The Lost writers room sounds a lot like conversations between the Roth brothers:

DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who's like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We'll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game...
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play...
DL: And then we'll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it's fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

Check out Jew Benny Feilhaber scoring a stunning winner for the US in the final of the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

At last, getting excited about the US soccer team seems at least theoretically possible.

UPDATE: Michael Winn of Weil, Gotshal and Manges points out that Feilhaber was joined on Sunday by another MOT, defender Jonathan Bornstein.

Returning to this whole issue of the US soccer team...

... I would point out that it's hard to feel too optimistic about Team USA's chances, when our own president -- not normally a man who's shy about indulging in nationalistic bluster that exaggerates American ability out of all proportion to reality -- can offer only this lukewarm assessment:

"Of course, my team is the U.S. team. They tell me we've got a good team. Now, whether it's good enough to win it all, who knows? But I know they'll try their hardest."

Try their hardest? Not exactly a vote of confidence! Still, it's refreshing to see him make a judgment informed by the evidence for once.

It's time for some very intense baseball blogging

Here's something that's just unbelievably dumb. I was watching the Mets-Braves game the other day. With two outs in the top of the sixth and the Mets up 1-0, Xavier Nady, hitting seventh for the Mets, singled. Then, with the number 8 hitter Kaz Matsui at the plate, Nady stole second. Now that first base was open, the Braves, sensibly, chose to intentionally walk Matsui so as to pitch to the Mets pitcher, Tom Glavine. Fine. Whereupon, both TBS announcers agreed that having Nady steal second had turned out to be a negative for the Mets, since it ended up meaning Glavine had to hit. The obvious implication was that the Mets should not have had Nady steal second.

Supposedly knowledgeable baseball people say variants of this frequently, and it just doesn't make sense. The announcers are arguing that for the Mets, Situation A, in which Matsui hits with a guy on first, is preferable to Situation B, in which Glavine hits with men on first and second. That means that for the Braves, Situation B must be preferable, what with baseball being a zero-sum game and everything. But if the Braves truly preferred Situation B, they could have gotten it by intentionally walking Matsui as soon as he came to plate, while Nady was still on first. The fact that they chose not to do that suggests they in fact preferred Situation A. And the fact that the Braves did what almost every team in that situation in the history of baseball has ever done suggests that they're right.

To be clear, if the announcers wanted to boldly challenge conventional wisdom -- and in this case the Braves decision -- by arguing that it really is better for the pitching team to concede putting men on first and second for the reward of getting to face the pitcher, I'd be interested to hear their argument. I think a case could even be made for it, at least in situations where the pitcher was a less experienced hitter than the veteran Glavine, or where the number 8 hitter had more power than the weak-hitting Matsui. But the point is, it hadn't even occurred to these guys that the Braves' decision not to walk Matsui immediately, with Nady still on first -- and the similar decision of just about every other team that's ever been faced with that situation -- suggested they were wrong.

If anyone's still with me after that, I'd like to go a bit further. There are two related factors that are confusing the announcers here, I think. The main one is the fact that Situation B (Glavine hitting with men on first and second), while not being preferable for the Braves to Situation A (Matsui hitting with a guy on first) IS in fact preferable to Situation C: Matsui hitting with a guy on second. Everyone agrees that Situation C is the worst situation of the three for the pitching team. That's why once Nady steals second, it's a no-brainer to walk Matsui. But the fact that it makes sense to walk Matsui in that situation leads the announcers to the perverse and self-evidently wrong conclusion that it would have been better for the Mets had Nady never stolen second at all.

The other reason this is hard for them to get their heads around is that it involves thinking about (not actually departing from, but at least thinking about) one of Baseball's Golden Rules of Strategy. If you are a baseball announcer or pundit of any kind, thinking critically about BGRS's is absolutely off-limits, and may make your head explode, hence the unwillingness to do it. In this case, the particualr BGRS at issue is the BGRS that says you don't intentionally walk someone if there's already a guy on first, since the walk will advance not just the guy being walked, but also the guy on first. So you're in effect conceding two bases, and putting a guy into scoring position, by moving him from first to second. This BGRS, like most BGRS's, almost always makes sense, and it makes sense in the Mets-Braves example too. But because it's a BGRS, it doesn't even occur to the announcers that you're legally allowed to intentionally walk someone when there's a guy on first. It's just not on their radar screen as something that could ever happen. If it were on their radar screen, they would play it out in their heads, and say: "hmm, the Braves could have chosen to intentionally walk Matsui even while Nady was still on first. Maybe the fact they didn't suggests that they've concluded they're actually worse off having men on first and second, even with the pitcher at the plate." This is why the BGRS's are problematic: Not, interestingly, because they can't always be applied. Everyone kind of understands that, and managers are often surprisingly good about breaking with BGRS's when it makes sense. (One brave manager even intentionally walked someone with the bases loaded, forcing in a run, because his team was up by 2 runs with 2 outs in the 9th inning, and he wanted to face the next hitter, rather than give the current hitter a chance to drive in both runs and tie the game. It worked.) But because even when BGRS's can be applied -- as in this case -- they discourage the critical thinking that allows you to actually understand what's going on.

