Euro 2008 odds and ends

• One of the Globe and Mail columnists has criticized the TSN/Sportsnet coverage of the tournament because the in-studio team don't explain their comments thoroughly enough. But I have to agree with the guys at the Globe's soccer blog who pointed out that it's intended for viewers who actually know a little bit about the game, rather than treating them like idiots. Actually, I'd like a little more in-depth analysis, because most of their commentary is pretty banal. Still, it's better than the garbage that ESPN usually throws up; mostly I'm just grateful that they're using the English feed from UEFA and therefore I don't have to listen to Tommy Smyth this month.
  
  
• The way the draw for the knockout stages is set up is kind of bizarre: The winners and runners-up from Groups A and B go into one side of the draw, while remaining teams go into the other side. This means that two teams from the same group, assuming they win their quarter-final matches, could then meet again at the semi-final stage. Any idea why they did it that way? I guess maybe they didn't want two teams from the same group meeting in the final -- like Portugal and Spain in 2004 -- but why is a semi-final any better? Actually, any two teams that can make it that far, there'd probably be more drama with a rematch in the final.
  
  
• I am kind of slow, but I realized yesterday that there was a reason why the last round of group games kick off at the same time: To prevent matches being fixed like (supposedly) Denmark v. Sweden at Euro 2004. Duh. And here I thought they were just doing it to fuck with my TV viewing schedule.
  
  
• If you haven't yet, you should check out the official UEFA Euro 2008 site, which has a whackload of information -- including pictures, videos, and more statistics than you would ever need in your entire life.

And a few other bits and bobs, seeing as we're halfway through the group stage now:

Best goal celebration:
1. Slaven Bilic, jumping on one of his coaching staff like an over-enthusiastic koala after Croatia's opening goal against Germany.
2. David Villa, who fractured his finger after getting it caught in Fernando Torres's jersey. Maybe they need to start practicing their hugging on the training ground. Wait, that's supposed to be "best," not "klutziest," right? Oh.

Best singing of the national anthem:
1. Gennaro Gattuso, belting his heart out for Italy. Bless him
2. Any member of the Spanish team, trying not to look awkward about the fact that their anthem doesn't actually have any words.

Best socks:
1. Croatia -- I haven't seen their home kits yet, but the blue away socks have that red-and-white checkerboard pattern on them, which is a nice touch.
2. Netherlands -- I wasn't sure about the baby-blue socks, but I've decided now that I like them. It's sort of "We are too cool to bother about our uniforms matching."

Most likely to be wearing eyeliner:
1. Nuno Gomes -- He is really rocking that smoky eye look.
2. David Villa -- It goes with the carefully sculpted little soul patch. Cheer up, emo striker!

I'm in withdrawal

And the Football League playoffs are not really doing much to help with that. Although I see that Doncaster have just won, which is nice, because we're all supposed to hate Leeds, right?

Anyway, for those of you who, like me, are desperate for some football to watch between now and the kick-off of Euro 2008 in a couple weeks, TSN is showing classic games from previous tournaments (thanks to The Footie Fool for the tip-off). These seem to be condensed versions of the games, though -- my DVR shows them as being only an hour each, rather than the full 90 minutes.

Also, if you get TLN, they're showing recaps of some previous World Cups, starting with the 1982 tournament in Spain this afternoon at 2:30 pm.

As for Euro 2008 itself, here in Canada, TSN and CBC are splitting the broadcast rights. Neither of them has a complete broadcast schedule up on their website, at least not that I can find (bad form, guys), but they're all listed here. I'm just hoping that they'll be using the international commentary instead of whatever horrors ESPN puts together.

Heads-up

For those of you in Canada, Rogers is running a free preview of its Sports Pack for the month of October. If you've got digital cable, that means you can watch Gol TV and Fox Sports World Canada, plus all those other channels with sports I don't care about. If you don't have digital cable, you can still catch the free preview on the weekends on regular cable.

