Anatomy of a Goal (and Day Five Previews)

Before we get to anything else, we need to talk about this:

I know, it happened on Friday and there have been eleventy billion matches between then and now. But try to remember. Try to remember when Spain and the Netherlands were playing one another in a tense and competitive soccer match, rather than Iker Casillas’ nightmare and a “performance that sang of the glue factory.” Before this moment, it looked as if Spain was going to head down the tunnel at halftime up a goal, on a potentially properly given penalty, and with not much else happening on the field.

After this moment, the game went into the half tied, the Dutch side encouraged and emboldened by Robin van Persie’s goal. Their intent was clear: to get between and behind the Spanish centerbacks quickly on the counter-attack. Playing up cautiously through the center, from defense through the midfield and then to the strikers would only play right into Spain’s hands. They pack the center of the field tight with players who press up on any opponent who tries to get through them, and then rebuild their own attack after winning the ball back.

In this match, Spain kept four players essentially within the center circle — Busquets, Alonso, Xavi and David Silva— with Iniesta close by to both initiate the press and serve as an outlet for any balls won in the middle of the field. Alba and Azpilicueta, the fullbacks, were positioned well wide and on the center line, essentially creating a line of 7 across the middle of the middle of the field, like a World War One trench, with the only vulnerable point a gap between the center circle and Azpilicueta on the left. Of course, Azpilicueta wasn’t that far wide because he or Vicente del Bosque wanted him out there, but because the Dutch formation required it.

Louis van Gaal, who is taking over Robin van Persie’s professional club Manchester United at the conclusion of the World Cup, trotted out a 5-3-2, seemingly to counter Spain’s attack. It appeared he intended to put out an overly defensive line with three centerbacks and two fullbacks in an attempt to build their own trench, just closer to their own penalty box, implying that the game would be played in the space between them. Or so I thought.

Even though I heard the announcer call the fullbacks “wingbacks”, the combination of winger and fullback and a hybrid generally as extinct as Eric Cantor’s legislative career unless you play FIFA and buy wide midfielders and turn them into wingbacks because you never lose the ball anyway, I never imagined van Gaal would play them as advanced and with as much license as he did.

With the three centerbacks marking (to some degree) the lone Spanish striker, Diego Costa (who is a terrible fit in the Spanish attack thus far*) and occasional forays from Xavi, Silva and Iniesta, and with Nigel De Jong and Jonathan De Guzman able and willing to drop deep and provide a second net over them, the Spanish attack up through the center was essentially thwarted: four Spanish attacks on five Dutch defenders.

This left those fullbacks with an immense amount of space on the sides, and with van Gaal’s permission to push up and take it, pulling the Spanish fullbacks out of their position and isolating the Spanish centerbacks (poor Pique and Ramos) against two of the best attackers of the generation: the afore-giffed RvP and Arjen “my right foot is for display only” Robben.

Here is a picture of what I mean:

Daley Blind**, with the ball, right on the sideline, has plenty of time and space to choose either of two runs about to be made. Robben (the baldheaded one closer to the bottom of the photo, is dragging his defender away from the box and clearing out room for van Persie, who is also in space between two defenders, neither of whom are close enough to impede his progress once the ball comes of Blind’s foot.

None of this comes to anything if Blind doesn’t play a perfectly weighted ball, and van Persie doesn’t have the ingenuity and audacity to essentially chip the goaltender with a flying header from almost 50 feet. But then, Robben’s first goal comes to nothing if he doesn’t turn 270 degrees in order to go left rather than his usual 90 degrees.

There is still work and art to be done, even when the tactics, strategy and execution all mesh. The beauty isn’t so much in the tactics themselves, but in the way the players understand the interplay between the freedom and responsibility those tactics give them. This goal didn’t crush Spain’s chances (the third probably did that), but going into halftime it should have been a harbinger to Del Bosque and wasn’t. It was a rout because Casillas had a terrible day, but it was a win because the Dutch found a way to exploit Spain’s strength through the midfield and turn it into a weakness. They’re not the first to do so, but no one has done it as thoroughly as the Dutch did on Friday.

Onto today’s games:

NOON: Germany and Portugal are heavy favorites to emerge from their group, and this match is likely to determine which of them wins it. Indeed, Germany are among the favorites to win the Cup, with a host of stars and a Golden Generation that actually appears to be capable of winning things, for club and country. Some of the more stats-inclined folks on SoccerInternet are touting Portugal as a dark horse to make a deep run and maybe even hoist the trophy. If they do, they’ll rely primarily on one player, but he happens to be one of the best in the world going on six or seven years now. Hate him because he’s beautiful, arrogant, flagrant, demonstrative or whatever, but he can be an absolute joy to watch, and a complete terror to play against. Germany probably have the defensive mettle and talent to isolate him, but that still might not be enough to actually stop him. Germany 2-1 Portugal.