Good ways to start an interview, #1

ESPN.com Sports Guy Bill Simmons talks to Malcolm Gladwell:

When I started reading you back in the mid-'90s, I remember being discouraged because you made writing seem so easy -- technically, you were almost flawless, and since I knew I couldn't write that well, you were one of those visible writers who made me feel like I was going to be bartending my whole life. You never waste a word. You come up with cool arguments and angles for your pieces, then you systematically prove/dismantle those same arguments and angles, and you do it in an entertaining, thoughtful, logical way. You never allow your biases to get in the way. You're better at writing than me in every way. Basically, I hate you.

So I always thought to myself, "Well, maybe he kicks my ass as a writer, but I guarantee he's a huge dork who knows nothing about sports and couldn't talk to a girl to save his life." Then we went out for drinks in New York City in December, argued about basketball and football for three hours, and then some smoking-hot bartender started hitting on you at the end of the night. She was giving off that same vibe that the 25 girls give the "Bachelor" during the first episode when he has, like, only four or five minutes to meet everyone, so everyone has to hit on him at warp speed. Now I have decided that you need to die.

The New Yorker, Yo La Tengo, Ruud Van Nistelrooy

A story in The New Yorker about the English football league is one of those exciting but slightly anxiety-provoking things where two things you love are brought together. It's great and everything but it's almost too much, and you feel a bit left out, like at a party where all your friends from different parts of your life meet each other. For you it would be a bit like if Yo La Tengo sang a song about Alan Moore's "The Watchman" comic. Or, I suppose, if The New Yorker did a story on Alan Moore's "The Watchman" comic. Or if The New Yorker did a story on Yo La Tengo. Anyway, you get the idea. (For some reason the story isn't online so I can't link, but it's probably a safe assumption that all 3 or so regular readers of this blog subscribe to the NYer anyway.)

So anyhoo, it's a good piece, and I certainly have no argument with those who claim that something's been lost since the league was transformed by an infusion of money in the early 90's. I enjoyed as much as the next man the privilege of paying 8 pounds to stand at QPR for 90 minutes and call the ref a wanker with little more than a cup of weak tea for sustenance. And I enjoyed it more, I'd wager, than John Cassidy -- who betrays no real love for the game itself in however many thousand words -- ever would.

But I do think it would have been worth pointing out the ways things have changed for the better, as well as for worse. The reasons why you no longer hear nearly as many racist chants at games as you did in say the mid 80's (when John Barnes was pelted with bananas, and black players routinely endured monkey noises from fans) are probably way too complicated and numerous to resolve, but the change does seem to have something to do with football getting taken over by people who had financial reasons not to tolerate that kind of thing. Cassidy makes no metion of this. He also might have included the fact that one of the results of the shift has been that people no longer, you know, die at football games. (He mentions in passing, the Hillsborough disaster -- and the requirement for all-seater stadiums it spawned -- but doesn't properly connect it to the vanished footballing way of life he's mourning. And he ignores the Heysel disaster altogether.)

Nor does he mention, sort of incredibly, the fact that the football has unarguably gotten better. Indeed, the English league has, in the last 15 years, gone from being a relative footballing backwater with a reputation for an unimaginative "long-ball" style of play into the acknowledged best league in the world, with world-class players from all corners of the globe displaying skills that 20 years ago, English fans had literally never seen. Back then, we almost never used to be able to attract top-quality foreign players to play in England (I remember what a coup it was seen to be when, in the late 80's Newcastle signed the mediocre Brazilian striker Mirandinha). Now, foreign stars line up to play here - it's been not uncommon over the last few years for Chelsea to field a team with not a single Englishman. It's pretty much been a line starting with Cantona in the early 90's, thru Bergkamp and Henry to Van Nistelrooy and Ronaldo. And whereas before, almost all of our truly world class players right up to Gazza eventually went to play in Italy or Spain, if Man United doesn't want to sell Wayne Rooney it's rich enough that it doesn't have to. (And they only sold Beckham because he fell out with Fergie. And okay, Owen going to Spain focks up my argument but he came back in a year.)