Fox's coverage has been decimated by the advent of Setanta, but if nothing else, it's worth checking out for the Superclasico between River Plate and Boca Juniors on Sunday, which is on at (I believe) 1:00 pm.

457 channels and nothing on

You know, you'd think that with my having caved and got Setanta -- i.e., a 24-hour soccer channel -- I would be guaranteed to always have something on TV to watch.

And yet, this is sadly not the case. Unless I want to suffer through the Manchester derby again, which, not so much. Come on, people. Don't make me watch my copy of the 2005 Champions League final again.

Actually...

Anyway, have a couple of useful links, for those of you here in Canuckistan:

Soccer on Canadian TV channels
Setanta Canada schedule

Ooh, there's MUTV reserve highlights on later...

Canada-centric linkspam

• First up, some (moderately) good news for those of us in Canada: Setanta Sports is going to be launching a Canadian soccer channel in partnership with Rogers Cable. There aren't a lot of details yet, but they're hoping to have it up and running by the time the Premiership season starts on August 11. It'll probably be a premium channel, costing about $15 a month. Which is pretty steep, but I'm going to suck it up and pay so I can get my fix.
  
  Basically, what's happened is this: The Score bought the Canadian rights for Premiership games, and is going to be sub-licensing them to Setanta. The Score will carry the 11am Sunday games, while Setanta will have most of the other games. Rogers Sportsnet, which was previously showing three games on Saturdays, will now only have one: the second-choice 10am match. FSWC, I think, is going to be left out in the cold.
  
  
• The police inquiry into the incident with the Chilean U20 team has exonerated the officers involved. Hopefully that'll be the end of that.
  
  
• The Canadian women's team came home from the Pan Am Games with the bronze medal, beating Mexico 2-1 in the third-place game. It was kind of a so-so tournament for Canada: they dominated their first two group games but then lost to Brazil 7-0 (or, really, losing to Marta +10) in the final round-robin match and went down 2-1 to the USA in the semi-finals. (The USA, represented by an U20 team, went on to lose 5-0 to Brazil in the final.) They've got a couple weeks off now, and then it's back to training for the World Cup in September.
  
  
• Toronto FC are finally back at home, but still struggling. They lost 4-2 to Aston Villa in a friendly last week -- although at least that was a decent performance, with TFC going down 2-0 and then coming back to tie it up before losing to a couple of late goals. On Sunday, though, they lost 3-0 to the Chicago Fire, and they were terrible.
  
  The team, unfortunately, is carrying a lot of injuries, including both their first- and second-string keepers. (Jose Mourinho is almost feeling sympathetic right now.) They actually had to start an 18-year-old rookie in net this week -- but the problem was less the goalkeeping and more the rest of the team in front of him. They had nothing going forward and even less defence. I know the MLS isn't the greatest league in the world, but come on. You can't let players just walk into the box unmarked.
  
  Up next: A home game against the LA Galaxy (aka David Beckham And His Man Crumpets). Still no word on whether Becks will play, but if he does, I'm sure he'll get quite the reception the first time he goes to take a corner.
  
  
• I forgot to mention this before, but the 2008 MLS All-Star Game is going to be held in Toronto.
  
  
• Why soccer isn't hockey. Not a bad clip from the CBC, with a reporter venturing into the stands during a Toronto FC game. Actually, this reminds me that I have a theory that part of the reason why soccer has been (relatively speaking) welcomed here is that hockey, rather than a "summer" sport like baseball or football, is our number one sport. And soccer -- despite the insanity of the Stanley Cup finals being played in June -- doesn't conflict too much with the hockey season.

U20 World Cup Wrap-up

I thought about doing some kind of tournament recap, but it basically boiled down to this: Argentina won, Canada sucked, I didn't hate the US tinies as much as I thought, Spain got my hopes up only to choke as usual, teenage boys are hot-headed idiots, tasering people is bad. The end.

The incident with the Chilean team, as far as I know, still hasn't been resolved. I suspect the truth is that both the Chilean players and the Toronto police were partly to blame. But FIFA's going to be investigating it, which means we'll probably never hear what actually happened.