(Ed. Update): LOL because Pepe just got himself kicked off for being stupid.

3:00: Iran and Nigeria. Seriously. Aren’t you glad you’re at work now? Argentina and Bosnia are the other two teams in this group and they have played the only competitive match that will occur in this group. Congratulations to Argentina on winning Group F on the first day.

6:00: I wrote this less as a preview than as a kind of an attempt to stir up feelings and get folks excited, so I didn’t say much about this match specifically. I’ll do that here, then. Ghana have knocked us out of the World Cup two times running. It is almost impossible that we would see them a third time consecutively, but here we are all the same. Ghana still have Kevin Prince Boateng, Asamoah Gyan, Michael Essien and Sulley Muntari. They’re good. But they aren’t unbeatable. They have weaknesses—including the aging Essien—that can be exploited. If Klinsmann brings out the dynamic formation he attempted agaisnt Nigeria in the final tune-up, then the US can bring a lot to bear on Ghana and potentially overrun them. Putting all of the serviceable midfielders out at once is a very “damn the torpedoes” move, but if the US is going to have any chance to advance out of the group, it needs all three points here.*** Same with Ghana. Look for this match to be very open and attacking because of that, at least until one teams scores and then parks the bus in front of the net, daring the other side to throw everything forward to get back in it. Sadly, I don’t think either team gets what it needs and essentially closes out its chances barring a meltdown from Portugal (this is not impossible! take heart!): Ghana 2-2 USA.

That’s it. I hope there’s something great to write about in the morning, and I hope it comes from the late game. Happy watching!

* “Diego Costa looks as comfortable playing tiki-taka with Spain as Dwight Howard would in the Spurs’ motion offense.” @RealGMSoccer

** That would be a terrible name for a goalkeeper, but somehow means nothing to an outfield player.

*** Yes, I’m kind of assuming you know about the US team and that’s probably not fair. Watch Michael Bradley and Jermaine Jones. If Jones is regularly further upfield than Bradley, that’s not a great sign. If Bradley isn’t playing the ball onto Clint Dempsey and Jozy Altidore — at speed — from the edge of the center circle to the edge of the penalty box, that’s not a great sign. If we’re whipping in crosses (God how we love to whip in crosses) from wide positions and Jozy isn’t within 10 feet of the keeper or 10 feet of the ball, that’s not a great sign. If Besler and Cameron are looking at Tim Howard and Tim Howard is looking in his own net, that’s not a great sign. If Beasley is allowed to come across the halfway line and cut inside to create space for Bradley or Dempsey, that is a great sign. If Jozy is able to get between and behind the Ghanaian defense, and Dempsey is able to drag the defense out wide, that is a great sign. If Bradley is shutting from box to box and directing the offense, that is a great sign. If you don’t hear the names Timmy Chandler and Brad Davis, that is a great sign. Essentially: watch Bradley and see how much time he has on the ball and how advanced he is when he has it. The more time and the further advanced, the better the US is probably doing.

NEXT: Pepe Has a Case of the Mondays: Day Five Review / Day Six Preview

Follow wahurd on Twitter @hemingwaysgun.

We Start … From Here

Seventy years ago, the United States became a world superpower. Historians can point to any number of events that brought the US to that point, and its ascendancy was, if not inevitable, at least likely, long before thousands of its men washed upon the shores of Normandy. The war would devastate Europe in a way that it would not the US. China and Japan would take years to recover. The rest of Asia, Africa and much of South America would spend decades emerging from the colonial yokes under which they labored. Only the US, across a sea, and in possession of vast resources, an immense population, and the lack of a colonial governor, could benefit from the wreckage that was the Second World War. Even as Russia emerged as a rival, it was the US alone that was able to take the war machine it had built to defeat the Axis and re-engineer it to create a new economy that lifted its own people rather than destroyed others.

On the morning of 6 June 1944, the first American troops were to land at Utah beach and take a strategic position on the western flank of the Allied invasion known as D-Day. They were the end of the line, around which the Germans could not maneuver if the attack was to be successful. If they could not hold their end, every successive beach and the troops landing on it would be vulnerable to being swept back into the sea or buried in the very sand on which they stood.

