World Cup Day Four: predictions, and a new segment, Did you know?

The Italians are known for their style of play known as the catenaccio,
or door-bolt. You can guess what that implies.

My predictions

Netherlands 2-0 Denmark
The Dutch have all the attacking talent they could dream of (though apparently Robin van Persie is now hurt... again...). Robben will take shots from everywhere. Kuyt will work really hard. Babel will dribble into trouble and lose the ball. For the first time in years the Dutch don't have a solid keeper, though their defensive frailties are nothing new. The Danes will be organized and will be a threat on the counter and on set pieces.

Japan 0-1 Cameroon
Cameroon are the highest ranked African team at the tournament, with a good keeper, solid defence, a strong midfield and scoring talent. They haven't impressed much lately, struggling to qualify and losing to eventual winners Egypt in the quarters at the Africa Cup of Nations. Japan aren't as strong as they were in 2002, when they lost in the Round of 16 to Turkey. They've also lost their last four matches, all friendlies.

Italy 1-0 Paraguay

Italy don't have much in the way of creativity in their squad right now, and they're getting old, but they are talented, hardworking and organized, and have just enough to get through an easy group. Paraquay impressed in qualification, including wins over Brazil and Argentina. Star striker Roque Santa Cruz struggled with injury this year, and his striking partner Salavador Cabañas will miss the tournament after being shot in the head in a Mexican nightclub.

Did you know...

In this segment I'll bring to your attention an interesting or little-known fact about the World Cup, the teams, or the players. In today's segment, keeping to the theme of footballers and guns, we take a look at the unfortunate Andrés Escobar.


In the 1994 World Cup held in the US, in a group-stage match against the US, Colombian defender Escobar deflected a cross into his own net. Colombia lost the game 2-1 and were eliminated. Escobar was shot and killed ten days later in Colombia, purportedly because his own-goal led to huge gambling losses for some Colombian drug lords or gambling syndicates (the same thing?).

He was known as the Gentleman of Football and his funeral was attended by 120,000 people.

Drink your way to the World Cup final!

Will England's Newcastle Brown Ale make it to the semis?
Or will Serbian brew Jelen beat them in the Round of 16 first?

The good folks over at Slashfood have developed a World Cup bracket substituting beer for teams. Here's a taste:

With the World Cup in full swing (games started early this morning), we wanted to hop on the soccer bandwagon Slashfood-style -- and that means a little something to drink, of course... In this case, we chose beers from around the world. Thirty-two countries, 32 different beers -- one for each country represented in the games -- all hand picked by our beer guru, Josh Bernstein.

Starting next Wednesday, Slashfood is starting it's own little tournament -- the Slashfood 2010 World Cup Beer Bracket. That morning, we'll open up the polls on Facebook and Twitter to see which beer you think should make it to the finals.

After the jump, get a head start on your picks with an in depth look at all 32 beers well be using for the tourney. Don't forget, the first round picks two winners from each group. A total of 16 beers will advance.

Algeria: Tango Though Islamic tradition forbids alcohol, beer has taken a foothold in this North African nation. The most popular tipple is the light Tango lager.

Argentina: Quilmes Cristal This light, pale-golden lager dominates the country's beer scene.

Australia: Foster's Hoist a hefty can of this Aussie lager when cheering on the footballers from Down Under.

Brazil: Skol Though the caipirinha is Brazil's national drink, the country's most common beer is this clear, bubbly thirst-quenching pilsener. .

Some of their selections are iffy (Foster's, really?), but kudos for finding and knowing about beers from North Korea and Cote d'Ivoire. Now just to track down which are available in BC:

BC Liquor stores
Private liquor stores in BC (where you'll pay more)

The Spanish Cruzcampo isn't available at BC Liquor stores, so I'm substituting Estrella Damm, a nice light lager from Barcelona. Good drinking to you all, and may the best beer win.

World Cup 2010 in South Africa... yes, I'm going to blog about it

So, I've decided to blog about the World Cup, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to add much, but I've been posting so much on Facebook that I thought I would spare you all the constant stream of thoughts and images and stories and gather them all here instead.