Apart from that controversy, though, it was a very successful tournament, setting attendance records -- 1,195,299 spectators, ahead of the 1,155,160 in Mexico in 1983 -- and getting some decent TV ratings. (This despite the fact that the CBC shunted a lot of the games off to Country Canada rather than showing them on the main network.)

Encouraged by this, the CSA are considering bidding for the Women's World Cup in 2011. But if they do that, I hope there are a few more proper stadiums -- I mean not necessarily soccer-specific stadiums, because putting down a new pitch isn't such a huge problem, but stadiums that are the right size. This time around, the venues ranged from Swangard Stadium in Vancouver, with a measley 10,000 seats, to the 60,000-seat Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, which was usually about half-full. They need some kind of happy medium, because even if they're selling 30,000 tickets or so to games, the crowd looks lost rattling around in a gigantic stadium.

While I'm being critical, let's talk about the CBC, who were the host broadcasters. The commentators, for the most part, were fine -- probably because the majority were organized by FIFA instead of being drawn from the CBC. As for the in-house guys, Nigel Reed and Craig Forrest did a decent job on their games (although I could have done with slightly less preaching from Forrest about Argentina's diving in the final; I don't like diving any more than you do, Craig, but I don't need to be beaten about the head with it in the commentary either). The other team, Steve Armitage and Paul Dolan...not so much. Dolan's a former national team member, so he knows his stuff, but Armitage is clearly not a soccer guy, and I couldn't get away from the impression that he was meant to be commentating an NHL game instead ("He shoots...he scores!").

They also seemed to have a problem synching up their satellite feed for some of the games, because the audio was slightly ahead of the video. Most of the time it wasn't a big deal (the commentators just seemed unusually on top of things), but you really don't want to hear them announcing a goal before you've actually seen the ball hit the back of the net.

The CBC did have a pretty good website, for the tournament, including a comprehensive rundown of all the groups, with team-by-team analysis. Probably the best part of their coverage was that all the games were streamed live on the website, or available to watch later.

On the other hand, the CBC site was far from perfect. If they want to feature commentators' blogs, for example, then they need to be updated more than once a week. My biggest quibble was that they didn't have the most basic thing: a page where you could see all the fixtures and results at once. It's not that hard; both Sportsnet and TSN managed to put one together, and the Sportsnet page even has links to individual match reports.

Okay, I know that most of y'all are probably bored by now. But the Women's World Cup is coming up this September on the CBC, and I live in hope that somebody from the Mothership may actually take note of some of this for their coverage down the road.

I still don't care about the Copa America

Although I am deriving a certain amount of schadenfreude from the USA's suckitude. This is what you get from sending the third-string so you could beat up on teams in the Gold Cup instead (yes, I am still bitter over them knocking Canada out). I mean, I understand that you can't send the same squad to two back-to-back tournaments. But if you really want to be taken seriously in the footballing world, maybe you should send the better team to the tougher tournament. On the other hand, this way they have a built-in excuse for their non-performance in Venezuela, and they don't have to face the fact that they're really not as good as they think they are.

Anyway, in the tournament that people who aren't me (or US Soccer) actually care about, Brazil have scraped into the next round by beating Ecuador in their final group game. They finished second to Mexico in Group B, with third-place Chile also qualifying for the quarter-finals and Ecuador eliminated. Hosts Venezuela are on top of Group A, despite only winning one game, because everybody in that group has been beating each other. The exception is Bolivia, who are going home winless, while Peru and Uruguay are in to the next round. In Group C, Paraguay and Argentina have already qualified for the quarter-finals despite not having played their third game, with the USA and Columbia amassing zero points so far.

The quarter-finals, starting on Saturday, feature Venezuela v. Uruguay, Chile v. Brazil, and Peru and Mexico against the first- and second-place finishers in Group C, respectively (Paraguay or Argentina). For those of us who don't have digital cable, TLN in Canada is showing all the games with Spanish commentary.*

* I just went to check soccerTV.com to see if/when the Copa America was on here and they've discontinued their Canadian TV listings. Anyone know if there's another site that would have those? I know about Live Soccer TV, but their search interface is kind of a pain.

