Artie Shaw, Bobby Thomson and why the Cards have already won it

The Cards just look ready and centered for this. Seeing Ron Washington send up Esteban German, who had not had an at bat since Sep 15, and he strikes out with a man on second…brutal.

Cards in 5 or 6. I have rarely or ever seen a team so poised to play postseason as LaRussa’s group is. They KNOW they will win. They conduct themselves like that. Baseball is mental and the Cards have that conquered.

I loved Joe Buck comparing LaRussa to John J. McGraw. McGraw was hated in his time. Edd Roush didn’t want to go play for him. He lost the 1908 pennant because he was hated. Good analogy for Tony? haha. I can not deny, however, the degree to which I feel the Cards are READY for this. They are out ahead of the game. You want to use the phrase dujour? The game “slows down” for them.

I actually find that “slowing down the game” to be a very apt description of it. Since I have started playing soccer again, for the first time since the mid 80′s, I really feel that is very descriptive.

When you are not confident, you tend to feel that there is LESS TIME to do something, than in actuality. The great clarinetist and bandleader, Artie Shaw, had one of my favorite quotes. I read it 30 years ago and still dredge it up from time to time. Folks gushed about his playing and he downplayed it by saying something along the lines of [I'm paraphrasing] “There is more time than you realize between things that seem to happening very fast”. He was talking about “fast” in a musical setting of course, but his point is that with practice, you can gain familiarity and effectively LENGTHEN the time that you have to make decisions, between closely spaced events.

In soccer recently, I have seen this in spades. Even though I haven’t played in 30 years with people, (except for a handful of pickup games), I have spent hours hitting the ball, two footed, off of walls. It’s a form of cardio exercise that I have always enjoyed. So my footy skills are decent, but my game vision is not!

When I first started back up, I would feel that I had no time to do things, ergo, I rushed them and had really bad results. I resorted to consciously trying to slow myself down–slowing down my decision making; picking up my head and looking around. All of a sudden, I wasn’t forcing passes that weren’t there. The great Jan Molby, of Liverpool, once said to Jamie Rednap, “…you can’t play what you don’t see”. And he’s right. It’s not enough to have a hunch that a blur in your peripheral vision is a runner with the right color shirt on, you have to SEE it and KNOW that they are there.

So it’s counter intuitive, but by slowing down YOUR reactions, you actually have better results, because your brain needs an extra beat to take in information and process it before you act on it. Now in soccer, you might make 30 or 40 key decisions in a game, if not more. But a fielder in a world series baseball game? Maybe he makes 3 or 4 key decisions; maybe even just one per game. You don’t get the chance at redemption in pressure baseball, is my point. You better get that decision right.

One step in on a ball over your head? Throw to the wrong base in a bunt situation? Very little room for error, so the team that can slow it down enough to make the correct decision, is, like Artie Shaw, aware that there is a beat more time to make these decisions than the inexperienced panicking player THINKS there is.

And bear in mind that the ability to calm yourself and remain in this “calm-but-centered” state is difficult to maintain! It’s not as easy as just THINKING it! It’s a well-honed discipline. For me, in soccer, sometimes making an early dopey decision can actually SHARPEN it! And sometimes, it can wreck it. While you can “find” it mid-game, I feel that more often, it’s a product of your mental attitude before the game. How do you feel? Do you feel strong? Are you excited to play? Or did you just look at the forward you will be covering and get that sense of dread, as in, “…I can’t go step-for-step with that guy!”

What I’m saying is that it’s a mental approach that can not be faked or manufactured and yet it is so important to performance, particularly under pressure. The team that can generate this feeling of confidence and maintain it, will prevail–it is often the difference. It can also be said, I believe, of managers and coaches and gaffers. It can also be contagious among team mates and coaxed at times among team mates.

Look for this in the games that are left. Ask yourself which team seems more confident in the moment? And realize that it doesn’t always mean that the player with this feeling will always get a hit–always succeed. It just means what Bobby Thomson told himself on Oct 3, 1951, before he hit “The Shot Heard Around the World”. He went up to hit thinking, “…give yourself a CHANCE to hit”.

And he did.

Liverpool for the ages

Bubble Footy is for young guys

I finally did it.  I finally went down to the bubble and paid my $15 to play open football.  They divide the bubble up into 4 fields and try to play 7-a-sides.  2 hours.  I figured that I could keep up since last year when Ciro and I stopped and in and saw some pretty beefy guys doing ok.  “I could get out there”, I said to him.  So at age 42, I figured I have to try this one last time.  After all, a guy I work with is playing in an over-40 league and well, why not?