As regularly happens in the chaos of war, the beach upon which the landing craft let loose its contents was not the intended one. The maps the troops held did not show the terrain ahead. In the smoke and dust, without that aid, they did not know the location of the bunkers that surely towered over them. Their plans, carefully laid out by great strategists and genius tacticians, were useless.

They landed anyway, because they were there and had no choice. Having left the craft— having gotten on the craft and left England—they had only that option. They piled onto the shore in the dawn and saw unfamiliar territory. The officers met and looked at their maps, trying to see if they could cross the sands and make it to the right place. This was impossible. To send that many soldiers across open territory, with the water at their back and no reinforcements—or to have the reinforcements land in daylight with no one having cleared their way—would lead only to slaughter.

Though it was not the right beach, it was a good one. Though it was not the right beach, it was one on which they could fight. Though it was not the right beach, it was the one they had to take. It was the one they found themselves on. It was the one that stood in front of them. It was the only beach they had on which they could make their stand. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.* was on the beach that morning. When apprised of the situation, he replied only: “We start…from here.”

If any phrase from our country’s history should be considered our motto, I nominate that one. It speaks neither to some grandiose notion of our own righteousness, nor to some divine providence that protects us, nor to some unalterable destiny toward which we make inexorable progress. Rather, it speaks to the very moment in which we stand. It does not assure us a victory or endow us with any unique capacities. It merely tells us that in this moment, we begin toward something. We find our present circumstance insufficient and must, through our own endeavors, move beyond it. “We start … from here.”

We start from here because this is where we stand. We start from here because this is what we have been given, and that is what we have to work with. We start from here because the alternative is to live in a world which cannot exist. We look upon our error and give thanks for the opportunity to resolve it. We see what lays before us and steel ourselves for the challenges to come. We know that where we are is not where we want to be, and though we cannot change the former, only we can change the latter.

This country has found itself—has put itself—in unenviable positions throughout its history. It has looked upon itself and torn itself apart. It has denied, and continues to deny, to those who love it, the full opportunity to participate in this endeavor. It has killed and maimed and ostracized its own. All in service of pretending that we did not have anywhere to go. All in order to continue imagining that the journey was over and the battle won. All so that we could bask in a glory received and a destiny fulfilled without having gone through the arduous tasks that would even being the journey, let alone complete it.

And yet, there have been those who could not allow themselves to be reflected in unearned glory nor remain in the shadows outside of it. They pointed out the falseness and hubris of these proclamations, noted the hypocrisy evident in the words when contrasted with deeds. They measured the distance between what is and what could be, and found it wanting.

They said, “We start … from here.”

And from these people—from Thomas Paine and Abigail Adams, from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, from Samuel May to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from Medgar Evers to Cesat Chavez, from Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver, from Dorothy Day to Jane Jacobs, from Harvey Milk to Rachel Carson—we are not there anymore. And from their efforts, we stand upon a different shore, upon a different beach.

And now we say, “We start … from here.”

We start from here for the same reasons they did. For all their work, for the blood and sweat and tears they gave, we find ourselves in the wrong place, without a map, and with a plan that will no longer work in given circumstances. But we cannot leave. This is where we are and what we have been given. This is it. The gap between what is and what could be remains too large, and we must cross it. And where we are is the only place from which to start.

It is not utopian. It is not impossible. It is not unreasonable. Yet, no more is it inevitable, destined or preordained. It only comes from those when those who stand upon the unfamiliar and inhospitable shore see where they stand and say to themselves, “We start from here.”

---

“We will not win this World Cup.” Jurgen Klinsmann, coach of the US Men’s National Soccer Team, said it himself, and there can be no authority who knows better than he. There is no one who spends more time with the players available, no one who watches those who might become part of the team more closely, no one more intimately acquainted with the state of US Soccer from the youth league playing on your way home from work to the MLS teams you’re ignoring to the European leagues you’re following while you sip a Bloody Mary** or two. He says we can’t win. It’s “unrealistic.”

No shit.

We’re not going to win the World Cup. This World Cup. You don’t become a superpower because you will it. You become a superpower because you build one. Sports shouters who have never taken a moment’s notice of soccer jumped all over Klinsmann for saying this, six months after he’d said it, mind you, because they thought it was “Un-American.” They thought it sounded defeatist and pathetic and unbecoming. They thought it meant the coach had given up the idea of success, given up hope.