All the news that's fit to, um, blog

Or, your Friday afternoon excuse for a bunch of Youtube links...

Poland/Ukraine has been chosen as the hosts for Euro 2012, over Italy and Hungary/Croatia. In other words, "Congratulations, you are slightly less corrupt and incompetent than those other guys." In honour of the winning bid, a clip of Andriy Shevchenko kicking himself, running into a defender and then falling over. No zdrowie.

The CBC has announced their broadcast team for MLS games and this summer's U20 tournament: Craig Forrest (making the jump from Sportsnet), Nigel Reed and Mitch Peacock. I have no idea who Mitch Peacock is, but Nigel Reed has been doing play-by-play for some of the Serie A games on TLN and he does a decent job. At least he doesn't make me want to poke my eardrums out with a spork, so he's automatically a step up from those clowns at ESPN.

Elsewhere in the wide world of sports broadcasting, Jacqui Oatley will become the first female commentator on Match of the Day when she covers Fulham v. Blackburn this weekend.

My favourite bit of asshaberdashery comes from Steve Curry:

"It is an insult to the controlled commentaries of John Motson, Mike Ingham and Alan Green that their domain is threatened by a new arrival whose excited voice sounds like a fire siren."

He's clearly never listened to any Spanish-language commentary.

There's been a lot of stuff written this week about David Dein leaving Arsenal and speculation about what it means for the club. I'm trying to be interested in it, really I am. But I can't help wondering if the truth is far less sinister than a stealthy American takeover. Maybe he just wants to get away from Julio Baptista's whining.

Midweek Premiership matches:

Manchester United 2-0 Sheffield United: Goals for United from Wayne Rooney and Michael Carrick, who has suddenly turned into some kind of goal-scoring machine. It's freaking me out a bit. Sheffield United got absolutely robbed by the ref, who denied them a penalty after Gabriel Heinze took Luton Shelton down in the box -- a tackle that really should've seen him sent off. On the other hand, they hadn't managed to score in the 70 minutes or so leading up to that -- against a defence with a grand total of zero first-choice players -- so it probably wouldn't have made much difference to the result.

Liverpool 2-0 Middlesbrough: This one looked like it was going to end up as yet another anemic 0-0 draw. And then Steven Gerrard stepped up and did his Steven Gerrard thing -- translation: sulked around for 45 minutes, then scored a 30-yard screamer, accompanied by the appropriate chest-thumping celebration, and then converted a rather soft penalty as an encore. (I love you, Stevie, really.)

The other midweek matches were a series of spankings:
Arsenal 3-1 Manchester City
Blackburn 3-1 Watford
West Ham 1-4 Chelsea

And finally, Cristiano Ronaldo may have the PFA Player of the Year award in the bag, but that Leo Messi kid is pretty damn good too.

Oh, Canada

TSN, as usual, has been showing the Champions League games here. Not live, of course. Yesterday we got curling instead. (Yes, again. It's always curling, for some reason.) But Milan v. Bayern Munich was supposed to be on at 8pm, according to the schedule on their website.

This was a big fat lie. I duly turned on my TV at 8pm, only to see...hockey. A Leafs game, to be precise. They won in overtime to keep their playoff hopes alive, which is great, except that I don't really care about hockey unless (a) it's the Olympics or (b) the Leafs have won a playoff game and there are obnoxious fans honking their horns outside my apartment.

Now, it's hardly a surprise that they'd choose to show hockey instead of soccer, this being Canada and all. But I don't understand why none of the geniuses at TSN bothered to keep their broadcast schedule up to date. I'm still sick, so I'm cranky, and this isn't helping.