The point is the game is better now in a lot of ways that Cassidy doesn't mention. And insofar as this was a profile of Malcolm Glazer there was no need to mention them. But it was also, more interestingly, a look at what's happened to the league over the last 15 years, so in that regard, it seems like a bad omission.

Select Soccer Silliness Part Deux

There are, admittedly, worse people in the world than George Vecsey (Tom DeLay, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Conor Oberst) but he has now incurred my wrath for the second straight day. (Go here for the first installment of Roth vs. Vecsey.) In part, it's because he has been unfortunate enough, in today's dispatch from Leipzig [NYT Select subscription required, but you don't need to read it, I've pasted the relevant parts below], to stumble unwittingly onto the topic of a heated e-argument i've been carrying on for the last 24 hours with my friend Mike, to wit: Does the US have any reason to complain about not being a number 1 seed in today's World Cup Finals draw?

GV never actually works up the bollox to mount an actual explicit argument in America's favor, but he clearly wants to. So instead, he just makes vague, whiningly aggrieved observations like:

"The Yanks were quarterfinalists last time. That is no small thing. Yet the masters of world soccer saw fit to slip Mexico into the top group of eight in this year's World Cup seedings, and delegate the Americans to steerage, where they have been before."

Yeah, and South Korea were semi-finalists, which is an even less small thing, but you don't see GV arguing that they should have been in the top 8. And let's unpack this myth of American accomplishment in 2002: They beat a highly-regarded but, as it turned out, deeply-flawed Portugal team (a good win, admittedly), they drew with South Korea (not a good team in anyone's book, despite their fortunate finish) then lost 3-1(!) to Poland (a loss which Mike, whose mother is Polish, claims was only allowed to happen as "a favor" to him: "I got to 'have my cake and eat it too,'" he argues, "because I got to watch my land of heritage finish on a high note, while at the same time I got to watch my underdog homeland make it to the second round.") Then they beat an impotent Mexican team 1-0 (a win which GV hilariously calls a "drubbing") before losing 1-0 to a mediocre German team, in a game in which, for all their dominance of possession, they generated only two clear-cut chances. Color me unimpressed.

Also, we get:

"The experience of 2002 must be worth something, even if the seeding committee tended to overlook it. The United States had its fun for three years, qualifying for the World Cup easily, sometimes rated above the older powers in the monthly world rankings. But at this World Cup draw, reality (or politics) intruded."

Huh? Is there anyone who doesn't understand that the only reason the US qualified "easily" is because they play in the CONCACAF region, against the likes of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, et al? Try putting them in an average European qualifying group, composed of, say, Italy, Norway, Romania, and two weak teams, and see how they do.

And what "politics" is he talking about? If GV thinks the US got stiffed because the world hates America he should say it. But he'd still be wrong.

In response to the good showing in 2002, GV tells us, "a player like DaMarcus Beasley had viability with PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands."

Ah yes, DaMarcus Beasley (or a player like him, anyway.) Striking fear into the hearts of defenders from Anderlecht to Feyenoord.

I'll grant that Mexico doesn't scare anyone, and the US outplayed them in 2002. But the ones who really should be aggrieved are the Dutch. Compare Keller, Donovan, Reyna, and Beasley, to Dutch players like Van der Saar, Van Nistelrooy, Davids, and Cocu. With the exception of Keller, the Americans just aren't in the same league.

I have a theory, as yet not very well thought-thru, that there is something deeply and structurally, even conceptually, wrong with American soccer, which will prevent it from ever realizing the potential offered by its vast talent pool. Which would be fine by me.

Select Soccer Silliness

Let us count the ways in which this (pasted below if you don't have Times Select) is silly:

1) It is silly that the NY Times makes you pay to read stories like these -- or any stories for that matter. It's hard to find anyone who doesn't think the NYT will come to regret this absurd and ill-conceived experiment. Paying for George Vecsey when you can get Rob Hughes for free is like buying Andy Rooney dinner in the hope that he'll sleep with you when Charlize Theron is already brushing her teeth in your bathroom. In a thong.

