sprawler

Opinions cultivated upon watching select games from this weekend-

--Lots of midweek considerations taken in Italy. Surely they don't remember the trouncings they took last year from their providential English foes from this campaign, do they? I'd say more but they all proved blandly victorious and/or fortunate, and I'm boycotting anything substantial dealing in Beckhamry, so onwards to the entertaining, verbose and self-indulgent shit. (worth mentioning, for I wept and came and shat simultaneously: Momo Sissoko's goal and creation of, a feat as long overdue as humanly possible.)

--Los Galacticos are now at the mercy of Juande’s once-was-lost-but-now-is-found tactical acumen, which sounds like it should combine to become one, a triumphantly all-powerful word. (Tactulmen? Tacticlen?) An ever-mutating 4-4-2—more often than not into a predatory 3-4-3—laid poor Betis at their knees and took a sixpence of hacks at the poor Andalusian lad’s chassis in just the first half alone. And yet, and pen me a sensationalist if you must, but Madrid, despite the grand performance, had nary a soul or really anything resembling; some might have seen a team rounding into peak form or making a firm statement about the gaining status of their fusing under Ramos, but I saw what I saw and was looking into eerily hollow eyes yesterday. A fucking bombardment of individuality and timely & opportune positioning, yes (you’re forgetting Betis’ repeated misses, too), but nothing underneath for support, to a level of which I’m here reigning fire and brimstone all over this half dozen-in-a-half parade. It’s more than just “lacking a spine” (they didn’t), too; it’s a celestial crisis, difficult to pin but almost as though the team were soaked in bleach, like a destitutely poor man’s Manchester United. And that makes both the looming CL tie and the Rafa-to-Real rumors so much more to me than they already were.


With that all being said, the real question here is why the fuck can’t Raul get one last game as a Spanish international? I guess it makes it all-the-more-fitting that he notions to the name on the back of his uniform and not the front after scoring. His display was romantic & sublime, straight from the belly of the whale—all of which will be touted but only alongside the team, most of which weren’t near worthy of even shaking the man’s hand on the day.

--I’ll forever have difficulty finding subjectivity in any and all things Manchester United until an opponent receives a penalty at Old Trafford, and so I won’t begin feigning neutrality now, not for nobody. I will hail a normally repugnant Big Sam for his much-belated Christmas tree, for in entrusting the embattled Santa Cruz as his gold star on top, Rovers were able to do what so many before them failed in by simply breaching Man U’s goal. (EVS or not, don’t care)(Rio has been screaming to be caught out lately.) But from a stylistic, eccentric and/or idiosyncratic standpoint, aka the shit I watch, love, & bleed the game for, am I really supposed to be that impressed by an early & tame poached capitalization of Ryan Nelsen and a free kick (stunning, yes, but the exception that proves the rule; if deadballs [even knuckling ones] were what I craved and lived for then I’d be shedding a wheelbarrow full of tears about Beckham. I’m not)? I see the finest of carpets laid for their innovation and champagne football, but where is the innovation when one of the quartet of three 30 million lb. strikers and the “WBP” (quotes cannot be understated there) is always gonna be on the bench? I don’t even have any sort of fleeting affinity for Tevez, the odd man out, but he deserves a spot over Nani, plain and simple. I don’t mean for a half hour after going a goal up, either; that ain't cutthroat, and for their, and my, money I want cutthroat when meeting my makers.

Maybe it’s because it’s as though every goal they score, no matter the quality, they always seem forced and tied to the whipping post, often created not out of enchantment but of boredom, banality, fear or snobbish disdain, always with an I’m-far-too-good-for-this-shit prose, and for whatever reason that offends the piss out of me. Maybe it’s because I’ve matured in a world where the Yankees are the devil incarnate, and where capitalism’s fruits have soured and grown mold of the highest rancidity, and that those things stink of Man U to high heaven. Maybe it’s because having brothers oppositely manning the back flanks not once, but twice, and fucking Brazilian twins the latter no less, is straight out of your worst prototypical feel-good bullshit sports romp. I think in the third Major League the 2nd baseman and shortstop were estranged Dominican twins or something. Maybe it's sour grapes. Probably some concoction of all, but I thus cannot support Man U, for they are the Yankees/2005 Spurs of England, of football, and for yours’ and brevity’s sake, fuck that on all counts.


--One could and would slave for days in search of a situation in American sport more partisanly damning than Lukas Podolski facing former and future club Cologne Saturday. What’s worse, it might not even equal the Germany/Poland affair he bagged a brace in during the Euros. Maybe so, though this weekend’s featuring a loss and a yanking at halftime (for the American, no less) will certainly sting longer. Dude’s emotions must be an indefinable wreck right now. I think this makes that brace over the summer all the more inconceivable and tenebrous, too.