Also cranky-making: this news that most of the Premiership games are going to be broadcast on Setanta, not Sportsnet, next year. This means I'm probably going to have to shell out the money for digital cable. Either that or spend even more time than I already do at the pub, which could be fun, but also somewhat detrimental to my wallet.

And further annoying me is the forecast for snow this weekend, meaning that the outdoor scrimmage we had scheduled is not likely to happen. It is APRIL. WHAT THE HELL.

(What passes for analysis of the Champions League games will be up later, once I've had the chance to, you know, actually watch them. For the moment: Go Valencia.)

The FA Cup and, um, some other stuff

Middlesbrough 2 - 2 Manchester United
Not a bad game, but I would have enjoyed it more if (a) I hadn't been quite so massively hung over and (b) United hadn't contrived to nearly fuck it all up. Please learn to defend set-pieces, boys. It'll make life so much easier for all of us.

And don't think I didn't notice you lining up with Wayne Rooney on the left again. I can only assume that the formation (sort of a 4-2-3-1) was designed to minimize the impact of having to play John O'Shea in midfield, but that still doesn't explain why you'd play both Rooney and Ryan Giggs out of position in the process. And yes, I will keep harping on this until Sir Alex stops doing it. Sorry, but it's Monday and I'm cranky today.

Finally, George Boateng needs to stop whining about the penalty. This is not like the rec league I play in where they let girls use their arms to protect their boobs. In the real world, if you raise your arms to block the ball, and it hits them, it's handball. End of story. Suck it up and take the shot to the face. I'm sure that making it through to a cup semi-final would've dulled the pain.

Other results
Plymouth Argyle 0 - 1 Watford
Blackburn 2 - 0 Manchester City
Chelsea 3 - 3 Tottenham

I didn't see any of the other FA Cup matches. But I did catch a couple of other very good games instead:

• Barcelona 3 - 3 Real Madrid: Which featured three goals in the first 12 minutes, Barca going down to 10 men before half time when Oleguer was sent off, a complete and utter lack of defending by both sides, Iker Casillas making his Iker Casillas face roughly 10,000 times, Leo Messi being amazing and scoring a hat-trick, and the GolTV commentators having an aneurysm live on camera.
  
  
• Inter 2 - 1 Milan: Which featured Ronaldo scoring against his former club, being whistled at every time he touched the ball, and finishing the 90 minutes looking like he was about to keel over and die; Zlatan Ibrahimovic beating the geriatric Paolo Maldini for pace (shocking, I know) to set up the equalizer and then scoring the winner; Dida flapping at the ball repeatedly like a giant Brazilian chicken; and, sadly, nobody smacking Materazzi upside the head just for the fun of it.

I keep thinking about for signing up for digital cable so that I can watch more of the European leagues, but I already watch way too much football as it is. Plus, I suspect I would find it very hard not to reach into my TV and punch the commentators in the face, because most of the ones on FSC and GolTV seem to be given over to hyperbole, dubious turns of phrase, and talking out of their ass on any given topic. Even more than your average pundit normally does, that is. At least the guys they have doing the Italian matches on TLN (which I do watch sometimes) are relatively restrained. They stick to actually telling you what's going on, with the occasional snide remark about the players and bemused comments on those mad Italians. I like that much better.

Hurry! Hard!

Annoyance of the day: The fact that I haven't been able to see any of the Champions League games yet, because TSN decided to show them all delayed in favour of airing -- I kid you not -- women's curling. Welcome to Canada. (Then again, I didn't get home until about 1 a.m. last night, thanks to my team's extended session of post-game beers and beers and karaoke. But at least nobody was beating each other with blunt instruments.)

Anyway, the point is that you'll just have to wait for my scintillating observations on the games.

Five things that are annoying me this week

1. The way Premiership broadcasting rights have been split up this year. I used to have a routine for Saturday mornings: Roll out of bed, make myself some tea, read the paper, watch the triple-header of Premiership games on Sportsnet, and yell obscenities at my TV. It was nice. This year, Sportsnet is still showing games on Saturday mornings, but Setanta now has the rights to the first-choice matches at 10 am. Which means that most weeks, if I want to watch United or Liverpool, I have to drag myself out to a pub somewhere.
   