2) It is silly that George Vecsey has written this story, which he has clearly filed only because they've sent him over to Leipzig and he's got nothing else to write about until tomorrow when they actually do the draw. Sing the national anthem, don't, who cares? GV doesn't even convince us that he does. And who really gives a fock if Sepp Blatter tends to say things off the cuff? It's sort of refreshing, as a contrast to officials from American sports leagues who weigh every word like they're Scott friggin McLellan. I"m not seeing the harm here. What would GV have written about if it weren't for Blatter? The real problem is that Blatter, like all high-ranking FIFA officials, is irredeemably corrupt, but GV isn't really interested in that.

3) It is silly that GV thinks that playing the anthems lends "pomp and dignity" to sport, and that this is important. The dignity comes from the game itself, and how many people care about it. Fock the pomp.

4) It is silly that Blatter thinks that women should wear tighter outfits when they play soccer. Women, of course, should not be playing soccer at all.

kidding, kidding.




Blatter's Blather Besmirching Soccer
By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: December 8, 2005

Leipzig, Germany

ONE of the great rituals of sport is going to survive. For a few tense days recently, it seemed that the singing of the national anthems at all World Cup games was going to be booted toward oblivion, not only by the sport's resident hooligans but also by the free-associating major-domo of world soccer, Joseph S. Blatter.

After a nasty scene in Turkey, Blatter blurted to the Swiss weekly Schweizer Illustrierte: "I feel this whistling shows a great lack of respect and is disparaging to national pride. I wonder, therefore, whether it even makes sense to play these national anthems."

Blatter, who is known as Sepp, surely knows that anthems are an intrinsic part of the greatest sports event on the globe. The players march out, stand in line and move their lips as if they actually know the words to their national anthem. Some soccerphobes equate this ceremony with more ominous mass stirrings, like to tramping armies. George Orwell once labeled international matches "orgies of hatred," words often dusted off by the British news media.

I, however, see the soccer anthems as a touching gesture, matching the handshake line in the N.H.L. playoffs or the singing of "My Old Kentucky Home" at the Kentucky Derby.

For a few seconds, there is some pomp and dignity in sport, although quickly followed by the elbowing and the shoving, the name-calling and the gesturing - and that is the benign part - on the field. Sometimes in the stands or city streets, it gets worse.

Tomorrow night in this former East German city, the draw will be held for the 2006 World Cup. The German hosts have initiated a policy of selling tickets only to registered individuals, who must present their passports and have their identity checked by microchips in the ticket at every game. This will surely cut down on scalping, and perhaps also keep away the thousands of officially barred thugs.

In keeping with his long history of blurting out whatever is on his mind, Blatter, the president of FIFA, world soccer's governing body, suggested this week that this tracking process was too complicated, but the hosts insisted they would do it their way.

FIFA has other issues on its plate. The downfall of an allied marketing agency, International Sport and Leisure, in 2001, left a loss of millions of dollars. The police recently raided FIFA's headquarters in Zurich to recover records, a move that Blatter yesterday called "not correct."

Blatter also got into the anthem issue after the final playoff game between Switzerland and Turkey. In the first match, in Berne, Swiss fans hissed and jeered the Turkish anthem, so when the Swiss team flew to Istanbul for the return match, Turkish fans rocked the Swiss bus and spat and threw eggs at the players. Before the game, the Turkish fans reviled the Swiss anthem.

This display was a shame because Turkey had contributed lovely moments in 2002 in the last World Cup. After defeating one of the host teams, South Korea, in the third-place match, the Turkish players held hands with the South Korean players for a mutual victory lap. The Turkish fans were also a credit to their country.

On Nov. 16, however, when Switzerland qualified after the second game, players and coaches from both squads got physical on their way to the locker rooms. FIFA is currently investigating and could place serious sanctions on Turkey during qualification for the 2010 World Cup.

Blatter's comments about anthems created a stir around the world, making it seem he would try to ban the prematch ceremony.

When asked at his news conference yesterday, Blatter said: "We should keep the anthems, but I said we should put them into question. We should respect the anthems and educate people about them."

Blatter has been known to quickly engage his vocal cords, perhaps ahead of his reason. He once proposed holding the World Cup every two years instead of every four years, which would have watered down the anticipation that makes the World Cup so vital.

And who will forget the time he blurted out that female soccer players should wear tighter shorts that fit their shapes?

"In volleyball, the women also wear other uniforms than the men," Blatter told the Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick. "Pretty women are playing football today. Excuse me for saying that." Needless to say, Merrie Kinge Sepp took some criticism for those public musings.

Currently, Blatter is dubious about modern technology, including electronic gadgets that may determine if a ball has crossed a goal line, a huge issue since England defeated West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final.

