The United States and Syria and their national soccer teams. Concepts never before found in the same paragraph, on this blog.
Each hoped today for a victory. Each would be crushed by a defeat.
Each will settle for draws, late in the making, draws that keep each team on a road to the Russia 2018 World Cup, if nowhere near safely arrived.
First, the Yanks.
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We like to think sports are above and beyond politics.
We know that is not true, has never been true and never will be true.
Political imperatives often threaten fair and free sports events, and anti-competitive forces tomorrow have one of the greatest opportunities in modern times to take the narrative in a pre-ordained direction.
Iran versus Syria, in Tehran, on the final day of Asian Football Confederation qualifying for the 2018 Russia World Cup.
If the dark forces of arranged outcomes are in the ascendance, Iran, already the winners of the group, will lose; Syria will win and the latter will 1) gain an automatic berth to Russia or 2) move on to the AFC fifth-place playoffs with a chance to get to Russia by another route.
The Iran-Syria match is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.
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UCLA trailed Texas A&M 44-10 late in the third quarter at the Rose Bowl in a season-opening intersectional football game tonight.
And won 45-44 with touchdowns in their final five possessions, including the winner with 43 seconds left. It was the second-biggest comeback victory in the history of major-college football.
When it was over, UCLA junior quarterback Josh Rosen got a lot of attention and a lot of credit. Fair enough; most teams pretty much give up down 34 points with nearly three quarters gone. Not many come up with five touchdown in its final five possessions — while holding the other guys scoreless, too.
But the Bruins also were Just Plain Lucky. More than a little. OK, maybe a lot. And Rosen was in the middle of it.
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It seemed too good to be true. It was.
The Dodgers had a sensational run from the middle of May through late August, going 69-18 through August 25, a golden, 87-game stretch when they won 79.3 percent of their games. A nearly unprecedented run that had them on pace to win 116 games, tying the Major League Baseball record for victories in a season.
Everything that could go right did go right.
Stars played like stars. Journeymen played like stars. Veterans got hurt and the club replaced them with kids who were better. It seemed like the club’s talent went 40 players deep.
The Dodgers got to 91-36, nine days ago, then the wheels came off. Two losses to the Brewers. A three-game sweep at the hands of the Diamondbacks — the first time they had been swept this season and their first four-game (and then five-game) losing streaks.
Clayton Kershaw came off the disabled list to lead a 1-0 victory in San Diego on Friday, but the Dodgers were swept in a doubleheader today, and now they are 92-43 after losing seven of eight.
What has gone wrong. Well, a lot of things, and some of them a bit alarming.
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Well, this is alarming.
The United States national soccer team played host to Costa Rica tonight at Red Bull Arena in New Jersey in a 2018 World Cup qualifying match.
USMNT fans gathered to see what they expected would be a spirited riposte aimed at the Ticos for a 4-0 thrashing they gave the Yanks in Costa Rica last November, the humiliation that cost Jurgen Klinsmann his job and returned Bruce Arena as coach.
What U.S. fans witnessed was a 2-0 victory by Costa Rica, and that yearning for revenge turned into cold panic, because the national team now stands a real risk of missing the Russia 2018 World Cup.
And that would be a disaster for U.S. soccer, failing to qualify out of a region that has only three reliably competent national sides. Or is it now only two?
This is the situation:
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Imagine the confusion in the Los Angeles Angels front office.
They knew their 2017 team was bad. It was Mike Trout, Albert Pujols running on fumes, a slick-fielding shortstop … and a bunch of guys.
Angels officials hoped the team might be just good enough that Orange County fans would still buy tickets. Mike Trout, remember?
They could try again some other year to get back in the playoffs; this would be only their third straight out of the postseason (though their eighth since they last won a playoffs game, back in 2009).