   And that raises a whole host of other issues, like pub #1's breakfast being crap, pub #2's waitresses acting as if I'm wearing an invisibility cloak, and pub #3 being populated by an unnecessarily high percentage of creepy guys. Yes, I'm cranky. But some weeks I just don't want the hassle of changing out of my pajamas, you know?
   
   
2. My soccer league's playoff tournament this weekend. It isn't the tournament itself that's annoying me -- I'm looking forward to it, although I'll probably be dead by Monday after playing seven games in two days. It's the fact that I'm going to miss the Liverpool-Chelsea and Man United-Arsenal games.
   
   Not that they'd be on a TV channel I could watch anyway.
   
   
3. Frank Lampard. I finally got around to watching the England-Macedonia game and I still can't figure out why he hasn't been benched yet. David Beckham was dropped because he didn't do much apart from taking free kicks and sending in crosses, and important as that was, it wasn't enough to justify his keeping him in the starting XI when it was pulling the whole team out of shape. Now it seems like Lampard's got a similar problem with Lampard. He doesn't really tackle, his passing has been mediocre, and he's not even scoring those lucky deflected goals right now, which as far as I can tell was his main contribution in the past. So why not drop him -- at least until he gets his form back -- move Steven Gerrard into centre midfield and bring in a proper winger on the right?
   
   
4. My ongoing quest for turf shoes. I have small feet, so I usually end up with kids' boots rather than the adult version. But turf shoes in small sizes are virtually impossible to find here. And it's made more difficult by my slightly irrational dislike for Nikes, and my belief that soccer shoes are not meant to be gold, or blue, or -- god forbid -- pink.
   
   
5. This article about female athletes using sex to promote themselves and their sport. (Thanks to YNWA for linking me to it.) I don't have a problem with the premise that sex sells, per se. And it's not as if male athletes don't do it too. But female athletes being treated as pin-up girls does bother me, for a couple reasons. First, there's the assumption that their only value is in being attractive -- that however good they are at their sport doesn't really matter. Of course, being good-looking helps male athletes as well -- I doubt that David Beckham gets all those ad contracts just because of they way he can bend a football -- but they do have to have the skills to back it up. I can't think of a male equivalent to Anna Kournikova, for example.
   
   The other thing is the assumptions about just what makes them attractive. For the women, it's usually being skinny and pouty and dainty, whereas for the men, it's being strong and muscular, going out there and getting all sweaty and dirty. Why can't that be sexy for women as well?

World Cup III: Togo, or not Togo

I've been complaining at being stuck at work while the World Cup matches are on, but the advantage is that I don't feel compelled to watch games like Togo v. Korea or Tunisia v. Saudi Arabia, and I can just follow them online instead. Sounds like both games had a lot of action, but not a lot of skill.

And, actually, you could say the same about Germany v. Poland. The Polish keeper, Boruc, was pretty good, but most of my entertainment came from wondering how many different ways the Germans could find to fuck up in front of goal. Also, Klinsmann really ought to remind them that passing into space is great, but not if your teammates are running in the opposite direction. Still, they got the win, and it looks like Germany will be the first team to book its place in the final 16.

Of the other games that I actually watched:

• Brazil 1-0 Croatia: It was probably impossible for Brazil to live up to all the pre-tournament hype, but they're going to have to step it up a notch if they want to win this thing. It's not that they were bad, they just weren't as fantastic as I'd expected. Croatia. meanwhile, are probably the best of what you'd think of as the second-tier European teams -- along with Serbia; if only the country didn't keep splitting into smaller and smaller pieces.
  
  
• Spain 4-0 Ukraine: I'm trying not to get too excited over this result, because chances are they're just going to choke in the quarter-finals, but damn that was a great performance from Spain. They've got an excellent midfield, now that Aragones seems to have stopped fucking around with his lineup (and got over his fear of the colour yellow), and they're very good at holding possession. I thought the penalty for Torres was a bad call by the ref, and I wouldn't be surprised if Shevchenko uses some of Abramovich's rubles to take out a hit on the linesmen, because he got screwed by offside calls a few times, but Spain were cruising in spite of the officiating.