--If there is one tactical principle I hold truly near and dear to my breast while throwing all others overboard, it’s that there’s an ocean of pitch out there, and that anyone treating it as such and perusing through the infinite combination of ways to arrange ten men inside a rectangle and choosing that that’s less traveled (especially within England’s orthodoxy) is forthwith my hero. You can imagine then what Rafa Benitez choosing the most vanilla 4-4-2 he could assemble (complete with Lucas holding) from his Reds roster against City does for me. The previous affair, as aforementioned through livebloggery, showcased a barbaric 3-4-3 with a revolving door midfield of jettisoning wingbacks and holders, and Ryan Babel to boot, and I’d assumed then and now that the game ended up a cracker because of this calculated gamble (and its subsequent substitutions), this hobgoblin idea caught somewhere between firmly entertaining the idea of scoring and damming any and all waves Pompey attempted making.

Is it any wonder then that, despite their routine second-half Kop procurement, Liverpool fell further behind for the title? Seven points is neither close nor far from atop February’s dreary summit, but it is indeed a breadth stretched further than the previous five point gap, quite needlessly at that. That Pompey game was both the last time ‘Pool took the field and two fucking weeks ago, so I’m heavily suspect to enough decisions as to actually list them mid-paragraph:

1a. Alonso was suspended, so as much as I’d like to, his absence can’t be put on Rafa.
1b. That also doesn’t mean that in a game and league where goals are both an absolute necessity and premium, that Lucas should be anywhere near the heart of midfield, and especially not to flank Mascherano, England’s new Makélélé incumbent. What (little) Lucas contributes is much less important than
1c. Replacing Gerrard and his lineage to Fernando Torres, which should mean (in my opinion, though I’d just as soon, and actually even sooner, not choose a 4-4-2, but for simplicity’s sake) Benayoun as an attacking central mid, Dirk on the right, and hey, here’s a thought, a Babel-Torres partnership?
2. Aurelio scores from a play nobody ever scores from, and gives a soundly quality performance in his first time midfielding, and gets omitted for the paltry Andrea Dossena? When I said vanilla, I meant it.
3. His substitutions are what routinely get critically smacked, but that might be because he does things like puts Nabil El Zhar on a goal down on the hour and waits another fifteen before cutting his deck again. As responsible as he was for the win a fortnight ago, I wonder just how culpable Rafa is for this.


Like I said though, the Grand Canyon seven points is not, and it actually seems a great deal closer than a loss and eight points would have been. Maybe I could even view it as some straight-up karmic shit I can’t control, like Rafa’s treatment of Bellamy, like Bellamy scoring against every damn club he was disowned by this season, like his goal being of the most random of deflections, like coming from two down at halftime to steal three points at Eastlands in November, and thus I can move forward towards Reds/Real in a few days accordingly, principles in assured tow.

--Will somebody else in Holland (Ajax, please) buy somebody from below our border so I can watch more than just PSV on Deportes every weekend?

--From here on out thou shalt cry conspiracy every time Barca falters in league. That was just not a red, embellishment be damned. It was unabashed, African (as was Yaya's goal; profligate examples why they're deified 'round here), and no doubt a yellow, but the contact appeared wholly incidental, as Keita's leg was tucked, and I'm here to chalk it up to another in dis-fucking-graceful decisions made across Europe this season. Rather than this being sign Spain's crusades are henceforth resuming, that is. Why? Well, from there on, blaugrana tropical football tended to exhaust and seep and fall victim to counters (and sheer pants-shittery, Victor) a man subtracted, for the success of waxing jubilant and empyrean needs not a backup plan often. This happens eleven v. eleven, we'll talk again. But as it now stands the gaps in the world's two zeniths sit even at seven, though they feel oh so queerly different, a fathom and a furlong and aridity in between.

--It’s nearly impossible to gain any insight from a preseason tournament about an MLS team, especially one as consummately fucked and fractured as the current Galaxy incarnation. I can predict, however, that failing in becoming champions of the pan-Pacific will neither convince DB to bring his handsome ass back here nor Milan to conclude their xenophobia anytime soon. (Hopefully through the remaining negotiations the LA brass will remain fervently stuck in, in complete recalcitrance to their on-pitch product.) Another prediction: I shan’t spend a dime on seeing this team play this calendar year, barring the absolute miraculous. A pity of epic proportions surely, though the fact that no one in Los Angeles cares while sharing in Milan’s rude gall, and that it's strangely and sadly contagious, even to those encompassed by the sport like myself, might just be worse.