I'm in a couple of pools, two for group and knock-out stage predictions and one for players and points. I've gone with really safe picks, which is lazy and will never happen. There will be a dark horse that makes it to the quarters or semis, and one of the big teams will get knocked out early, I just couldn't commit to those teams.

I've picked Brazil to win, beating Spain in the final, and Fernando Torres to be the top scorer. See? Very safe. My dark horse candidate (that I didn't pick) is Serbia. I think they'll come out of the real Group of Death, and they could beat England (or the US) in the first round. They would then face Mexico, Nigeria, France, Uruguay or Greece in the quarters, no-one too intimidating there.

I've also decided to predict the outcome of every match. It's easier than it looks if you aren't too worried about a dismal success rate. Go on, pick a day and try it.

Day One predictions:

South Africa 1-3 Mexico

France 1-1 Uruguay

Mexico will press constantly, and their attack will be too much for the hosts. France won't be able to score very much this tournament, and Uruguay are better than people think.

The SA-Mex game is already over but I got my hands on a PVR and I'm watching the game now. So far it's pretty exciting. South Africa are holding their own, but Mexico look dangerous. The celebrated vuvuzelas (plastic horns) are creating a constant, extremely loud buzzing in the stadium; it must be getting on the nerves of the Mexicans.

So, there ya have it. I'll try to keep my posts short and pointed, with a broad rather than narrow focus, such as where to watch in your neighbourhood (in Vancouver) but also what the South African experience might mean for Brazil in 2014 and why the Dutch won't win (hint: it's not for lack of scoring).

Sit back, watch some games, and enjoy the beautiful game.

Some books I'm reading or about to read

Another trip to Pulp Fiction, another haul of books (see my earlier trip). Coupled with some earlier purchases, my list of books to read is getting huge. Here are a few that I'm excited about:


The Political Brain, by Drew Westen - The Role of Emotions in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Kansas, despite all reason or logic, vote strongly for the Republicans. Al Gore had all the arguments for the rational mind, but George W. Bush chuckled and appealed to the brain stem. It's baffling to most of us. Helpfully Drew Westen has done a great job of explaining how and why the Republicans have done such a great job of using emotion while their Democrat counterparts have failed to capture the hearts of American voters. I'm enjoying the history and the anecdotes, and trying to relate it to my experiences here in BC.


Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov - I joined an online book club at Pajiba, and this is the first book. I just picked up the 50th anniversary edition at Pulp Fiction. I've read, more than a few times in the past half year, that Nabokov is the finest writer of this century, a crafter of the best sentences ever written. Luckily I'm not given to high expectations.


Inverting the Pyramid, by Jonathan Wilson - The History of Football Tactics. I've been excited about this book for a while, and it finally arrived in the mail the other day. I just finished Raymond Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely (which was a tad more over the top than his brilliant first novel, The Big Sleep) and I am already enjoying this change of pace. Ever wonder why central defenders are called centre-halves in England? Or how Hungarian teams could ever dominate European football? Or why most teams play a flat four at the back? I do.


The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte - While planning our trip to Spain (spits on ground at Spanish thieves), we wanted to find good books by Spanish authors, preferably about Barcelona. We settled on The Shadow of the Wind, a fun literary mystery that took place right around where we were staying. On the short-list was a series about a swashbuckling 17th century Spaniard, Captain Alatriste, which looked light and fun. Today I saw some books from the series, along with The Club Dumas, by the same author. I can't really say why I chose it instead, other than that it is an earlier book and sounds more serious.

Why I love Vancouver

Yep, it's spring already in this rainy city. Photo by Galit Mastai.

There are so many reasons to love Vancouver, but here are a few of them for those of you that need a pre-Olympics pick-me-up.

The weather

It's already springtime. One year I played tennis outside every week starting the last week of January. It's not uncommon to see our first flowers coming up in the middle of January. Yes, we'll have some shitty weather in February, and then it will rain until the end of April, but right now it's sunny. Here are some photos my friend Galit took recently in our Mt. Pleasant neighbourhood.

