resulted in the score being reversed in their favor.

At this point, then, the Spurs manager made a substitution, sending on the woefully out-of-form Son Heung-Min.

And magic happened.

Please take fifteen minutes out of your day to watch the highlights video, because it’s one of the most dramatic sporting events I’ve ever seen.