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I’ve spent the morning reading essays from the following:
Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners
Names and Naming in Joyce
ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners
James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth
European Joyce Studies 7
James Joyce’s Dubliners:Critical Essays
James Joyce’s Dubliners:A Critical Handbook
Critical Essays on James Joyce
James Joyce: New Perspectives
James Joyce: A Study of the Short Fiction
James Joyce & the Craft of Fiction
James Joyce and Modern Literature
20th Century Interpretations of Dubliners

I’m pretty damn certain that’s enough Joyce for today. The good news is that the central idea of my paper is shaping up nicely so hopefully it will be fast in the writing.

Oops. Brazil 4, US 0 in the Women’s World Cup. Ouch.

I don’t watch much women’s soccer, mostly because much of it lousy. This is also the reason I don’t watch much college soccer, A-League soccer, and soccer from second-tier leagues (except for MLS, which is often pretty good). I have strong opinions about player development and I think the US is going about it all wrong. Players are being over-coached from a very young age to fit into a certain tactical system, one that’s based on a northern European style of play. I think this is a lousy idea.

The US Women used to be fun to watch, primarily because of Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers. Akers brought a crazy, adrenaline-fueled passion to the team and Hamm brought also sorts of stupid skills. They were natural footie players who invented the modern women’s game. The most recent incarnations of the team have been composed of natural athletes. While it may seem counter-intuitive, this strikes me as a bad thing.

Here’s why: natural athletic ability results in false positives for a long, long time during player development. Players who can run faster and jump higher tend to excel at the youth levels, which works well for the northern European grind-it-out kind of game, which valorizes stiff tackles, long-balls, and goals off of set pieces. However, genuine football skill wins out over the long term. The result is a match like this 4-0 drubbing by Brazil. The US lumped long ball after long ball into the box which the Brazilians neatly cut out; Brazil tore apart the US midfield with one-touch passing and beating players one-on-one.

Not everyone can play like Brazil, I know this. But the fact of the matter is that teams that produce the most attractive football— Brazil, Argentina, Spain, many of the African teams— have very little infrastructure for developing youth players. The best policy, in my mind, is to encourage as many kids to play as humanly possible, and let them go at it with little instruction until they’re 15 or 16. Once they’re in their teens, coaches can develop tactics around the kinds of players that have been produced.

On the men’s team, the only genuinely creative players are Dempsey and Beasley, maybe Donovan at a push—but I think he relies way too much on his speed. This is bad. This makes the team horribly one-dimensional. And the funny thing is that the two coaching systems that are the most prevalent in the US are taken from the English and the Dutch. Quick, when’s the last time either of these teams won a major competition? Right. 1966 for England in the World Cup, 1988 for Holland in the European Championship. A bit of a barren spell for both you might say.

Some of the theories are good. Playing 3 v 3 and 4 v 4 for the little kids is genius as it eliminates herd-ball. The problem is that “select” teams begin way too young and results are of far too much importance. The whole process should be far more organic. To this day, after playing soccer for coming on thirty years, I’m a pretty one-dimensional player. I was a fast kid so for most of my teen years I was put up top to chase the long balls lumped over the defenders. In my late teens, I was pushed to the outside midfield because I was a good crosser of the ball and could beat defenders with speed. To this day, I can still cross and shoot fairly well but I’m lousy when it comes to beating players one-on-one. Why? Because that was never a skill I was taught. Lots of trapping, lots of crossing, lots of shooting. I attribute the little bits of creativity I can muster today to screwing around in the backyard with my brothers and watching a lot of soccer over the years. In many ways, I’m much more skillful now that I’m old, fat, and slow but as a kid it was faster, faster, faster. I wasn’t subjected to a sterile coaching “system” like the kids are today, but the little coaching I did get stunted my ability, I think.

Anyway, point is that the US Women’s team looks like a team where every player was over-coached from a young age. The lack of flair is breathtaking and, what’s worse, it’s not very fun to watch. The US used to be the team in the women’s game; now they’ve got some catching up to do.

Current Mood: Bored |