A big part of my workout regimen while not eating Hershey bars, is to kick the ball off the LaCrosse wall in town for 45 minutes.  I’ve been doing that off and on for 2 years now, so I feel like I have the touch and am fully 2-footed.  So, why not?

Well, I get there and get thrown on a team with some nice guys who have Eastern European accents, every one of them.  I’m maybe the oldest guy there, but it doesn’t look too bad.  We start.

I figure that my first touch will be watched by the old hands and depending on how I handle the ball, that will determine whether they want to pass it to me later on.  I flub my lines.  Immediately, I notice, I’m not a part of the passing network.  Ok, fine, I get it, that’s how it works.  I haven’t played with people and at this speed, since 1999.  I’m nervous to boot, because I know that my first touch is the big audition.  Of course. So I deal with it.  I’ll get my touches on balls I win and the occassional accident.

Almost immediately, I am winded.  I’m not in real good running shape and I knew that, so I am trying to deal with it.  I have no business playing up and even if I was welcome to do so, I would not have the wind to get back and play any defense, so that’s out, because the last thing you want to do is blow off defense with new guys when you are the weakest link and have no wind.  So back I stay.  I’m not really defensive minded, but I do my best.

About 7 minutes into it, I realize that this game is much faster than (a) I remember and (b) it looked from the sides last Winter when Ciro and I checked out the bubble.  The skills on the 14 guys in my game are just about all above me.  Great.  I figured I’d be better than one or two older, duffer guys.  No, I AM the older duffer dude now.

The rest of game 1 was just me trying to find places to get out of the action and get a blow.  If I did too much, and it didn’t take much, I spent all my wind and without wind, you have no skills.  So it was just an excercise in conservation and not exposing myself.  I did pretty well at that and a lot of it was luck.  I kept waiting for the other team to figure out that the left back was shite and that EVERYthing should come down the right side.  The stuff of nightmares.  And it didn’t happen.  Why?  Not sure.  Guys who can ball-handle have very definite ideas about how they want to go about it and it didn’t include that tack.  Maybe they didn’t respect the footy skills of the guys up my side, I coudn’t tell.

After you have initially been assessed as a kicker, they mentally write you off, as I said.  And that inevitably leads to a reversal, the first time you do something with a touch that they don’t count on.  For me, I got the ball in some space just over the midline, and took about 7 steps toward goal with the ball and let fly with a left footed shot that was hard and just off the goal.  I think that surprised some.  It surprised me because I’m right footed and the idea that I could hit a moving ball that hard and accurate lefty, was nice.  A little confidence came back to me.  I also thought, “…if I had that ball on my right foot, they would have really seen something.”  But no one knows you are two-footed, in fact, they don’t think you can play at all.

Not only was I surprised by the speed of the game, I was very annoyed with my touch.  I didn’t have any.  I am so used to hitting balls at the wall, where you have to spank it to get it back with any pace, that all my passes were WAY too hard.  It was embarrassing.  But as time goes on and you settle down, you get a little better, but still, I had very little touch.

I was pleased by the overall sense of decorum that everyone had.  Everyone respected everyone, no matter their footy level and fouls were self-policed and there was none of the testosterone-fuled rockheadedness, that you can see often in softball.  A guy miss-hit a shot and it went past my head–hard.  He apologized.  I wasn’t looking for any apology but it was nice.  You play long enough, you will get the occassional ball to the face.  At one point, the keeper was down and out of the play and there I am in the goal–I decided to put my hands in front of my boys and face the music.  Mercifully, the ball went past me and in.  I heard some guys laughing at my “cover-up” but hey, that’s not what I was there for.  And all in all, I only saw one or two really clear cut late hacks all night, and nothing near a yellow.

After a while, the yellow team was moved over to another field to play a different team.  Half-time I guess.  The other guys were clearly Spanish and some of them were pretty heavy.  “Good”, I thought, “maybe these guys are more my speed”.  Wrong.  These fat kids could *&^%n MOVE!  And they could play some football.  NO respite.  And soon, I’m thinking thoughts of, “…when does 11pm get here?”.  So that’s not a good sign–it’s down to survival.  And since the beginning, my left hip is hurting.  The muscle or tendon that you use to raise your leg, right where your leg joins your torso is hurting.  It has something to do with my bulging disc, which can bother me at times and affect the function of my left leg.

