What you missed while waiting on your plane for the damn TSA inspectors to show up…
- Commentators: “The Community Shield is a friendly.” Nani and Patrice Evra: “What exactly would unfriendly look like?” Nani will miss the start of the season after a John Terry tackle separated his shoulder, while Michael Ballack appeared to have been brought on to hatchet job Patrice Evra.
- PSV still haven’t won a game this season.
- What do David James, Peter Crouch, and Michael Owen have in common? If you guessed “They were all left out of the squad for England’s August 12th friendly against the Netherlands,” than you’ve probably been reading my notes.
- The start to Argentina’s season isn’t any closer than it was Friday.
- It’d really screw up the premise for that Grant Wahl book if the Galaxy made the playoffs this year, wouldn’t it?
Advertisement
The Argentina story is heartbreaking, but for too long clubs have predicated their success on the field by building up debt in the bank. It’s the same story, told over and over and over. I’m not a huge AFA supporter, but I love watching the derby matches. Let’s hope they get their act together.
The thing that’s most striking about that story is that it’s really the European clubs and their penchant for getting into debt that’s allowed the Argentine clubs to follow suit. Once Europe stopped buying players, the Argentine clubs’ main source of income dried up practically overnight; they made $150 million on transfers last year, but only $30-some million this year. No industry can afford to lost a $120 million revenue stream.
That’s not to say that the clubs are run well; clearly that isn’t the case. But they have been kind of given the short end of the stick, especially when you look at the kinds of debts racked up in Europe. Both Manchester United and Liverpool have more debt on their own than all of these Argentine clubs combined; there’s a huge economic disparity here.
They need to sort out the third party ownership thing, too; I have a hunch that the proliferation of the third party owner has caused part of the problem here.
Ahhh, Rochester. If you didn’t have the best hospital in the world, you’d be nothing but a cow pasture. What a wonderful place to be stuck on a plane.
The first half of the CS yesterday was great. The second half was….different Terry’s tackle on Nani was clean. He just hit the ground poorly. Ballack, on the other hand, was pathetic.
If I were a United fan, I’d be very, very worried about Ben Foster. I know I said exactly the opposite last week, but he looked like a scared little kid out there yesterday.
How Michael Ballack escaped without a booking boggles my mind; he was involved in three fouls on Evra within five minutes of his arrival. And Ivanovic seemed to be subscribing to the same school of thought in the first half, chopping down Nani twice in pretty much exactly the same spot, again within a five minute span. Chelsea came off looking like a bunch of hacks to me, which is even more irritating because by the end I wanted United to win, which is an awkward and dirty feeling.
My comment on Foster from TPPU!AN last night:
“and Ben Foster better have a fucking Ritalin before matches because he’s more jittery than a 10 year old with ADHD after drinking a 2 liter of Mountain Dew”
He made a ton of terrible decisions yestyerday. Hopefully he pulls his head out of his Ballack, or he’ll be the next keeper sold to Everton for $7 and a used kickback (before turning into a star…)
I just don’t remember him giving up that many rebounds before…and for a kid who made his name with an iPod and penalty kicks, Chelsea sure seemed to have him figured out on that front, too.
Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I think that United are putting Foster in a position to fail- on purpose.
He’s English, plays at one of the big clubs, has been successful when loaned out (albeit at lower than EPL levels), and England needs a new keeper to emerge- David James is what, 50?- but I don’t think SAF has any confidence in him at all.
I think he’s going to let him implode so that there’s no more pressure to continue to play him and he can hand things over to Tomasz Kuszczak until Van der Sar comes back, and while looking for a new keeper to buy elsewhere.
Initially I actually thought that the conspiracy was related to the length of EVDS’s injury; I thought that Foster was going to come in and the recovery date would be revised based on Foster’s performance. If EVDS comes back in a month instead of two months, I’m going to stick by that claim.