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When Saturday Comes

The Life Lessons of Relegation

Having a team in the drop zone is like being on death watch for a relative: The world swirls around you, bee-busy, while your time slows to black-hole slowness. “Football mirrors our meritocracy, so this only works out for so many people or teams. The majority stoically settles for stasis – mid-table safety may not be ideal but we’ll plod along in the hope that something better might develop. But if people or teams must shift upwards (and they must), some of us have to shift down to accommodate them.” (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)

(Image credit: longwayround/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Blame When Saturday Comes

WSC ploughed the field we all play in now — first with a literary, “unashamedly cerebral” take on the sport; first with football humor set-pieces; first with “the new vocabulary of puckish humour, critical scrutiny of football’s hierarchies and the promiscuous eliding of football with other parts of the popular culture. Cranky, and populist, it might seem a little outdated now, “like a slightly mildewed Victorian keystone buried within the sparkling bowels of a craning new-build mega-city, it has remained essentially unchanged as football has mushroomed around it.” And thank God for that. (Barney Ronay/The Guardian)

The Lincoln City Assassination

What’s worse than rooting for a crap team? Rooting for a crap one that has a good little run and fools you into thinking that it’s shed its lousy ways…only to tumble right back into the shit. Welcome to Lincoln City FC: “My English teacher once told our class: ‘You’re in school to learn, not have fun.’ Great preparation for life, and all that. Except that we never do learn, do we? And we don’t have much fun either.” (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)

Well Struck: Deceptive Correlations, Card Waving and a Ball Tom Friedman Would Love

Did England’s early World Cup exit boost English tourism? Did the Jabulani make shots less accurate? Can a soccer ball boost business productivity? Click the headline for some great…click-throughs.

Perp Walks and Banner Days at Walsall

The management of League One’s Walsall F.C. has developed a nasty habit of ordering its stadium stewards to rip down banners and flags of any kind — including one that simply said “Freedom of Speech” — and perp walk the banner owners out of Bank’s Stadium. A fan was also banned for calling a chat show. Ironic, since the club’s chair came to power in a wave of fan protests. But is it more — can Walsall become a watershed case advancing fans’ freedom of speech? (Tom Lines/When Saturday Comes)

All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

“History” and “historic” have become the new “new” badges for football marketing…the word that everyone pastes on any subject — from last year’s Cristiano Ronaldo deal to Fulham’s win over Juventus — to add that crucial extra inch of legitimizing differentiation. Of course, to speak of “Premier League” history and “Champions League” history is to imply that anything before 1992 is in fact not history, just “players with bad haircuts winning antiquated trophies on unsightly, muddy pitches.” (James Calder/When Saturday Comes)

How the Championship’s Other Half Lives

Life in the luxury box of an about-to-be-relegated Championship team is everything it might seem: surgically enhanced WAGs, player entourages worth of “an American heavyweight boxer in the 1970s,” the father of the loanee from one of the Big Four who makes disparaging remarks about the other players in front of their families. And this is the starting 11′s box — you wouldn’t be caught dead with the untouchables who know the subs… (Kevin Donnelly/When Saturday Comes)

Rethinking the MLS Audience

MLS attendance is up almost 20% year over year, belying fears about early crowds being down this season. Anyway, the figures have always been “slavishly tracked and overanalyzed,” argues Fake Sigi — attendance is just one factor of many that determine MLS teams’ profitability. Meanwhile, Ian Plenderleith of When Saturday Comes says the annual summer march of big Euro teams to the United States for “hollow, half-hearted” friendlies shows these clubs are “stuck in the 1980s, in the condescending mindset that thinks the US is still an unconquered footballing backwater.”

Nothing to See Here, Folks

Like Fellini or Gore Vidal branding their films with their own name, Ipswich Town is now “Roy Keane’s Ipswich Town.” Unlike Satyricon or Caligula, though, Keane’s club has been the one thing nobody expected: bland to the point of invisibility. Even the media, which had been baying for his ouster, is now spiking stories about Keane’s lusterless tenure thus far. (Csaba Abrahall/When Saturday Comes)

The Hot New Position

The Inside-Out Winger — is it more unnatural than the Dirty Sanchez? The Rusty Trombone? It’s certainly nastier, as right-footers play the left side and vice-versa in an effort to create space and target a full-back’s weaker side. Jacob Steinberg of When Saturday Comes says it’s increasingly embraced in England; Rob Marrs of Left Back in the Changing Room has his own variations.

German. Soccer. Violence.

German. Soccer. Violence. The rampage by Hertha Berlin ultras after a recent loss isn’t an isolated incident of violence for German football in recent years — and the good work of two decades building positive fan vibes could be supplanted by body scanners at the gates. (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes) (Addendum: Map of the worst 30 instances of German soccer violence in 2009.)

Reads of the Day: Somebody Got Hurt Sunday

Somebody Got Hurt Sunday: The best on Achilles’ rupture: Paul Hayward/Guardian; Ian Chadban/Telegraph; James Hamilton/More Than Mind Games; Matthew Syed/The Times…plus a golden oldie by Barney Ronay/When Saturday Comes.

Why Everyone Should Be a Ref

Why Everyone Should Be a Ref: What would it take to stop Arsene Wenger from complaining about calls from 60 yards away? Why every professional soccer player (and manager, and fan) should train as a referee — and then officiate some U-12 girls’ matches. (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)

Read of the Day: Against Formations

Everybody’s agog over tactics — but do they really matter anymore? Or have the global movement of players and the refusal to enforce the persistent infringement rule marginalized formation innovation? Horrors! (Ian Plenderleith/When Saturday Comes)