Goal: 1,380 miles - Miles to go: ZERO!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Can't hang with 'em, can't out kick 'em


When I was a real runner, we used to have a saying: "Can't hang with 'em, can't out kick 'em, what can ya do?" It was sort of a joke. There are times when you have to race against someone who's just better. Maybe not if you're Mo Farah, but for basically everyone else you'll have races where there doesn't seem to be any possible way you can win.

That's how it felt for the first 134 minutes of the Sounders-Tigres quarterfinal series of the CONCACAF Champions League. During the first leg of the series, stringing together five or six consecutive passes felt like an accomplishment for the Sounders. For 90 minutes, the top team in Mexico relentlessly pounded our back line with shot after shot after shot. Thanks to a few clutch saves and some sloppy finishing, we managed to escape with just a 0-1 loss. We couldn't hang with 'em, but at least we were within reach.

Then the second leg in Seattle started and despite a handful of opportunities, we just couldn't put the ball into the net. Seizing one of their few early opportunities, Tigres launched a quick counter attack, kicked Yedlin to the turf and scored an easy goal. Game over. With away goals being the first tie breaker, we'd need three goals to avoid being knocked out in the quarterfinals for the second year in a row. You could feel the stadium deflate. You could see it on the field too. The fire was all but extinguished and if not for another couple spectacular saves by Gspurning, the game could have gotten completely out of hand.

Then something strange happened. We caught a break. For a team that had more than our fair share of coin-flips go against us, it was nice to win one for a change. In the 45th minute, Manuel Viniegra, who was already on a yellow card for time wasting, drew another yellow. Maybe a bit of a soft yellow, but the ref who'd been liberal with the cards all night stayed consistent and sent him off. We went into halftime down 0-2 on aggregate, needing to score three goals in 45 minutes, but we were up a man. And more importantly, we had a little bit of a hope. And an underdog, who can't hang with you and can't out kick you, but somehow someway has a spark of home going into the last lap, is a very dangerous thing.

The second half began and the fire was back. Playing 11v10 helped for sure, but we were playing with a confidence and a desire that hadn't been there before. And in the 53rd minute it payed off. DeAndre Yedlin, the homegrown 19 year old right back, launched a long range volley that seemed to defy logic, space, and time. In just his 2nd professional start, he fired what will surely be one of the most memorable goals in Sounders history. I remember watching the ball sail, in what felt like slow motion, into the back of the net. It was one of the most beautiful goals I've ever seen. At least until fellow defender Djimi "The D is Silent" Traore blasted a golazo of his own a mere seven minutes later, sending Century-Link Field into an absolute frenzy. With his voice cracking from the excitement, Ross Fletcher said it best, "30 yards out, left foot rocket, cannoning off the underside of the cross-bar, no goal keeper in the universe will stop it. Seattle lead 2-1 and the dream is very much alive." It was magical. When every shot seemed to go just wide, or be safely covered by the Tigres keeper, it took a couple moments of brilliance from the least likely of sources to bring us roaring back with a vengeance. 

The "small" crowd of 20,000 erupted like packed and house and you could feel that we were experiencing history. It was all but inevitable when Eddie Johnson broke free down the left hand side and slipped a shot through the non-existent gap at the near post to give us the lead. We were beating the best team in Mexico. For the first time ever, an MLS team would knock out a Liga MX team in the elimination round of CCL. History, we just wrote it. Unbelievable.

It was hands-down the greatest comeback I've seen in person, the greatest win I've seen in person, and the greatest damn sporting event I've ever seen in person. In my pantheon of non-championship wins, I'm having a hard time remembering anything better than this. Because the Sounders showed how you beat someone when you can't hang with 'em, and you can't out kick 'em. You just keep fighting. No matter how impossible it seems, you don't give up and you don't give in. Because crazy shit happens. Maybe it's a 19 year old kid with crazy hair launching a ridiculous shot that he has no business taking, or 33 year-old defender scoring his 1st ever goal for a club team, but the impossible happens all the time in sports. It's only impossible until it happens.

Of course, the journey's not over yet. The goal was never just to make it to the semi-finals. But after watching history unfold right right in front of me, over the course of 45 minutes on a rainy Tuesday night in Seattle, I know that we'll keeping fighting. Because that's what we do. We are Sounders, mighty Sounders, we are Sounders from Brougham End.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Way over-thinking a reality television show


There's that saying in sports, "May the best man/woman/team win". I don't know if anyone really means it, it's just what we say. But I've long argued that the thing that really makes sports great is that the best man/woman/team doesn't always win. It'd be boring if they did. Most of the time, the best team wins. If they didn't, it'd ruin the integrity of the sport. But without upsets, why would we even watch?

