Dave’s Football Blog

I know what you’re thinking: where’s our Carlito? Well, he’s taking the weekend off, and so am I. Tonight, I will be walking in Memphis, joining more than 100 of my closest friends (sort of) on a pub crawl down Beale Street. (Three guesses as to what football jersey I’ll be wearing tonight. First two don’t count. Here’s a hint.) Besides, I needed an excuse to use that awkward campaign moment photo, and here it is.

It’s an awkward time to leave, of course, given that the NFL free agency period begins today, and chances are the weekend will be filled with blockbuster signings and perhaps a big trade or two — to say nothing of a full slate of league ties throughout Europe, plus the NAB Cup semifinals and Super 14 throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Oh, and how could I have forgotten? It’s Week 1 of the Arena Football season. Ron Jaworski must be all a-tingle, and the boys at It’s Still Football will do their best to make you care, even if they don’t, either.

For now, though, here’s some light reading for you:

• Myron Cope lives on through WAV files. [Myronisms!]
• And YouTube tributes. [The Angry T]
• Anonymous player: The NFL is on drugs. [NFL FanHouse]
• Middlesbrough: The FA is on crack. [Reuters Soccer Blog]
• Should the AFL go 16-on-16? [World Footy News]
• Here’s a good site for gridiron strategy. [Smart Football]
• So that’s why Jon Stewart does bumpers for FSC. [Hugging Harold Reynolds]
• Winning road games in Copa Libertadores is damn hard. [BBC Football]
• Becoming an announcer in Kazakhstan is easy. [The Meaningful Collateral]
• Is someone eager for Brett Favre to go? [Deadspin]
• John Elway could use the Juande Ramos diet. [BeRecruited]
• Barry Hall, however, is doing just fine, thanks. [Fox Sports Australia]
• Is the GAA coming around on International Rules? [World Footy News]
• The KSK Gay Mafia has a new target. [Kissing Suzy Kolber]
• As does the ghost in Manuel Almunia’s house. [The Run of Play]
• Steve Nash still loves him some Spurs, ha ha. [Guardian Football]
• Jozy Altidore predicts a trip to Beijing for his team. [Goal]
• The Sons of Ben are having themselves a party. [Sons of Ben]
• Will MLS expansion mean higher player salaries? [Pitch Invasion]
• Tony Dungy gets a dig on Bill Belichick. [Shutdown Corner]
• I wouldn’t say this about Shawne Merriman to his face. [Mr. Irrelevant]
• Football enslaves us all. [Soccerlens]
• Football can also be very… artistic. [With Leather (NSFW)]
• Hey, these guys seem to like my blog. [Cold, Hard Football Facts]

That ought to hold you for now. I’ll be back on Monday. If you need some NFL free agency news, the gang at NFL FanHouse has it all covered. Enjoy your football, everyone!

Yeah, I’m back on my futsal high horse again. [Soccer FanHouse]

These gents are members of the Sons of Ben, Philadelphia’s soccer supporters group that officially got a club to support today when Major League Soccer, as we had expected them to do for the last week or so, announced that the Illadelph would be home to an expansion franchise that begins play in 2010.

I find their choice of colors intriguing. You wouldn’t expect baby blue and yellow in a primary color town like Philly. Those colors wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with…

YIKES!!! Perhaps it’s best just not to think about this and move on.

Want to know what’s really funny about this photo of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones dancing on stage at Six Flags Over Texas?

Six Flags theme parks are owned by Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder.

Of course, Six Flags is tanking, so perhaps Jones is dancing on its grave…

(Spotted on Shutdown Corner.)

It’s been a pretty crappy offseason for AFL commissioner Andrew Demetriou. First, he tried to move the Kangaroos from North Melbourne to the Gold Coast and was summarily rebuffed and called mean names by nice old ladies. Then he announced plans to expand the AFL to 18 clubs with new additions on the Gold Coast and Western Sydney. Not only did he get AFL club presidents questioning the speed of this move, but he’s gotten the rugger buggers really, really pissed off.

Gold Coast Titans boss Michael Searle has attacked the Australian Football League’s expansion plans, labelling the AFL “cannibals” and vowing to fight to protect his team’s turf. …

He said the AFL’s aggressive attempt to make its presence felt in the region was the greatest challenge facing his (National Rugby League) club and he intended to be pro-active in repelling its advances.

“The AFL is aggressively trying to expand into traditional rugby league markets and we have to be equally aggressive in defending and growing our game,” Searle said. “The AFL has shown itself as a sport that wants to cannibalise. It doesn’t want to co-exist.

“I have great respect for what the Brisbane Lions have achieved in the past 10 years and feel for them in the predicament this will put them in, having to share revenue in a finite market. This battle has just begun, but we must have a plan that will counteract what the AFL is trying to achieve.”

To understand why this is a big deal, you have to understand the concept of club membership, which appears to be very unique to Aussie sports. These clubs don’t just want fans to buy tickets, walk in, cheer and leave like most American sports owners do. They want these supporters to feel like they’re involved in the success of the club itself — and with their financial support, they often are. Membership gets you special ticketing privileges, voting rights within the club, lots of free and discount gear, and the general feeling of being part of a very large family.

