Dave’s Football Blog

He may have vowed to play again after getting dropped by the West Coast Eagles and shunned by other clubs, and he might have the backing of the AFL Players Association, but boy oh boy, Ben Cousins just can’t stop himself from being a big fat train wreck, can he?

COUNSELLORS at an exclusive drug treatment facility in Malibu are scouring Los Angeles in search of disgraced former West Coast star Ben Cousins.

Sources close to the Summit Centre in Malibu said yesterday the 29-year-old failed to check in, as scheduled, on Monday.

They say they are worried for his safety. “No one has any idea where he is,” said a person with knowledge of the situation. “He’s got everyone freaking out because LA’s not a good place to be out doing what he may be doing. I just hope nothing bad happens to him.”

Oh, our boy Benny should be just fine. I mean, it’s not like anybody does drugs in Los Angeles or anything. Let’s just hope he doesn’t run into that Lindsay Lohan girl. The last thing we need is a real-life remake of Trainspotting.

With all the hype surrounding Arsenal v. Man U this weekend, you’re probably not paying any attention to the Coca-Cola Championship, but you might find it interesting that Watford, last year’s Premier League doormat, is sitting comfortably on top of the second division, six points ahead of second-place Bristol City — say, weren’t they in League One last year? — and nine points clear of the playoff zone. (Finishing first or second in the Championship guarantees promotion to the Premier League, but the 3rd- through 6th-place teams fight it out in a playoff for the final promotion spot.)

Two seasons ago, Watford won that playoff. They spent the next season getting battered by the big boys and were immediately relegated. Manager Adrian Boothroyd, however, seems to have taken an interesting tack to that quick drop.

Instead of spending money last January to try and stave off relegation, he sold Ashley Young to Aston Villa for £9.65 million and saved up the rest of the club’s top-flight riches and FA Cup winnings for the summer. Then he went out and spent that money on new players that could help his Hornets win the Championship and get right back into the Premier League.

So far, this strategy seems to be working; Watford looks poised for promotion to the top flight for the second time in three years, and Boothroyd is doing everything he can to keep his current squad together, including fighting off overtures from bigger clubs for striker Marlon King. Says Boothroyd:

“We’re not a club that needs the money. We need to build, not to be taken apart.”

Is Boothroyd’s long-term plan the new model for smaller clubs looking to grow into Premier League clubs? Win promotion, take your knocks, save your money, then build a team that can return to the top flight quickly? It looks like a process that might take several years of bouncing back and forth, but given the riches that await clubs in the top flight — the TV contracts alone can add about £45 million to a club’s coffers — it certainly looks like a viable long-term strategy, especially given the number of clubs at the bottom of the Prem table that look awfully vulnerable to relegation these days.

Perhaps Derby County should adopt this same strategy. Then again, perhaps they already have.

We Americans have a rich tradition trying to impose our cultural will on the rest of the world. We sell everyone else on American music, American movies, American fashion and American food. In years past, everyone else just bought right into this crap, because it looked sexier than anything they had.

We’ve been trying to do this with American football for the last two decades, too. First, it was the World League of American Football, which devolved into NFL Europa and finally closed its doors after 16 less-than-memorable seasons. Then there was last Sunday’s big London experiment. Look! A regular season NFL game in England! This one counts!

This beat-you-over-the-head-with-our-culture approach, however, isn’t going to serve the NFL very well, because every other country plays some form of football that’s different from America’s game. There’s no guarantee that these people will accept our armor-plated battle chess as readily as they accepted Jerry Lewis and Baywatch. We can storm into town with our football, and they’ll just say, “But… but… isn’t this football?” And they’ll have a point.

You know who has a much better approach to international expansion? The Australians.
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Y’know, maybe Giants v. Dolphins wasn’t the best NFL matchup to send to England.

The response from Sunday’s sloppy NFL game in Wembley Stadium has garnered exactly the type of response you’d expect. The league is calling it a success, while the English press rejects that notion. Meanwhile, bloggers outside of the U.S. either didn’t get it or tried to apologize for it. Throughout it all, though, the same complaint was echoed throughout blog posts and comments:

NFL is the slowest God damned sport in the world - literally nothing happens.

If you didn’t grow up with the gridiron game like I did and don’t know its history, then yes, it’s going to seem slow compared to soccer or rugby. American football is a stop-and-start game. Every play is a set piece, as Will mentioned in the comments here. You make a move, your opponent counters the move, and men in striped shirts set things up for the next move. It’s much more about strategy and execution than free-flowing play.

