zequist

The answer to your first question is, both of the Welsh clubs. The last time Cardiff beat Everton was in the 1956-57 season (in fairness, the game back in August was EFC's first against Cardiff since the 1960s). Swansea have never beaten Everton at all. As for your second question, what do you mean by "highest ranked"? Are you looking at that just by league level (like if there was someone in League One who's never played Everton), or also by the current standings within each league, or something else? Off the top of my head I know they've never played AFC Wimbledon (currently 15th in League Two) since that club has only been around for about ten years, but I don't know about anyone higher up the table - that would take some research.

No one player clearly stood out head and shoulders above the rest of the squad to me, but out of my top three candidates (Coleman, Barkley, and McCarthy) I voted narrowly for Barkley because through all the tight marking and fighting for possession he always felt the likeliest to make something happen if anyone ever did. I was thinking for a big part of the second half that this could end up being a match where we miss having Baines, because a perfectly weighted touch on a set piece could be the difference in such a tight contest. Lo and behold....

Performance scores from Squawka for yesterday's match Coleman: 100 Osman: 76 Barkley: 55 Pienaar: 40 Distin: 28 Barry: 25 Oviedo: 24 Lukaku: 24 Jagielka: 5 Howard: 0 Deulofeu: -32 Bench: Mirallas: 49 Stones: 5 Not an absolute, but a good tool for relative comparisons I think. Scoring a goal is worth about 40 points in their formula, so with goals subtracted their top 5 would be Coleman 60, Barkley 55, Pienaar 40, Osman 36, Distin 28, which is pretty close to how I saw it. I put up a long post on the other thread about why Seamus was my MOTM. Squawka also provides separate scores for each player in attack, defense, and possession; Coleman and Barkley were the only players to earn 10+ scores in all three phases. Gerry was a negative in all three phases. Defense performance scores for the back six: Barkley 29, Coleman 22, Distin 17, Jagielka 3, Oviedo -3, Barry -16 (big neg for giving up the penalty of course) Possession performance scores for the fullbacks and midfielders: Pienaar 27, Coleman 22, Barkley 16, Barry 9, Oviedo 7, Osman 6, Deulofeu -12

I remember being quite proud of owning the forum's best distance on Scrat Jump. Wouldn't really have time to play the arcade anymore though, so probably just as well that it's not there to tempt me.

Having now had a chance to watch a replay of the match after work, for me it was a no-brainer that the MOTM was Coleman. He was the one player I saw who was active, involved, and effective for the entire 90 minutes. Pienaar and Distin also put good shifts in, but Coleman hardly put a foot wrong the whole day. He played absolute shut-down defense on the right side. Even during Fulham's best spell, almost every wide threat they could muster came from the left. He and Distin led the team with 3 interceptions each (he also chipped in two of the team's 11 successful tackles), and Fulham's only successful cross from the right side all day came on a free kick. Passing! Where everyone else was misplacing passes all over the place, targeting the wrong spots and turning the ball over, Coleman made good decisions pretty much every single time. I wasn't sure what the stats were, but I checked and his pass completion rate for the game was 98% - 44 out of 45! The team as a whole only completed 77% of their passes, so it was obviously a big help to have at least one guy who knew where to put the ball every time he got it. Heady positional play. Go back and watch his defending on that mishit header by Jags early in the second half. As soon as it was clear that Parker was going to beat everyone to the ball, he put on a burst of acceleration, closed down fast, and established a tight defensive position that blocked Parker from cutting back to the right and also subtly angled him away from the goal. Parker's only options were to go further left (worsening his angle, as he was already to the left of the near post), backwards, or shoot, and all he could manage was that curler around Coleman that might have gone wide even without Howard's save. It doesn't show up on the stat sheet, but those are the smart defensive plays that win you games, especially in contests where your team is at less than its best. And I haven't even mentioned the goal yet....

It probably varies some from region to region. In my area it seems like ManU and Arsenal fans are by far the two groups I run into most often, followed by Chelsea and Spurs. I don't see as many Liverpool fans, and not many City bandwagoners yet either, although I'm sure that will change if they keep spending money like this for the next ten years. The rest of the league is mostly ignored, although one of my friends actually adopted West Ham a few years ago despite my best efforts to talk him out of it. While I may fault his taste, at least he's the one person who will never be accused of bandwagon-jumping.

Mike! Good to talk to you again. Things are great with me, and I hope you're well. I never stopped reading the boards, just haven't had time to do any posting because of work and other real life stuff, but I'm hoping I can start poking my head in a little more often again, especially now that we're finally getting full TV coverage of every match in the USA.

Never happened, Nikica. According to Wikipedia only two managers have ever won the FA Cup with two different clubs (Herbert Chapman and Billy Walker), and both of their wins were at least eight years apart.

Administration is a real possibility, according to this article. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=679533&sec=england&cc=5901

Moyes chimes in with his own take on the recent youth transfer flap. http://soccernet.esp...england&cc=5901 In other news, everyone else in football ignores what he says because it's actually a thoughtful, reasoned opinion!