I did finally get a ball on my right foot that I shot, low and hard through traffic, that the goalie saved.  And I also did a few things well in that passing-wise, so it wasn’t all bad.  Getting a shot on goal was a moral victory.  So many players with really big skills would end their runs with stupid, hard but HIGH shots over the pipes.   WHY?  You HAVE to keep the ball below the bar or it’s a waste of EVERYone’s efforts.  But you saw it all night.  So I took pride in hitting my shot low and hard and on the pipes, that wasn’t as common as you might think.

All in all, I lacked two things: wind and experience/confidence.  Without wind, you don’t have any reserves to run off the ball into space and be a part of the attack.  You also don’t have skills as skills decrease in direct inverse proportion to how winded you are.  So you might be a breathtaking skill guy (not that I am–I’m not) but if you’re winded, you are just a kicker.

The other thing I lacked was the confidence, over the ball to take that extra beat and look around and maybe keep the ball a little longer.  Many of my bad passes were panic moves, where I just looked to get rid of it and yet I wasn’t in total imminent danger at the moment.  I had more time than I thought.  Confidence it big.  It means you’ll look around longer for something to develop and you won’t make the bad, panic pass to the wrong guy or over the touch line.

What’s the remedy for both?  Well, get into doubly good shape than I am in now and keep going back doggedly until some confidence builds.  Do I want to do that?  Unsure.  Probably not but we’ll see how I feel.  I would think it would be an amazing way to stay in shape all winter, but can my knees take it?

After about the 75 minute mark, the timekeeper had us moving to another field.  I had played 75 minutes and could feel that I was pressing my luck.  I wasn’t enjoying it, if I ever was and I made a decision that I wouldn’t have been smart enough to make only a few years ago–I walked out.  Knowing when to quit is big.  I played long enough to break the shame-barrier, so I left.

And it was amazing how stiff I got IMMEDIATELY after stopping.  It was like my whole body went, “…whoooaaaa”.  By the time I had gone 100 feet to the car, I was walking like Fred Sanford.  My hip thingy was killing me.  I wondered how the hell I did it at all!?  I KNEW I was never doing it again.  But that was last night and now I’m not so sure.  We’ll see.

Beckham in NY: Teenybopper madness

Click here to read about the game in a new window (from Yahoo)

We decided to go to the Red Bulls last night, almost last minute.  Max and I head down to Giant’s Stadium and he tells me that he’s never been there.  I find that hard to believe but I guess it is so.  When you get down there, you see the silly xanadu but you also see the steel skeleton of the new Giant’s Stadium, which is well along in construction.  Annoyingly typical of Metrostars/Red Bulls is that you can not just park where you want.  We ended up parking in the lot they funneled us into, lot “Y”, which is a mile from stadium, or so it seemed.  So far away, in fact, that they were running buses to the stadium and back.

Max has a baseball (9U) playoff game today, so last night he wanted to throw a full bullpen session.  We did that in the parking lot of the stadium.  He liked that.  I was worried about bounced “changeups” chewing up the ball.  I was also worried that if he didn’t catch the return throw, it would roll about a quarter mile across the asphalt.  But the legendary Meadowlands wind, the same wind that made Phil Simms a hero, and other guys chumps, was blowing hard.  The wind made it fun because my knuckler was dancing on the return throws.  Max was bug-eyed over it.  I don’t think he ever really saw it move like that.  He wanted to know why and I told him because it was in a 20 mph headwind, which means that in stead of throwing it 30mph, like I was, it was like I was chucking it 50mph, and thus it moves more.  He got it.  I think.  He threw well and liked the local.  We’re ready for the playoffs.  Then we took out the soccer ball and kicked that around for a while.  Old times with the Cosmos, almost.

We took the bus in to the stadium and right as we got to the gate without tickets, Max pointed to a guy holding up two.  I noticed they were good seats and I talked him down 30% which he grabbed and we were both happy.  See?  Why is scalping illegal? Wiling buyer.  Willing seller.  Happy people all around.  The government should NEVER be able to tell you that you can’t sell something that is yours.  You wouldn’t like it if they did that with your car?  Why is it ok with tickets?  Intelligent initial distribution is all you need to do.  After that, secondary sales are your Constitutional right.

Inside it’s a sauna as it is 97 degrees all day.  I like the 6:30pm kickoff time though.  Good choice as it was still light when we came out!  We were amazed to find that our tickets were at midfield only 19 rows up.  Primo seats.  And with David Beckham in town, they are looking to sell out the bottom two levels, tallying about 45,000 people.  Max has never been to pro footy and he is getting into it.