The neighbourhoods

Today, to enjoy the sun, we went over to Commercial Drive to grab some coffee and pastries for breakfast. I miss two things about Commercial after moving over to Mt. Pleasant last year: Italian cafes and Chinese grocers. I was once a denizen of Abruzzo, the best place to watch soccer in the city, and it feels very good to go back to order an Americano con leche para ir (the servers are always Spanish-speakers). We got our coffees, and while waiting were treated to a goal by Messi in Barca's match against Getafe.

Abruzzo, Magpie and Highlife, the Saturday trifecta. Sadly Magpie

closed down a couple of years ago.

From Abruzzo we wandered up to Fratelli's, an amazing Italian bakery at 2nd and Commercial. A spinach and feta brioche and chocolate croissant complimented the Italian coffee perfectly. From there we wandered back down the street, stopping at Highlife World Music to buy some records, a new offering in an excellent music store.

The bookstores

I've written before about Pulp Fiction, the best bookstore in the city, and I'd like to mention another. Bookstores, more often than not, accurately reflect the neighbourhood they are situated in. Like Pulp Fiction, like Little Sister's in the West End, the People's Co-op Bookstore on Commercial embodies this principle well. In addition to the standard fare, it also features local and Canadian writers, labour theory and queer fiction, and a great selection of magazines. Unfortunately they were out of Charles Demers' excellent Vancouver Special, a book I highly recommend to anyone with an eye on Vancouver's history and politics.

I tried to pick a good quote, but there are too many.

I almost never leave a bookstore without a book, so I apologize, PCB. I've been on a tear recently, and need to read the ones I already have.

It's home

On my way home from coffee, pastries and shopping, I stopped in at Tino's, my barber shop on Commercial. For $15, and about 12 minutes of my time, he gives me a perfect haircut with only the briefest of instructions. Here is a typical exchange:

Tino: A trim?

Me: Yep. Pretty short.

And that's it. Really. I'll be good for another couple of months, then when my hair's to shaggy again, over to Tino's I'll go.

Then I stopped in at Dollar Grocers for some Avalon milk and to say hi to Quoc (who asked for my autograph... guess I haven't been in in a while).

So, yah, the Olympics may suck for some folks who commute to downtown to work or need to take transit during the gold medal hockey game, and homelessness may still be a huge issue, and the Downtown Eastside may still feel like a warzone on occasion, and there are huge swaths of South Vancouver that deserve zero attention and gang warfare may spill over onto our streets, and it may rain for a month straight at times (for real, it did a few years ago), and there might not be many corporate headquarters and we may all dress in Gore-tex and it might be hard to find a slim-fit dress shirt...

But I sure love Vancouver.

Fantasy Football Week One

Ouch. I'm sitting in 10th place (of 14) after the first round of games. I had a few players really come through, and I had a few come up short, but my biggest mistake was in team selection. I ended with 10 pts, while two of the players I left out got 11 pts between them. Here's the thing, though: Do I get more involved, and spend some time researching the players, the opposition, etc? Doesn't seem like a good use of my time. 

Fantasy Football

I joined a Fantasy Football league this year, complete with transfers, bidding, etc... 14 members were each given £75 million to bid on and buy 16 players in several rounds of blind auctions. I bid quite high in my first round and secured 13 players, probably the most of anyone in the league, but was left with only £5 million for the remaining three. Some astute bidding secured me two more in the second round, and I'm left with £500,000 for one player in the third round. My team so far:

GK - Tim Howard, Everton - 10m

DF - Jose Bosingwa, Chelsea - free (in the second round, even) 