I bring this up because Chuck Klosterman recently interviewed Jeff Probst in a must-hear podcast. One of his most interesting questions was whether Survivor promotes mediocrity. That instead of the best player winning, the most average player wins. At the start of the competition, the old and weak are voted off first; in the spirit of keeping the tribe strong and winning immunity challenges, the athletes usually team up to get rid of everyone who's a liability. Later, the game evolves into voting off the biggest threats. Inevitably, the guy who had won five immunity challenges in a row gets snuffed as soon as he fails to throw a bean bag into a bucket before someone else does. This leaves us with the "middle class" winning in the end. Whoever didn't suck enough to get voted off early, but didn't dominate enough to get targeted late ends up winning.

The question blew my mind. I'd never thought about it before, but was Survivor just a competition to see who was the most average? Devastated that my third favorite sport could be a fraud, I did some serious soul-searching. After praying meditating thinking about it for about seventeen minutes on the bus ride home, I've decided that no, Survivor doesn't promote mediocrity.

Like any sport, there are upsets. We all remember when Sandra beat Parvati six votes to three in season 20 -- it was one of the biggest upsets in sports/reality show history. The better woman lost but it was an upset, not a celebration of mediocrity. Most of the time that doesn't happen. Usually, the best player wins. Or at least one of the best players wins. It often comes down to which of the few true contenders makes the decisive move at the right time. Who wins a crucial immunity challenge, who reads the other poker hands correctly, or who can sway the couple undecided votes in the jury when it comes down to it. These qualities are not a lack of physical prowess or simply being unthreatening. They're a combination of decision making ability, charisma, leadership, and intuition.

For the sake of way over-thinking a reality television show (and to convince myself that my last decade of Survivor watching hasn't been a waste of time), let's break down a few of the most iconic Survivor contestants of all time.

Russel Hantz
Russel's probably the most famous "villain" in Survivor history. He impressively made it to the finals in two consecutive seasons, a feat that had never been done before and will probably never be done again. When he lost in the finals two seasons in a row, he argued that it was because the game was flawed. That he deserved to win, in a way asking the same question as Klosterman. However, he was wrong. He was spectacular at getting second place, but could not finish. Not because he was "too good". But because he lacked the most important skill of any Survivor winner: finding a way to get the people who you vote off, to vote for you to win a million dollars. It takes subtlety and finesse. You have to be able to beat people and have them respect you for it, not resent you.

Boston Rob
Rob has the advantage of having been on the show four times. But you could see how the experience paid off. In his final season, he was unquestionably the best player and rightfully won the million bucks. It was the single greatest season anyone has ever played. The best move he made was keeping his original tribe loyal post-merge. Often times, we see the tribe with bigger numbers turn on each other, thinking they have to be the one backstabbing lest they get backstabbed themselves. Rob remedied this with one of the most brilliant strategies in the history of Survivor. Brilliant but simple. The "buddy system". No one from his original tribe was ever allowed to be alone. They all partnered up and refused to even pretend to talk strategy with the opposing tribe. It was an impenetrable defense. Rob also had both short-term and long-term strategies planned out. He knew who he wanted on the jury and who he wanted to sit next to at the end. There's no guaranteed blueprint on how to win Survivor, you have to adapt to every situation and Rob did that beautifully.

Parvati
Until Rob's unparalleled season, Parvati was my pick for greatest to ever play the game. And you could argue her overall record is just as good impressive, with 1st, 2nd, and 6th place finishes compared to Rob's 1st, 2nd, 10th, and 13th. Especially because she was always flagged as a threat early on and still managed to make it to make it deep into the "playoffs" every season. Being able to stick around after you get a target on your back is one of those skills that you can't teach. You either have it or you don't. One of Parvati's greatest accomplishments was defeating Ozzy in season 16. The move that is forever etched in the record books occurred at the always crucial crossroads with nine players left, when a 5-4 blindside is possible, but risky. The episode was a clinic on how to win Survivor. It started with winning immunity in an endurance challenge (stand on a log and hold your arm above your head for as long as you can). Then setting up the blindside (let's vote of Jason like we always planned to do, but really we'll take this opportunity to vote off the amazing, but a little too trusting, Ozzy). What often gets overlooked here is that this single move probably won her the entire game. By keeping her side-promise to Jason and not voting him off, she won his jury vote, which ended up being the decisive vote for her to win 5-3. It didn't matter if she took the heat for backstabbing Ozzy, he was going to vote for Amanda to win no matter what. The move netted her one jury vote, got rid of of biggest competitor and gave her the most persuasive argument for why she deserved to win -- "I decided to pull the trigger and axe the front-runner, I did so by winning and leading, not by following and riding someone else's coattails." It was possibly the only scenario that would have lead to her eventual victory and it was executed perfectly. I'm actually starting to talk myself back into ranking Parvati as number one all time.