Looking around, you see almost every 10th person in a “Beckham” LA Galaxy kit.  A few Manchester United tops, but not many.  About every 5th was an England jersey.  I looked around for Liverpool colors but found none.  The closest was a Fernando Torres top from his old La Liga team in Spain.  I’ll take it.

The other strange thing about the crowd was the inordinate amount of young women.  Teenyboppers, really.  They were there to see Becks.  And scream.  I think my eardrum was punctured at one point.  It was like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.  It was rock-star-dom.  If he even came near your side, people would stand and the screams would start and the pointing and the yelling.  It was weird.  I mean, here you have a bunch of marginal footballers, scraping by on as little as $30,000 a year (can you live in LA or NY on 30K?), and there’s Becks making 60 million from all sources last year.  Astounding.  And I don’t care for the guy at all, I’ll tell you.  I think his “advertisments” and publicity shots are tasteless porn that I wouldn’t want my daughter looking at.  His body is covered in silly tatoos and he is basically an ass, hanging out there with Tom and Katy.  Oy.

But I will not deny that he is a great footballer.  He is.  Years ago, Shearer called him “the best crosser in Britain”, and he was right.  He takes a great set piece too.  Practices long hours on that stuff as well.  And for passing and playmaking, Giant’s Stadium hasn’t seen that kind of quality since Franz Beckenbauer was in town circa 1978.

A few things struck me about the game and Beckham.  His passing and field vision were clearly a gear or TWO above anything out there, except maybe Landon Donovan.  Little things, which I tried to point out to my nephew, like taking a pass with his head swiveling quickly to print the location of all the nearby players while waiting for the ball.  He was one touch almost all night.  He knew before he touched the ball, where it was going and which foot and how he would deliver it.  I thought the the hundreds and thousands of hours that he spent on the training ground in the UK with Man United, playing the five-a-sides and fearing any loss of the ball with Sir Alex looking at him.  A place in the first team and Man U riding on every one of the millions of balls struck.  Read Gerrard’s book and get an idea of the training and the pressure that these kids fall under, beginning as early as age 12!  This guy probably had more touches between age 12 and 16 than some of the MLS’ers will have their whole lives.  Touches.  Lots and lots of them.

His quality was clearly above the others and yet he restrained himself from trying to do too much.  He would not succumb to trying to take over the game.  He only made a really offensive run once, late in the game.  Mostly, it was as if he was on the ManU training ground, one-touch passes.  He gave the little girls barely any time to scream when he had the ball because it was gone before you knew it.  And he had a few chances to maybe ball handle into some space and have a go himself and you know what?  He NEVER did it.  Not once.  Not even when it would have made 1000 girls faint in the joint.  He distributed the ball all night without fail to players who wouldn’t have been good enough to clean up the boot room for the juniors at Man U (except Donovan).

Other observations were the silly Americans who are getting into or out of their seats just before a set piece that Beckham was taking a little past the 18.  This is the one thing everyone paid to see and these big fat guys are in front of us just CLUELESS, trying to find their *&%$n seat!  A lady with an English accent behind us and I, were the ones yelling “SIT DOWN” at them.  Everyone else was happy to be robbed of what they paid to see I guess.  At Anfield, in Liverpool, you would not see ONE person get up or return from their seats during play.  My goodness, it’s only 45 minutes!  If you can’t go 45 minutes without nachos or potty, then go watch American football!  There’s plenty of commercials.  Geez, soccer is OVER in 90 minutes!  You won’t waste away there without a hot dog! hahaha.

The game ended in a frustrating 2-2 draw and the play was sloppy.  If you are used to the EPL then you will be horrified by the missed opportunities, mistimed or not-bothered-with runs, balls played to no one and so on.  But in spots, there was decent play and it was end to end and entertaining at times.

Max enjoyed it and now wants to play in the Fall again, instead of baseball (that was the idea).  He was fired up and told me that he wouldn’t mind going back any time.  After the match, he wanted to kick the ball around in the parking lot and we did that.  And, while I’m trying to get him fired up about footy, and show him some stuff, as if sent by God, a man walks over to us in the parking lot.  I can barely understand him but he says I’m pretty good and am I a coach?  I say no and not really and he tells me he was a professional player. He’s wearing dress shoes but he takes the ball and does about 5 different tricks that are eye popping!  And he is showing Max how to do the tricks and demoing it and it is really cool.  I give him a “gracious” and he leaves and we fool around a bit more then go home.  Mission accomplished.  We will be back.