"The referee can make mistakes," Blatter said yesterday, adding, "For the next few years, we will not speak of goal-line technology."

But we will surely speak of many other things. Blatter's random comments are a part of soccer, right up there with the anthem ritual.

The Rasputin* of Sports-Related Racial Stereotypes

So Major League Baseball and Chevrolet do this thing where they identify 6 qualities that Chevy trucks and some baseball players could be said to have in common. Then each week they nominate 6 players who they think best embody that week's quality, and ask fans to vote on which one should win.

This week's quality is "durability". The MLB site explicitly equates durability with "toughness", noting that, "you can't succeed in the Major Leagues without toughness, a quality that endears you to your manager, your team-mates, and your fans." Then it tells you the 6 nominees, and they are all white, even though only 63% of all players are white.

In sports, for some reason, only white guys can be tough.


*When I say this is the Rasputin of sports-related racial stereotypes, I mean because it's very hard to kill. Not because it helped precipitate the fall of the Romanov Dynasty, or because it had, by some accounts, a large and serendipitously-placed mole on the shaft of its penis.

Another thing I think about in bed...

...is the inadequacy of the ERA (earned run average) statistic as a predictor of a pitcher's future performance. The obvious problem is that it doesn't measure baserunners, so if a pitcher strands alot of runners, he keeps his ERA low. But by the law of averages, allowing alot of baserunners is going to catch up with him. It's true that certain guys are good at "pitching out of jams", but in reality, pitching with men on base requires the same basic skills as pitching with the bases empty. In other words, with rare exceptions, a guy who allows a lot of baserunners is sooner or later going to be a guy who allows alot of runs. It's the getting hitters out that's the pure test of the pitcher's skill.

The easiest way to think about this is: Pitcher A gets 2 outs, then gives up a single and then a home run, then gets the third out. So he's charged with 2 earned runs. Pitcher B gets 2 outs, then gives up a home run and a single, then gets the third out. Although he performed identically to Pitcher A in terms of the aspect of his job that he can control (the pitcher-hitter matchup), he's charged with only 1 earned run, because he stranded a runner on base.

So the point is, a guy who, over the first half of the season, had allowed alot of baserunners but a low number of earned runs, because he had frequently pitched his way out of jams, would not be a guy who one would expect to be successful in the second half of the season.

So what you need is a stat that measures hits and walks, and also that further penalizes a pitcher for surrendering extra base hits (which generally result from an objectively worse pitch than do singles, making them a relevant indicator here). The best way to do this, I think, is a Bases Per Inning (BPI) stat, which charges a pitcher 1 point for giving up a single, an unintentional walk, or a hit by pitch, 2 points for a double, 3 for a triple, and 4 for a home run. (Forget about what the runners do once they reach base, whether or not they score, etc. Focus only on the pitcher vs. hitter contest.)

Then, rather than doing it per nine innings, like the ERA, divide that by innings pitched. Nine has become sort of arbitrary because pitchers rarely pitch a complete game any more. So a dominant pitcher might have a BPI of 1 or a little over, meaning that in an average inning he'd give up just one single or walk. A bad pitcher might have a BPI of 3. The average would probably be around 2.5, I'm guessing, although the median would be lower.

The drawback here is that BPI doesn't account for situations that do genuinely test a pitcher's skill but don't necessarily involve hits or walks. So with 1 out and a man on third, a good pitcher will get a strikeout or short pop-up which prevents the runner from scoring. A bad pitcher will more often surrender the sacrifice fly ball that lets the runner score, but isn't counted as a hit. In the "crude" BPI system, he wouldn't be charged for that. But maybe you could fix that by treating a run-scoring flyball or grounder -- or a case where the hitter intends to advance the lead runner and succeeds -- like a single.

It'd be interesting to see how this would change how we rate pitchers. I'd guess that Pedro Martinez, who this year has a very good but not spectacular ERA of 2.86, would fare even better under a BPI system, because frequently this year he has gone thru stretches where he retires 10 or 12 hitters in a row, but then has given up clusters of hits, allowing runs to score. Another Met pitcher, Victor Zambrano, seems to have pitched out of a lot of jams this year, and I'd bet his BPI would be comparatively worse than his (already relatively poor) ERA. But that could be wrong. In a later post, I'll use existing stats on hits and walks and innings pitched to figure out some crude BPIs for a few pitchers (the more sophisticated version would be impossible to tally from existing stats unless you went thru all the box scores, which would take forever), and see how they compare to ERAs in terms of the pitchers' rankings against each other.