That was by design. Back in the 1880s, Walter Camp was the best rugby player at Yale, but he hated the fact that you couldn’t do anything in rugby but line up and go after every tackle. He wanted to incorporate more strategic elements in football, like there were in chess, his other favorite game. Combining elements from chess and rugby created the modern battle chess matches we see every autumn weekend in America.

Of course, nobody in England has the first clue about this. They just look at the pauses in between every play and wonder why it takes so long to set up the next play. They didn’t grow up watching this game and appreciating its nuances, just like we didn’t grow up thinking soccer was anything but that kid’s game played by those suburban hippie commie pinkos. Some Americans still call Association football a communist game, but if they took a long look at European football, they’d find it to be the most capitalist institution on the planet this side of the New York Stock Exchange.

These cultural differences exist because so few people understand where these games came from. What’s more, all the seeds for these different games were sown in the 19th century, which might as well be when dinosaurs roamed the earth to most people. The NFL is all hype and marketing bluster, but it pays little more than lip service to its game’s origins, and that may make it difficult to spread the gridiron gospel outside of North America. If you don’t know the history of someone else’s football, you don’t really know what you’re watching, do you?

When I refocused this blog last February, I wanted to do more to help others understand the differences among all the world’s football games. When you know where football comes from, you can appreciate it just a little more. The continuing discussion about these different games underneath the NFL at Wembley post indicate that I’m not doing a good enough job at this.

However, I don’t really feel like rewriting a lot of these same ideas over again, so what I’ve done is make it easier for people to find them. In that far-right column, you’ll find a number of links to posts I’ve written about the origins of all our football games.

Know Your Football Codes: A quick overview of the major football codes played today.

Football Variations: A sideways look at different football games inspired by the major football codes.

Ancient Football Codes: We’ve been playing football for a very long time. These are some of the games we used to play.

The Playing Fields: A few posts on how the places where we played football had an impact on what type of football we play.

Origins of the Gridiron Game: A series of posts I wrote for FanHouse about the origins of American football.

The Great Rugby Split: Basically, a quick look at rugby union v. rugby league.

Feel free to look at some of those posts and add to the discussion. I love the fact that people are having a conversation about these things. It’s an esoteric topic, yes, but it’s one that deserves more attention, given that we have so much more access to international media here in the 21st century, and we all have different ideas of what football should be.

By the way, I’m still fiddling with the background, but I think I’m going to keep it black for a while. I like the contrast.

I have a few free hours to mess with the design of this site, which I’m going to do today. Suffice to say much of the reason for this is related to the comments under the NFL in Wembley post — and the fact that I’ve written a lot about why certain types of football are the way they are, but I’m clearly not making these things easy enough to find. I hope to fix that here.

And for the record, Arsenal-Liverpool was always going to be a better game than Giants-Dolphins, which was probably doomed from the start. If you want to see American football at it’s highest professional level, watch the Colts-Patriots game next Sunday.

While some leagues would like you to believe that football history began when the late, great Max McGee fought off a hangover to catch the first touchdown pass in Super Bowl history, others know the story of football goes back much further than that. In the case of Sheffield, it goes back 150 years.

This week, Sheffield F.C. celebrated its 150th anniversary. The amateur club was founded on October 24, 1857, by a group of cricketers looking to keep fit during the winter. (Sound familiar, Melbourne Demons supporters?) Of course, this was a full six years before the Football Association rules were officially codified, so Sheffield F.C. had to write up its own rules. The original Sheffield Rules actually resembled Australian football a bit with its fair catches and shoulder charging.

Of course, not having a whole lot of competition, Sheffield F.C. mostly organized games within its membership, but it did its best to promote the Sheffield Rules among public schools throughout England. In fact, the Sheffield Rules proved to be more popular among spectators than the original FA Rules, which struggled to find an audience both inside and outside of London. Sheffield suggested several rules changes to the FA, but they weren’t all that receptive.

By the 1870s, though, with rugby football starting to encroach on everyone’s territory, the FA began working with Sheffield more, adopting several rules changes — little things like the corner kick and he header. By the end of that decade, London and Sheffield played football under one unified set of rules, which would go on to be the primary form of football played just about everywhere.

I remember hearing somewhere that the two greatest exports of the British Empire were 1.) Association football and 2.) the phrase “fuck off.”