JT
In an easily overlooked performance because it was so boring, JT's win in season 18 deserves some credit. His brilliance was in voting people off and being almost apologetic about it. "Sorry Coach, I don't want you to go, but that's just the way the numbers are going to fall." His decisive move came immediately after the merge, using his charisma to win over enough opposing tribe members to keep his outnumbered original tribe not only alive, but somehow in control. He left himself a little vulnerable to a blindside, but one could argue that he knew his alliances were tight enough that he had nothing to worry about. What firmly established himself as the best player of his season was his performance in the final tribal council. He acted genuinely hurt when Stephen admitted that he might not have taken JT to the end with him if he'd won the final immunity challenge. It was only after the votes were counted and JT had won 7-0 that he admitted there was no way he would have kept himself around if he'd been in Stephen's shoes. When faced with stiffer competition in season 20, JT showed why he's not among Survivor's all-time elites, but in a bit of a down season, he put in a dominating performance.

Sandra
On the other side of the coin, Sandra's the poster-child for Survivor promoting mediocrity. She's the only player to win twice and put in wildly forgettable performances both times. The lesson here is that flying under the radar can be effective. Simply making it to the end without pissing anyone off can sometimes be enough. But not usually. Sandra beat Parvati because Parvati underestimated the blowback her alliance with Russel would have. This was one of the few times that having the jury hang out with each other leading up to the final tribal council changed the outcome. There was so much anti-Russel range on that jury that even being associated with him was enough to cost Parvati the game. Sandra's first win wasn't quite as egregious but I think she benefited from a bit of a down season. It was more a circumstances of being on the dominant tribe at the merge and again, not pissing anyone off.

I guess the argument would be that Survivor does not simply reward mediocrity. It's true that flying under the radar and not sticking your neck out is a great way to make it pretty far in the game. But it won't usually win. To win, you have to stick your neck out at the right time. You have to know when's the time to reveal your hand and when to check/fold. And that's how it should be. There shouldn't be guaranteed formula for how to win. The winner should be whoever can take advantage of the unique circumstances of every season the best. Usually, that's what happens. But still, Parvati got robbed.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

A quarter inch the other way and you'd have missed completely

There's a great scene in The Mighty Ducks -- well there are a lot of great scenes, it's an awesome movie, but specifically there's a scene where Coach Bombay is talking to Charlie about how close he came to winning a championship when he was a kid.
Coach Bombay: I go in, I triple deke. I fake the goalie right out of his pads.
The puck's headed in, and then, Clang! Hits the post.
We lost in overtime.
A quarter of an inch this way and it would have gone in.
A quarter of an inch, Charlie.
Charlie: Yeah, but a quarter inch the other way and you'd have missed completely.
It's a scene that expresses exactly how I feel about the Sounders game last night. We had our chances, plenty of shots off the crossbar and one or two off the post. Eddie Johnson got taken down in the box on what should could have been called for a penalty kick. Montreal's only goal came off an almost impossible chip over a 6'6'' Michael Gspurning. If you replay those half dozen shots a hundred times, we probably come out ahead more than we come out behind. But on the flip slide, all of those post and cross bar shots were equally close to missing entirely. And Montreal narrowly missed a couple  more goals of their own. If we were a quarter of an inch from winning 2-1, we were also a quarter of an inch from losing 0-3.

Most soccer games come down to a couple crucial plays. It's not enough to almost score, you have to finish the few genuinely good opportunities that come. It's so cliche, but that's the difference between winning and losing. It's almost always just a quarter of an inch here or there.

A 0-1 loss to start the season against an expansion team in their second year, made up of mostly old washed up Italians, is nothing to panic about. But it's something to worry about. At least a little bit. We didn't lose just because Alonso was out and we weren't able to control the midfield. Or because our back line was missing at least two -- potentially three -- from our "ideal eleven". We lost because, as a whole, we played sloppy. Careless and sloppy. Outside of a few impressive moments, we looked uninspired and shockingly mediocre.

I know it's only the first game of the season, but it's not like these guys have been sitting around getting caught up on Downton Abbey all offseason. Eddie and Evans have been playing with the US Men's National Team for weeks, Martinez has been wiping the floor with the US Men's National Team, and all those second-stringers have been winning preseason tournaments. Of course we'd be a little rusty, but not that rusty. Maybe Estrada set our expectations unreasonably high last year after scoring a hat trick on opening day against some other so-so Canadian team. Suffice it to say, I expected more. I think 38,998 of us expected more.

Next week we have an opportunity to redeem ourselves. If we play like this down in Mexico, it'll be an excruciatingly long 90 minutes. But if we play to our potential, or at least somewhere in that range, there's a lot to be optimistic about. If Joe Flacco can win a Super Bowl, anything's possible -- that should be Nike's next ad campaign. Just do it, Flacco did.