Question of the day: Which of the supposed star strikers has underperformed the most so far? Ronaldo? Thierry Henry? Wee Michael Owen? My vote goes to Henry, because he doesn't have the excuse of recovering from injury or carrying around a whole extra person. Of course, he doesn't have the team built around him the way he does at Arsenal, but still, you expect him not to suck quite this much at an international level.

Oh, and the other advantage to watching the games on tape in the evening? The ability to fast-forward through all the annoying commercials (no more really cool oom-pah-pah bands!) and the half-time blather. I still think the Canadian commentators are better than the guys on ESPN, but really, they shouldn't have so much trouble pronouncing "Thierry Henry." Considering that we speak French here and all.

World Cup update

It's day three of the World Cup and I've managed to watch every game so far. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up, seeing as I have, you know, an actual job, but for the moment it's great.

Things we have learned in the past two days:

• Currently leading the pack in the World Cup Bad Hair competition is Sweden's Christian Wilhelmsson with his lopsided rattail (reminiscent of New Kids on the Block circa 1989; unfortunately I haven't been able to find a good picture), followed by fauxhawked Bastian Schweinsteiger of Germany and the entire Argentine team.
  
  
• The vampire who refereed the England-Paraguay game really had it in for Peter Crouch, who constantly got fouls called against him for, as far as I could tell, simply being tall and gangly. Maybe the ref just doesn't like the robot dance.
  
  
• Half the Trinidad and Tobago players seem to have their first and last names backward. Poland has the best names so far, though, with players called "Bonk" and "Yop" (I'm probably not spelling those right, but I'm too lazy to look them up).

In my attempt at more serious analysis (ha!):

• Germany 4-2 Costa Rica: I know Jurgen Klinsmann has been trying to make Germany a more attacking team, but I didn't realize that meant giving them a complete personality transplant. Scoring four goals is great and all, but their back line was so shaky it'd make Newcastle look good by comparison.
  
  
• Poland 0-2 Ecuador: Actually, I fell asleep watching this one. I think it's probably better that way.
  
  
• England 1-0 Paraguay: England, on the other hand, haven't had a personality transplant at all, no matter how much Sven tried to fool us with his squad selection. You know the pattern: Eke out a lead and then hold on like grim death (two words: Owen Hargreaves. Which is not so much "grim death" as "mild case of stomach flu," but anyway). At least they did manage to win withough actually scoring a goal, so that's...good? I guess?
  
  
• Sweden 0-0 Trinidad & Tobago: The upset of the tournament so far (I realize it's only day three, and it was actually a tie, but humour me here). Looking at it as an England fan, this is a great result, but on the other hand, if England play worse when they come up against mediocre opponents (see: England v. Paraguay, among others), then their game against Sweden next week is going to be awful.
  
  
• Argentina 2-1 Cote d'Ivoire: The first game from the group of death (yes, America, it's Group C, not Group E, no matter how much you whine) so I figured it had to be good. The Ivory Coast have a fair bit of talent -- not to mention tons of pace -- but Argentina have even more talent and looked very disciplined. If they keep playing like this, they're going to go far in the tournament. And that'll bug me, because it turns out my dislike for Diego Maradona is even greater than my annoyance with Didier Drogba.

Also, I have to give props (can I even say that, or am I just too white?) to Sportsnet and TSN for their coverage so far. Just look at the TV schedule: that is a thing of beauty. They're airing everything live, and rerunning every game at least once. (And plus there's all the games on the foreign language channels. Yay for Canadian broadcasters.) I haven't been paying a lot of attention to their pre- and post-game coverage, but at least it hasn't made me want to throw things at the TV -- until this morning, when they referred to Arjen Robben as "classy." Perhaps most importantly, they're using the British international feed, rather than ESPN, for their play-by-play commentary, for which I am profoundly grateful. And you should be too, because it means I don't have to rant about it for the next month.