Interestingly enough, Sheffield F.C. has remained a strictly amateur club for its century and a half of existence. It’s currently playing in the Unibond League First Division South, which is about seven levels down from the Premier League. Sheffield United, at their current pace, may be joining them any year now.

More Sheffield F.C. talk is at Two Hundred Percent and The Offside.

Y’know, I want to say more about this whole NFL game in Wembley Stadium thing, but really, I can’t be arsed. The New York Giants and Miami Dolphins are playing in London. Woo. Let’s repay the favor with a West Ham v. Middlesbrough game at Giants Stadium.

Of course, our pal MJD is doing the best he can to make the Brits feel at home with this foreign football.

Americans think they need a lot of scoring to be entertained, but they don’t … for example, in this country, baseball, hockey (well, a few of us), and a golf tournament with a winning score of +1 can still draw huge ratings. A lack of scoring is an excuse we make for not liking soccer, when the truth is just that we can’t embrace it because it’s not our game, it’s not from our culture, and we’re not very good at it.

Mostly, we just have this neat trick of making one score count for 6 (likely 7) points. Maybe you should try this with soccer. Don’t change the game in any other way, but make each goal worth 100,000 points. Then we might love it.

Soccer as 1990s pinball machines. It could work.

Of course, the KSK Gay Mafia is chiming in as well.

I’m sure the remaining 6 of you actual UK natives will learn to enjoy watching Eli Manning overthrow receivers with the same inexplicable sense of schadenfreude as us Americans.

Personally, I love how everyone pushes the gridiron v. soccer angle and conveniently ignores that they play this little game called rugby in England — and two types of rugby, at that — and it just happens to be the forefather for American football. We’d be playing rugby today if that bastard Walter Camp had just left well enough alone. Chess-loving freak. It’s a proven fact that chess drives people batshit insane. Look at Bobby Fischer and tell me I’m wrong.

In a move that will come as a complete shock to absolutely no one, Greg Ryan was sacked as the head coach of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team today. When asked whether Ryan’s removal was the result of his decision to bench Hope Solo in favor of Brianna Scurry, U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati wimped out and mumbled something about how it wasn’t one specific incident.

Which is crap, of course. While it’s impossible to say whether the USA would have beaten Brazil in that Women’s World Cup semifinal if Solo had played, it’s a pretty sure bet that the team wouldn’t have been on the wrong end of a 4-0 drubbing. Plus, not only did Ryan bench his hot goalkeeper in favor of an aging veteran that hadn’t seen meaningful action in months, but he badmouthed his opponent days before the match and managed to piss off a nation even more apathetic about women’s soccer than America is. Ryan’s comments got far less run than Solo’s, but they probably did even more damage. If Ryan had kept his mouth shut and kept Solo in the lineup, none of this would have happened.

In other news, Solo was informed that she can stop apologizing now. She shouldn’t have had to apologize in the first place.

In more other news, the FA is debating whether to offer Ryan the England job, as Ryan actually has the balls to replace a goalkeeper before a crucial match. Zing.

There’s been some discussion on this site of South Sydney Story, the docu-drama on Versus about Russell Crowe’s takeover of the South Sydney Rabbitohs of the NRL. I still haven’t watched it yet, though the first two episodes are sitting on my DVR when I finally have a free hour.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but Crowe is going to be a guest in the booth on Monday Night Football tonight. As I wrote on FanHouse earlier, Crowe might actually talk about sports more than American Ganster in this appearance, as he’s in Jacksonville to promote his Souths’ upcoming test match against the Leeds Rhinos — which, incidentally, will be played in Jacksonville. Might as well be around sports fans in that town to pimp the match, right?

Unfortunately, since that Souths-Rhinos match probably won’t be on ESPN, I’m pretty sure the gang in the booth will try their best to keep the subject on movies. ESPN isn’t in the business of promoting anything that’s not on ESPN — unless a lot of money changes hands. I’m pretty sure the boys at Universal Pictures don’t want Crowe to waste any time talking about the similarities between American football and rugby league, even if that might be far more interesting than, say, what Denzel said about his son on the practice squad in St. Louis.

Plus, since ESPN has no interest in any form of rugby, they don’t want any sports fans to know anything about it, either. That’s been the WWL’s policy on hockey since the NHL moved to Versus.

So don’t expect Mike, Tony & Jaws to give more than minimal lip service to the Souths tonight. It’s a shame, but we’ve all come to have criminally low expectations from ESPN anymore, haven’t we?