Hey, What About Those [Your Favorite Team]!

[ntw3001]

The final sentence is one of the prime places to give up reading. But yeah, I'm pretty sure sport is one of the areas in which the words used don't exactly have to mean anything, just give a sort of poetic sense of action. I imagine a Jabberwocky-style stream of nonsense would serve perfectly well in a report like this.

[Judas Maccabeus]

I imagine a Jabberwocky-style stream of nonsense would serve perfectly well in a report like this.

Or for an announcer. "He gyres, he gimbles, what a frumious tove! Now he's galumphing the rath to Bandersnatch, who burbles a beamish wabe... Callooh! Callay! He OUTGRABES!"

[MysticalDescent]

I was able to work my way through that stuff, but I just gave up when faced with the closer "Slabber lashed in Simmonds's cut-back."

Stoke recently played a few friendly matches in America and live footage was broadcast over the internet with American commentators. It was glorious. I have no idea if any of it was common jargon in North American football or existed purely in the heads of these two gentleman, but it was just about the only thing that convinced me to join in. Screaming 'THROUGH THE FACE' at full volume whenever the ball went anywhere near the six yards box was one thing, but bamboozling the audience with a cry of 'Jones...tries to fire a seed through a mailbox' is something else altogether. Another favourite was 'Rodriguez tries to beat Wilson, but the Stoke man is strong, in the idiom of all Stoke men'. I could have listened to it for hours and hours. I would personally pay their wages if the BBC would take them on as their top commentators.

[chrismachine]

Yeah "through the face of the (goal or crease)" is from hockey where the "mouth" of the goal (or the basket maybe, but that has no face in our common jargon) has a crease for some protective feature of the sport, and the top or front part is the face. Given that our league has records for assists it really is more like hockey than any other NA sport, so maybe they've borrowed more heavily than I'd noticed. Not that I watch more than about 5 MLS games a year...

[PonderThis]

I imagine a Jabberwocky-style stream of nonsense would serve perfectly well in a report like this.

Or for an announcer. "He gyres, he gimbles, what a frumious tove! Now he's galumphing the rath to Bandersnatch, who burbles a beamish wabe... Callooh! Callay! He OUTGRABES!"

That was totally AWESOME

[ntw3001]

England beat Brazil at the footballs and actually looked alright! They passed to their own players instead of the other guys.

[chrismachine]

I feel like they would be somewhere in the 3-6 ranking range if they would just dress a squad with an average age of 21 rather than like 27. Let go of the old "stars" that never won anything. "Oh what a leader that pylon Terry is, he has to play" some might think... make him an assistant coach. Witht their old slow bums who are too set in their ways to develop chemistry in a different style they effectively play themselves out of the top 10.

[ntw3001]

I dunno, Terry wasn't there and probably wasn't any great loss. Lampard and Gerrard are still good, and we are hurting for replacements in central midfield (Wilshere is good enough, but aside from that there's not a huge amount of depth). Cole is still one of the best left-backs around, and just about the only player who's performed consistently for England. Last night was his 100th international cap, and it turns out he's not been on as a substitute in a single one of those matches. Even Rooney did alright, which is fairly unusual. The rest of the team were young players, so it's just the remnants of that generation hanging around now and they've all been pretty good. Even Terry did well at Euro 2012, but I think the team is just fine without him.

[chrismachine]

Thing is, you guys ahve some of the fastest players on the planet but are forced to plod along much of the time so your older players can be wiley and stuff. You are right about needing more midfielders as your best ones all play wing. There's likely a 17 year-old in your system that just needs a chance.

[MysticalDescent]

Some opinions:

I like Roy Hodgson as a manager. The last few England managers have bought into this nonsense about England having the best players in the whole world and therefore being able to take on anybody as equals. Watching England at the 2010 World Cup against Germany pretending that John Terry and Matthew Upson (!) were world class defenders capable of playing a high line against the second best team in the world was utterly embarrassing. It's nice to see an England manager actually accept that his pool of players is full of crap and to therefore approach games as such. People complain about the game against Italy, but they put out a wonderfully disciplined defensive shape that restricted the eventual winners to zero chances of note.

I'm not sure about the actual defence. Terry is massively overrated and way over the hill. I admit that my view of him is somewhat skewed by his hardman image (gained largely by shouting a lot) not reflected the way he plays on the pitch at all - I've seen him mauled about the pitch by a bloke who signed for Stoke on a free transfer from Gillingham, I've seen him struggle with said player so much that he performed an outrageous dive in order to try to get him sent off and I've seen him behave in the most unpleasant manner almost every time I've seen him play in person. Cahill is, by and large, a joke of a defender who gets by because he's 'technically skilled'. That's the modern day slang for 'passes the ball five yards but can't defend to save his life'. You can rank Phil jones in that category too. Chris Smalling is very middling as a defender. Ferdinand is unreliable and past it. It's not a particularly pretty selection. I'm aware that I'm very open to accusations of bias, but the very best English defender that I've seen in the last few years is Ryan Shawcross. Consistently high levels of performance over 5 seasons now. It's no mean feat being made the captain of a Premier League club at the age of 22, either. The media have now completely discounted him partly because he's a touch unfashionable compared to the others, partly because they're fixated with Rio Ferdinand and partly because 30 seconds into his England debut he made an absolute howler to allow Ibrahimovic to score. He came on in that game as a substitute on something like the 70th minute. Why Gary Cahill, the senior defender who had been playing the whole game, decided that the new guy who was yet to get started in the game should mark one of the best strikers in the world while Cahill himself goes wandering off in midfield, I'll never know. Grumble.