These people are assholes. These are the assholes who see immense structural problems and say that the problems are too big to fix. These are the assholes who say that if any solution doesn’t solve every problem, then it shouldn’t even be attempted. These are the assholes who assume that their success is guaranteed and their victory is assured, their triumph preordained and indeed already accomplished. These are the assholes every great American has had to overcome through a lifetime of struggle, who will not give up their imagined perfection even in the very midst of a contrary reality. These people land on the wrong Utah beach and see fucking Kokomo.

I’m not comparing the USMNT to D-Day or civil rights or anything resembling an issue of vague importance. I’m saying that the same people who want to shit on Klinsmann for saying that his team won’t win this World Cup are the very same people who refuse to do any work toward making things better. I’m saying that they are lazy people, who have always had the easiest path to success and have never considered the difficulty with which others might walk. I’m saying that these assholes—for they are well and truly complete fucking assholes—are willing to throw away every piece of objective evidence and say with all confidence that their delusions are the true reality and we can’t see it because we don’t believe in those delusions hard enough.

Well, the USMNT is not going to win this World Cup, and I’m going to be standing and screaming and drinking and at least one point crying because of them. Because despite what Mitt Romney and Donald Trump will tell you, those who don’t win aren’t just haters and losers who don’t have what it takes to win. More often there are systematic disadvantages, pervasive disincentives and rampant inequality. The US can’t reasonably be expected to compete against countries that devote enormous material and cultural capital toward something most Americans still consider beneath them, when they refuse to recognize that willing something to be true can’t make it so.

So when the US crashes out, it won’t be because they didn’t have the will to win. It won’t be because their coach said they couldn’t win. It will be because the system had them beat before they ever kicked a ball. What Klinsmann was saying when he said, “We can’t win this World Cup”, was that we can’t win this World Cup. What he was saying was “We start … from here.”

We start with Clint Dempsey and Tim Howard and Michael Bradley, who have succeeded at the highest level. We start with DeAndre Yedlin and Julian Green, who have just started their careers and show signs of bright futures. We start with Chris Wondolowski and Kyle Beckerman, who have participated in the expansive growth of the game in the US through MLS. We start with the players we have, who love the game, one another and the opportunity to show just how far the US has come.

But it is still only a start. The US is in a tough group, with three tough matches. Germany and Portugal have some of the best players in the world, including quite possibly the very best in Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo. The US has no comparable player. Not even the left-behind Landon Donovan is in the same class as their best players. Ghana, today’s opponent***, has knocked the US out of the last two World Cups. Making it out of this group would be an immense achievement. Four points and a ticket home would be a result worthy of adulation.

This team will play their God-damned hearts out, and Klinsmann will try to get them in a position to be in every game. Jozy Altidore, despite only scoring in the final tuneup against Nigeria, has actually looked to have a good rapport with his midfielders and put some great chances on goal that simply didn’t convert. Clint Dempsey (PBUH) has been up and down, but should be able to produce a few runs and open up space for Altidore, Bradley and … well, we probably won’t be bringing many more players into the attack, but if Bedoya gets swapped for Johannson, he could be the beneficiary.

The defense remains very suspect, even if Tim Howard can be counted on to answer the call and make a couple acrobatic saves as befits a keeper of his stature. Untested or simply untalented (comparatively), the US defense is going to be up against it in every match. They will have to surpass every reasonable expectation to keep opponents on the right side of them and the ball on the right side of the net.

They’re not going to win. But they are going to try to win. They’re in unfavorable and uncharted territory, shrouded in darkness and smoke. They cannot go anywhere else, because there’s nowhere else to go. Having gotten here and realized the conditions, they will do what they have to do.

The task is not easy. Glory is not assured and victory is not inevitable. But both can be earned. They can be won.

We start … from here.

*Yes, TR’s son and a general too old to be there except that his cousin was president and you can’t apparently keep a guy named Teddy Roosevelt from being at the bottom of a hill and making some grandiose statement.

**Yes, you want one.

*** If you want a formation guess, I’ll say he sticks with the crazy, bendable thing he brought out against Nigeria, which risks all the good midfielders but allows Bradley to concentrate upfield while also giving Jermaine Jones the chance to join the attack, as Beckerman sits deep. It starts 4-3-2-1, but as Bradley moves up and possession changes, he becomes the point of a 4 man diamond, with Bedoya pulling in, and it can turn into a 4-1-4-1 with Beckerman playing behind the diamond with Dempsey on the outside and Altidore upfront. More on formations (they are lies) soon.

Next: Anatomy of a Goal (and Day Five Previews)

Follow wahurd on Twitter @hemingwaysgun.