(Speaking of throwing things at my TV, though: those Rogers wireless commercials where they go to Germany and find a "really cool oom-pah-pah band," etc., are on constantly and every time I hate them more. Unlike the Adidas +10 ads, which I could happily watch over and over, and yes I know that makes me a patsy to advertising but I don't care. They make Jermain Defoe play goal!)

Premiership Weekend Roundup: November 5-6

Manchester United 1-0 Chelsea
I have never been so happy to be wrong.

The game was on a channel that I don't get at home, so I headed to the pub up the street, which just happened to be full of people in United shirts. 11am kickoff + beer = perfect. Of course all the middle-aged British men in the pub felt it was necessary to warn me that there might be some foul language. I told them not to worry, because a lot of it would probably be coming from me.

Anyway, it was a great atmosphere to watch United grind out a win. It would have been good to see some more attacking flair from United -- Van Nistelrooy was pretty much useless. Ronaldo had Paulo Ferreira tied up in knots down the left wing all game, but his crosses weren't always the best -- even the one that led to Fletcher's goal looked as if it was heading out of play. But this kind of gritty performance -- particularly Alan Smith throwing himself into some crunching tackles in midfield -- is exactly what they needed. (And provided me with lots of opportunities to yell at Chelsea that they were "fucking wankers." Did I mention the 11am beer?)

So. It wasn't always pretty, but they did it. Roy Keane may have even cracked a smile.

Aston Villa 0-2 Liverpool
You know, if I'm going to drag myself out of bed at 7:30am for a game, it had better be worth watching. This one really wasn't -- certainly not for the first 75 minutes or so. I still don't see what's so great about Peter Crouch, but at least he brought the game to life.

The Guardian, as usual, says it best:

If Sky want people to pay to view any more games such as this, they should consider making Roy Keane an offer he cannot refuse to continue his career as a pundit. The Manchester United captain's observations on Harry Kewell's new hairdo would have been more entertaining than anything this match produced and Keane could also have brought to bear his withering opinions on questions such as whether Cisse offers more style than substance, where Gerrard and Alonso were supposed to be playing and whether Villa were actually aware the game had kicked off for the first half-hour.

I would also like to know how Xabi Alonso's hair manages to stay so fluffy even after 90 minutes of football. It's one of the mysteries of the universe.

Arsenal 3-1 Sunderland
If only Arsenal had lost, this would have been a perfect football weekend from my point of view. Despite my Arsenal-hate, though, I have to admit that they can play some damn pretty football -- quick, precise passes, lovely flowing movement, and deadly finishing from Thierry Henry. You have to feel a little bit sorry for Sunderland, who were clearly overmatched. Even after they scored to make it 2-1, you could tell that Arsenal were just kind of toying with them, waiting for the chance to pounce and put the game out of reach.

Portsmouth 0-2 Wigan
Does it make me a total bandwagon-jumper if I say that I am kind of rooting for Wigan now? I'm sure they know that they're hardly the best team out there, but they are certainly playing their asses off, and you have to love that.

Most annoying thing about watching the game was that Sportsnet switched over to the Fox soccer feed, which meant that in addition to the score in the top left corner and the Sportsnet bug in the bottom right corner, it also had the FSC bug in the top right corner -- plus, for part of the time, a British Airways logo, for no reason that I can see other than to piss me off. You could barely see the field under all that crap. Although it was still less annoying than The Score on Sunday, where you had to deal with not only the ticker at the bottom of the screen but also that picture-in-picture thing where the anchor has to update you about games that nobody cares about -- or, if they did care, they could find out about by reading the stupid ticker in the first place.

Other results
West Ham 1-0 West Brom
Newcastle 1-0 Birmingham
Fulham 2-1 Manchester City
Blackburn 4-1 Charlton
Everton 1-0 Middlesbrough