DF - Sol Campbell, Portsmouth - free

DF - Sylvain Distin, Portsmouth - 8m

DF - Lucas Neill, West Ham - free

MF - Ryan Babel, Liverpool - 4.5m

MF - Francesco Fabregas, Arsenal - 15m

MF - Luka Modric, Tottenham - 6m

MF - Martin Petrov, Man. City - free

MF - Theo Walcott, Arsenal - 7m

MF - SWP, Chelsea - free

FW - Gabriel Agbonlahor, Aston Villa - 14m

FW - Dean Ashton, West Ham - 10m

FW - Darren Bent, Tottenham - free

FW - Michael Owen, Newcastle - free

So, it's easy to see that I got many on free transfers, meaning no one bid on them that round, allowing me to overspend on those I really wanted. And I did overspend. No one else bid for a few players I spent a good amount on. That's what happens in a blind auction, I guess. I was also lucky to get a few players that had equal bids; the system makes a random choice. 

Edit: I finished my team off with a .5m bid for Kevin Kilbane. Not a superstar by any stretch, but a solid defender, albeit on a team that will struggle.

Bent's been hitting the net in the pre-season, and Berbatov is off to ManU, so he should get playing time. Owen will be my sub, I can't see him hitting too many this season. 

The state of football in Canada (July 4)

I think we have a real chance at qualifying for the 2010 World Cup. We have a difficult group (Mexico, Jamaica and Honduras), but we have the talent, the drive and hopefully this time a little luck. Mexico will probably top the group, but we should beat Jamaica and we can beat Honduras. Our 3-2 loss against Brazil's first team should serve as inspiration for our men.

We just dropped 17 places in the FIFA rankings, even though we had a winning record in June (2-0-1). An email exchange with my friend Lucas:

Me: US down to 30, heh, though we're down to 77. From the Canada Soccer website:
"Canada’s men’s national team posted one draw and two wins in June, including back-to-back wins over Saint Vincent & the Grenadines in 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ Qualifiers. Canada lost points in the standings, however, because older matches lost their value (most notably, last year's CONCACAF Gold Cup)."

Lucas: That's the first good evidence I've seen of how stupid the ranking system is. There is no logic that a team loses 15 spots during a period in which they were 2-0-1. Even if they were a perfect 3-0, they'd still lose ground.

Me: I don't know. If the games that are falling off were wins against Colombia or Mexico, it would make sense. Our ranking (62) was dependent on those wins, and even though we had a winning record in June it was against crap teams. You could just as easily make the case that our ranking at 62 was artificially high, given that some of the points for the ranking were from four years ago.

Lucas: Sure, but a team shouldn't lose ground by doing nothing but winning. Maybe they shouldn't gain ground if their opponents are lower ranking, but to lose ground in a period where you have nothing but positive results is absurd. That way you're not ranking the team, you're ranking their schedule.

Me: But that doesn't address the issue of points falling off as they pass out of the ranking period. I don't really have a problem with judging schedules: If France is above Italy in the rankings, and France beat Malta twice in a month while Italy beats Germany twice, shouldn't Italy jump France?

Lucas: True. Let me clarify. If team A beats two lousy teams, while team B beats two good teams, team B should make the jump, but not because team A loses points, but because team B gains more points. Canada lost 83 points - not positions relative to other countries, but points - in a span where they didn't lose a single game. I maintain that that is stupid. They are being punished, not for their play, but because they didn't have difficult enough opposition.

Community Coach Senior (June 30)

This weekend I became a certified soccer coach. (Senior is for 14+, not 65+.) It was a fairly simple course over two days, involving some team management skills, skills progression and game management. Nothing too revelatory, though I am a little excited about putting together some skills progression drills for my team. Super-dorky, I know.

Coaching is an interesting aspect of football, one that I think I will seriously pursue. I enjoy thinking about the game almost as much as I enjoy playing it, and with my knees and ankle the way they are, playing it is becoming increasingly difficult. Boo.

Edit: This was the best thing I've read about the Euro Cup so far: "Spain's win has been about good technique and imagination - something that the English, for all their boasting about their over-hyped and inflated Premier League, would do well to note. You never know, this tournament might just influence people to play football again. Stranger things have happened."