A Soccernet blogger rating the transfer window dealings gave us a 7 (out of 10), with these comments: "David Moyes may have fought tooth and nail to keep Lescott, without success, but having driven the hardest of bargains he somehow convinced Manchester City to part with £24m, making the England international one of the most expensive defenders of all time. Moyes has used the windfall wisely in recruiting Johnny Heitinga and Sylvain Distin to strengthen his defence and adding talented Russian midfielder Diniyar Bilalyetdinov. Jo has also returned on loan from City to supply goals. Rating: 7/10" Only teams to get equal or higher ratings than us were City (9), Stoke (8), Sunderland (8), and Spurs (7). At the bottom of his list, he only gave Liverpool a 2.

Just agreed to a full-season loan deal at Wolves. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=672386&sec=transfers&cc=5901 Be interested to see if he shows more with them than he did with us. Edit: Crud. Didn't see this was already in rumors - never even crossed my mind that someone might think he was coming back here. Sorry.

I was surprised to see so many people thinking this group was a favorable draw, because to me it seemed like one of the more difficult ones - one of the "big three" in Portugal, one of the "big three" in Greece, and a minnow with Champions' League experience - that's not the mix I would've picked for us. I crunched some numbers on all of the 1-3-4 seed combinations, though, and our trio of opponents is pretty much right in the middle of the pack as far as combined European points goes. We could've done better (like getting into Group H with Steaua/Twente/Sheriff), but we could've done a whole lot worse too (like being stuck in Group L with the Bremen/Bilbao/Nacional trio). Long as we get our on-field performance straightened out I give us a pretty good shot at clearing this group, but I don't expect it to be as easy as two years ago.

Isn't he the one who submitted a transfer request at Wigan before they'd even left the pitch after the last game of the season? If so, no thank you.

1. Chelsea 2. Arsenal 3. Man U 4. Liverpool ______ 18. Wolves 19. Hull 20. Portsmouth

Sure. The question is, will we have enough time to bring in as many new people as we'd like to? We've only got a week to get these deals done.

Well good grief, the Battle of the Somme saw 20,000 British soldiers killed just on the first day alone. I think the difference today is that 1) back then you didn't have embedded media beaming photos and video footage of the carnage to all the citizens back home, all they saw was numbers in a newspaper story, and 2) the death tolls were so incredible that they're almost numbing. A wise man once said that it's easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million, and that's probably true. If one person gets killed by a roadside bomb, people see the victim's picture in the paper and hear stories in the media about how his friends back home are coping with the tragedy. If a thousand soldiers die in a single day in a huge infantry battle, you might find a list of names somewhere, but not many of their individual stories would ever be highlighted, because there's just too many of them. 20,000 dying in a single day...well, that's just mind-boggling. It's no wonder the survivors didn't want to talk about it - who can blame them? Anyway, there aren't too many more left to talk about it now, even if they wanted to. Only three known combat veterans of the war are left: one American, one Canadian, and one British ex-pat living in Australia.