By the way, I'm defintely far from the first person to be thinking along these lines. I'd bet that general managers, at least since Bill James, have been much more interested in hits per inning (or some version thereof) than ERA in trying to gauge a pitcher's future performance. Some version of this thinking is probably in Moneyball, which I keep meaning to read.

Dutch Football, Sports Photography, Franklin Foer, Carl Gilbey-Mackenzie, Eric Stolz, William Blake, etc.

Dutch football may seem like an odd note to kick things off on (pun intended, haha), but i've been reading this book called "Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football", by this guy David Winner. It's about how Dutch football is a reflection of Dutch culture and society and everything. At one point during the chapter on how Dutch players use space differently from others players (which, according to Winner, is because the Dutch in general see and use space differently -- I think because their country is so small and they're very big, and have to build a lot of dykes and so on), he talks to this Dutch photographer who takes pictures at football games. Only they're not sports pictures, they're, like, art pictures. But they're not all arty either. They're really about the football, showing key moments in the game from a panoramic, TV-style view. This part's really interesting:

Van Der Meer has taken memorable photographs of Ajax matches too - but never from the traditional photographers' vanatage point at eye level behind the goal or on the sidelines. He perfers to work high in the stands, ususally near the halfway line, from where he aims to capture what he calls the "moment of tension." His deep-focus, pin-sharp images freeze the game, the crowd, and the trees and clouds beyond the stadium. Although his pictures are taken from a similar angle to that of TV cameras, they capture something quite different. 'Football is a game of space, so why should you leave the space out?' he says. 'Every Monday in the newspapers you see the same stupid, boring closeups taken from behind the goals with long telephoto lenses which distort the space. Those pictures show you the football siutations but you have no idea what they mean. Two players fight for the ball. So what? Where on the pitch are they? In the 1950's we had different pictures, more interesting photographs of the crowd, wide-angle pictures of the game. The closeups tell you so little. When the sports photography archives are opened in a hundred years, there will be a whole part of the history of the game missing because all the interesting little things around the pitch were simply not photographed...Newspaper picture editors always say its much more dramatic to have a closeup. That is bulshit. The problem is basically they don't understand football, they don't know what they're looking at. Of course, yes, it is nice also to have closeups, to see footballers looking like heroes. But you need both kinds of picture.'

I never thought about it like that but it's totally true about how lame the pictures that newspapers run are, and how they totally fail to capture anything interesting or important about the game.

What's also cool about all this -- both Van der Meer's pictures and Winner's book -- is that it's actually interested in what's going on in the game, not, like, the socio-economic background of the fans or whatever. I mean that can be interesting too, but it's nice to read serious sports writing that's not afraid to get its hands dirty. Very little sports writing is both A) willing to treat sports as a serious cultural subject, etc, AND B) actually concerned with the nitty-gritty of what happens on the pitch. Too much serious sports writing does A but not B. One thing that sux about Frank Foer's (I'm allowed to call him Frank not Franklin because i once received an email from him, after i had written him a long and rambling message taking excited issue with a minor point he made in a New Republic Online piece about the European Championships) otherwise annoyingly good "How Soccer Explains the World" is that, for all the fascinating ways that he shows football bound up with local political, religious, social, and cultural issues, he doesn't seem to actually like football all that much. I mean, I'm sure he likes it. You'd have to, wouldn't you, to go to all the games he went to and so on (that sentence sounded very Hornbyesque, btw). But, beyond the pedestrian observation that the Italians play a defensive style called catenaccio (which means 'bolt', like a lock) he has nothing to say about the action on the pitch. Maybe this is unfair, because that would be a different book (my English teacher when i was 11, Mr. Carl Gilbey-Mackenzie -- about whom regular readers will surely be hearing more in future posts -- once wrote at the bottom of an essay in which I had criticized the film "Mask", starring Cher and a young Eric Stolz, that my objection -- the substance of which remains lost to me -- was like saying "I like chocolate but why is it not toffee?") So anyway, maybe it's like that, but it's a shame that Foer's not so interested in the on-field action because (as Winner shows, both in "Brilliant Orange" and in "Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football", his possibly even-better followup which does the same for English football as B.O. did for Dutch -- although maybe it's only better because the English are more interesting than the Dutch, or maybe I just know more about them -- and whose title, brilliantly, refers to William Blake's "Jerusalem") it's on the field, and in specific tactics and styles of play, that much of the best material for the sort of clever socio-cultural observations that we all so love can be found.

As Matthew Yglesias would say, "All Done".