Team of the Tournament (June 28)

Just read this: Team of the Tournament

-----------------Buffon
Aniukov---Carvalho------R. Kovac---Zhirkov
----------------Senna
Schweiny--------------Ballack----Sneijder
-----------Arshavin
--------------------Torres

Subs: Senturk, van Persie and Fabregas.

Not sure my diagram fits it, but it's about a 4.1.3.1.1.

Tough choice between Casillas and Buffon. Buffon has probably made a few better and bigger saves than Casillas.

Aniukov? Seeing as his name is barely familiar (and I watched all but one of Russia's matches), surely someone else could take that spot. Ramos had an amazing match against Russia but a crap group stage and only a decent outing against Italy. I thought Bosingwa was really good, but he didn't do that well against the Germans (and didn't make any of the other TOFTs in the article). Lahm out of his preferred left back position?

Puyol has done well in the centre but hasn't been spectacular, as has Marchena. Pepe also played well.

Zhirkov should be the automatic choice at left back, though Lahm was outstanding against Turkey (a depleted Turkey, it must be said).

Senna is the easy pick in midfield; best player in the tournament so far for my money. Ballack will be on most lists, but Fabregas deserves a shout. Schweinsteiger had one great game and one good game. Sneijder gets the nod ahead of Modric, but only slightly for me. Arshavin is automatic.

Torres? He has played well and set up a few goals, but in the semi he was noteworthy for his misses. Villa was pretty great, Guiza was good off the bench, and Pavliuchenko would get the start if he had put away a few more of his many chances. Podolski, maybe? A couple good goals but didn't do much against Turkey.

My TofT, then:
---------------Buffon
Ramos------Puyol----Carvalho---Zhirkov
---------------Senna
Scheiny-------------Fabregas---Sniejder
-----------Arshavin
-------------------Villa

Subs: Torres, Ballack, Pepe.

Cheers, everyone. Enjoy the final. I'm hoping to convince the rest of the coaching clinic (who schedules a soccer coaching clinic on the weekend of the Euro Final?) to take the time off and put in an extra hour at the end of each day.

Edit: Torres deserves the nod, then. Great goal, great effort the whole time he was on the field. After his header against the post I thought that it just wasn't going to be his tournament, and then he pushes past Lahm and beautifully chips Lehmann. Brilliant, and deserved.

Euro 2008 (June 12)

I watch a lot of football. A lot. I'm pretty excited about the Euro Cup that's going on right now, and for good reason. Other than the French and the Italians (both usually take time to get going), the big guns in Europe are firing, and the quarters and semis are shaping up to be quite interesting.

Spain: 4-1 against Russia was a flattering score-line, but they deserved the win. Their counter-attacking was brilliant, but they didn't break down the Russian defence in normal open play. Sweden should prove to be a tougher opponent, capable of scoring and much better defensively than Russia.

Germany: Improved their standing with an easy win against Poland. Croatia should put up a good fight, especially in midfield. Germany's defence looked solid, particularly Metzelder.

Holland: Was their win against the Italians that easy? The first goal was clearly offside; I haven't seen anything official that would explain the ref's decision. The second goal was great, if a little lucky, and the third was just unfortunate for Italy. Without Totti, Italy lack some attacking sense in midfield, and their strikers are having trouble.

Portugal: Perfect so far, and the first team through to the quarters. Is this the second Golden generation? Ronaldo is brilliant if whiny, their back-line is solid and brilliant (excepting the merely good Ferreira), and Deco has decided to play (looking for possible suitors?). The Czechs were a little unfortunate, but their D were outplayed.

Middle of the pack teams:

The Czechs and Turkey haven't been too impressive. Sweden should progress and provide some good football in the quarters, though Russia might have something to say about that. Russia were called this year's Greece by Globe and Mail columnist Stephen Brunt in what is easily the worst oversimplification I've read yet. Croatia and Poland should be an interesting match, though neither look strong enough to challenge their opponents in the quarters. Romania as the dark horse? Neither France nor Italy have impressed yet, and who progresses from the group is still totally up in the air.