Let’s take this point-by-point (and for the rest of this post I’m going to call it “soccer” and American-style football “football” just so that there’s no confusion). *There aren't enough points. This is true of a certain small subset of American sports fans, and the ones who would dislike soccer for this reason also tend to dislike baseball too. The real problem for this type of fan, though, isn’t so much with the amount of scoring as it is with the pace of the game – if they just wanted scoring they’d watch cricket. These are impatient sports fans who want lots of fast-paced action, and sports like baseball and soccer are too slow, too deliberate, too tactical for them. However, this is a very small percentage of the fans. *It's not violent enough. Again, tends to be that same small group of sports fan who would say there aren’t enough points. The reality is that mainstream American society has been moving away from violent sport for a long time. Football has become more popular as it has introduced more rules to clean up the game and eliminate the most dangerous/violent types of tackles. Meanwhile, a lot of people have told me that they don't watch hockey because they think it's still too violent (even though it has also tried very hard to clean itself up), and boxing is on life support in this country. *We didn't think the game up and it is therefore suspect. This seems to be your central argument, but I am Not Buying It At All. That sounds like the sort of thing that an insulated sociology professor or self-righteous journalist thinks that a sports fan would say. Frankly, the only sport that is an entirely American invention is basketball, and I’ve personally known a hell of a lot of Americans who won’t watch basketball, for all kinds of reasons. I have yet to meet a single person who lives in the real world (and not in a classroom or a newsroom) who has ever said, implied, or even hinted that they or anyone they know won’t watch a certain sport simply because it’s “not American.” I'm sure there are a few, but it's probably an even smaller subset than the ones who demand more violence. 99.9% of American sports fans just want to be entertained – it doesn’t matter if the sport that we’re watching was invented in America or England or Zimbabwe, as long as we enjoy it. *We have never won a championship. Again, not buying it. The only sport where there is any correlation in this country between national popularity and expectations of international success is basketball. Otherwise, forget it. We’ve never won a major international title in baseball, and football has no global competition of any kind, but they remain two of the three biggest sports in this country. Meanwhile sports like hockey, tennis, track, and volleyball remain niche sports at best, even though we have won more than our fair share of World Cups, Davis Cups, and Olympic golds in them (in fact, the hockey gold medal we won at the 1980 Olympics is one of this country's proudest sports memories - still didn't help hockey's popularity at all, though). *Were too fat That would be a reason to not play soccer, of course, not a reason to not watch, but in reality playing soccer has never been the issue in this country. Lots of people play soccer…in fact, recent statistics show that soccer is currently the MOST-played recreational sport in America, believe it or not, followed by baseball (#2), basketball (#3), tennis (#4), and golf (#5). The problems is that so far, just playing soccer has not translated into those people necessarily becoming fans of watching soccer or dreaming of pursuing professional careers. So why do we still trail the world in global soccer? I see two main reasons, one at the amateur level and one at the professional level, and neither of which you addressed. First, one thing that IS true of America (and also many other countries, including England) is that the majority of our professional athletes tend to have grown up in lower-class or working-class homes. Definitely the vast majority of our football and basketball players come from those backgrounds. However (and this IS a key difference between us and other countries), for whatever reason things have evolved so that most of the kids who grow up playing soccer in America are middle-class suburban white kids, who are less likely to feel driven to pursue a career in professional sports, especially a sport like soccer that doesn't pay as much. Understandably, since they have a much wider range of career choices open to them than that lower-class kid who might see athletics as his only ticket out of the slums. Other people have commented on the youth structure and the lack of academies and such, but I don't think that has much to do with it. We don't really have formal sports academies for any sport like Europeans do, but that doesn't stop us routinely churning out some of the world's best golfers and basketball players and swimmers and track athletes and so on. Even in women's soccer it works well (remember we have one of the world's best women's teams), it's just men's soccer where things fall down a bit. The best American athletes are still choosing other sports. And that ties into the second thing, which is... The lack of a credible major professional soccer league until very recently. Kids want to play the sports that they grow up with - that they watch on TV and play with their dads and their friends and see their favorite athletes playing. Every little boy in America for the last 50 years who grew up watching sports has had a dream (however fleeting) of being a star baseball or basketball or football player, because those sports are everywhere - you can't get away from them. There are also sports in this country with strong regional popularity, like hockey in Minnesota and Massachusetts, lacrosse in Maryland, or surfing in California and Hawaii. For a long time, soccer was one of those regional sports too. There were a few local hotbeds in New Jersey, around St. Louis, and up in the Northwest (Portland & Seattle areas), but prior to the '94 World Cup there wasn't really a time when the sport was able to command nationwide attention. That is starting to change now, though. MLS has been around for about 13, 14 years, and the sports media here don't treat it like a curiosity anymore. Teams like Seattle and Toronto have proven to have very loyal and passionate fan bases, and the numbers of people coming to games are pretty solid, even in a recession (last year MLS ranked 12th among soccer leagues worldwide in average attendance). Even so, it's going to take a lot of time for the league to weave itself into the national fabric the way the NBA, NFL, or MLB have. The youngest of those leagues, the NBA, is over 60 years old, which means four or five full generations of kids have already grown up with the NBA as part of their lives and passed it on to their kids. The first generation of kids who grew up with MLS haven't even started having kids of their own yet.

To change the topic up just a bit, what was everyone's favorite Jackson song? Mine was actually "Leave Me Alone" (slightly more obscure, but very funny I always thought, especially the video), with "Beat It" a very close second.

Looks like dark needs some enlightenment about my country, because he's got a lot of incorrect assumptions there. Too bad I'm stuck at work right now and don't have time to give a fully thought-out response. Maybe later.

Times, CBS, and NBC all now saying that he's died. Word is that the hospital will make a statement soon.

Unconfirmed. One report is saying "hospitalized," the other is saying "dead." If it is true, then that would be an incredible coincidence - one of the biggest icons of the 70's (Farrah Fawcett) and one of the biggest icons of the 80's dying on the same day. Wow.

Actually, I've always thought Arsenal might be the best-prepared of the four to handle a CL-less season, especially in relation to Liverpool or Man U who both have much larger debt loads to service than Arsenal does. In particular I seem to remember that the Glazers' business plan when they bought Man U was dependent on CL money, which was one of the things that had their fans so nervous. Regardless, if Man City keeps spending big money and they learn to spend it wisely, on the right players, then it seems likely that they WILL break the monopoly sooner or later, and when that happens we'll see how the loser fares without their CL money.

Update. Setanta's EPL package was auctioned off today, and ESPN bought it (just the EPL part of it, not the SPL or anything else). http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id...and&cc=5901 The article keeps repeating that it's UK rights only, so I guess that means we won't get any extra games stateside out of this (rats!).

Could be West Ham. Aren't the Icelandic group trying to get out from under that club?