They could resume trying to be good sometime soon. Maybe even next year when the bottom line was not weighed down by the final $25 million of the Josh Hamilton contract/fiasco (the deal that seemed to break owner Arte Moreno’s spirit) and be in position to ditch a bunch of free agents, if that made sense, and it probably would.
But then the Angels got to the end of August and, dang, if they weren’t somehow, some way contending for an American League wild card.
Actually, at 69-65, they were one game behind the Minnesota Twins for the second wild-card spot.
What to do?
Just ride it out and see if manager Mike Scioscia could hold this team together via alchemy, or whatever strange science he has employed … or go all in (or semi-all in) and get a couple of real players to help out in the here and now.
To the Angels’ credit, they opted for the latter, obtaining two veterans to plug the biggest holes on their roster as the race to the wire commences.
And who are these two newcomers?
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Oh, for the comparatively sane salaries of American sports!
The NFL gives out big contracts but rarely means it — most of the money is not guaranteed and often is not paid out.
The NBA spends enormous sums on players but 1) the league has a salary cap, which taxes big-spending clubs and 2) its big money goes to demonstrated superstars.
Major League Baseball gives nice bonuses to high draft picks, but nobody makes serious money until a player has reached free-agent status.
In world soccer, particularly European soccer, clubs are doing crazy things all the time, and sometimes the stacks of money go to players who are 20 or 21 and have not actually done much of anything yet.
Like Barcelona’s new addition Ousmane Dembele.
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The United Arab Emirates national team came up big. On the same day I said the Emiratis would lose 3-0. And maybe worse.
Needing a victory over Saudi Arabia to keep alive its ultra-slim chances of qualifying for the Russia 2018 World Cup, the UAE got goals from two of the greatest forwards the country has produced and defeated the Saudis 2-1.
Bravo! And apologies for my lack of faith.
The UAE has, historically, cowered when the Saudis were on the other side of the pitch. According to my former colleague, John McAuley, the UAE had not defeated the Saudis in soccer since 2007. And lost a lot, including 3-0 earlier in this qualifying round and 2-1 away in the previous round.
But in this one they rose up, despite not having AFC player of the year Omar Abdulrahman, overcame an early penalty and got world-class goals (no, really; go see them) from Ali Mabkhout and Ahmed Khalil to win a game with multiple ramifications in Asian Football Confederation qualifying.
First, about that “other, other” thing.
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It is time for the grape harvest, in the south of France. The summer has been fairly warm, and the grapes are ready to go — about a month sooner than they were a year ago.
This is a big annual event in the Languedoc and surrounding regions, which produce a third of France’s win. Grapes/wine are such a big part of everything down here. The culture, the land, the economy.
To live here is to witness the life cycle of vineyards. From leafless stumps in the winter to the green buds of spring, to the appearance of proto-bunches in early summer, to the pale green or dark purple grapes harvested in late summer that will be turned into wine in the coming months.
The most dramatic event of an oenophile’s year is the appearance of the mechanical grape harvester (as seen above), which gets the grapes off the vines in a way that I did not imagine, before living here.
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Joey Votto made a bit of news today when he walked in all five of his appearances.
That made for a 0000 “stat line” in the boxscore for the Cincinnati Reds first baseman, but if you look a little closer you can see the “5” for his quintet of walks.
(A nerd thing. The boxes on espn.com are what the Associated Press once called “expanded” boxes. If you go back in time, to the pre-USA Today era, (before 1982) baseball boxes provided four stats for each player, and the two teams shared one column in the newspaper: Visitors left, home team right. When USAT began running expanded boxes, most papers of any size eventually did the same thing. It required a commitment of space, in a newspaper, because the boxes were twice as long — visiting team above home team, but they moved walks and strikeouts up into an expanded stat line — so Votto is 000050 in the box linked above.)
Votto has done this before. He went 000050 in 2013, seeing 28 pitches. This time, he saw 43 pitches.
Which is a long prelude to “unusual boxes we have known”, including one or two that may have been done only once.
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