(This explains why the Sydney Swans supporter I spoke with at the Grand Final party in Raleigh would kiss the Swans logo on his cap in the middle of every other sentence. The membership system makes the Swans really feel like his club.)

Of course, the catch is that membership costs money, and Aussie sports fans only have so much of that. As Ando points out over at the AFL Footy Blog, lots of sports radio callers in Melbourne have said they can only afford one club membership, and they find themselves having to choose between the Melbourne Victory and their AFL club. So while the A-League and AFL schedules don’t compete with each other, the clubs themselves do.

Thus, the NRL is pissed off that the AFL is trying to encroach on their territory, because suddenly, they have to compete with them for members in markets that were exclusively theirs. That might be the main reason these football codes keep sparring with each other. It’s not enough to say that your code is superior — you have to convince your members to put the other code down so that they can help you sell more memberships.

As all these football leagues seek to expand, the battle for members will only grow more fierce every year, and old ladies will find even more entertaining words to describe Andrew Demetriou. References to roosters and lollipops grow more likely every day.

It started as a summer tournament for degenerate gamblers who needed a fix during the offseason. It became a UEFA-sanctioned event for clubs who felt they were good enough to compete in the UEFA Cup but couldn’t qualify through standard means. And it’s going to be abolished after this year. Nevertheless, it’s become al the rage in England.

Everton have applied to enter the Intertoto Cup next season, despite lying fourth in the Premier League - three points clear of rivals Liverpool.

The club claim that the decision is a safety net following Tottenham’s success in the Carling Cup, and does not indicate a lack of belief that David Moyes’s team will continue their strong run of form in the league - the Merseyside club have not lost (a Premier League match) since the 4-1 defeat to Arsenal on December 29.

So here’s how it works in England: the top four clubs in the Premier League qualify for the Champions League. The 5th-place club and the FA Cup and Carling Cup winners qualify for the UEFA Cup. However, if the Carling Cup winner finishes top four in the league, that UEFA Cup bid drops to the 6th place team, and if the FA Cup winner finishes top four, the FA Cup runner-up gets the bid — unless that runner-up also finishes top four, and then the bid falls to the 7th-place club.

Got all that? Good. That’s how it happened last year. Chelsea won the Carling Cup and beat Manchester United for the FA Cup, but since Man U won the league and Chelsea finished second, the UEFA Cup bids went to 6th-place Everton and 7th-place Bolton.

This year, however, Tottenham Hotspur upset the apple cart. They won the Carling Cup and got the UEFA Cup bid that came with it. So now, the 4th-place club gets a Champions League bid, the 5th-place club gets a UEFA Cup bid, and pending the results of the upset-heavy FA Cup, the 6th-place club gets… nothing. Zilch. Bugger all. Diddly-squat.

This makes the Intertoto Cup a no-brainer for the likes of Everton, Aston Villa and Manchester City, all whom have applied — and all of whom petered out early in the FA Cup. If their seasons turn south and they don’t get at least a UEFA Cup bid, they can get in through this back door, which consists of one fairly easy home-and-away tie in July against some third-tier club on the continent that clearly lacks the talent of an average Premier League side.

UEFA, however, is abolishing the Intertoto Cup after this year. It’s a clear message to the clubs — earn it on the pitch, because we only want the best of the best, and if you come up short, you can piss right off with the degenerate gamblers who built this dead competition. So there.

Juande Ramos just made two disrespected cup competitions look a lot more attractive. Funny how that works out, huh?

They don’t make ‘em like Myron Cope anymore. You rarely see truly unique voices like Cope in local sports broadcasters, because so few broadcasters aspire to be local in the age of ESPN and satellite TV. Sports are global enterprise today, and broadcasting moreso. Cope found his niche in an era when fans had only four channels on their TVs and still tuned into AM radio regularly to listen to games — when Cope’s nasally “Yoi!” and “Double Yoi!” were genuine enthusiasm, rather than the kitsch of a local bumpkin.

Myron Cope, longtime Pittsburgh Steelers announcer, Pete Rozelle Award winner and inventor of the famed Terrible Towel in the mid-1970s, died this morning after a long bout with heart and respiration trouble. He gave all the breath he could for the Steelers — 35 years is a long time for any career — and he just had no more breath to give. His legacy, though, will be swung from the rafters every autumn Sunday in Pittsburgh…

Godspeed, Myron. We’ll miss voices like yours more every year.

On Sunday, I watched a little bit of the A-League Grand Final between the Central Coast Mariners and the Newcastle Jets. At one point, I was expecting an International Rules match to break out. There weren’t that many handbags in New York during Fashion Week — and honestly, it was the only reason to keep watching. The football was dreadful, but at any moment, anyone could have hauled off and become the Australian Kermit Washington.

Alas, all we got was Mariners goalkeeper Danny Vukovic smacking at a referee’s arm after arguing about a handball penalty that wasn’t called late in the match. Vukovic did what most Central Coast supporters wanted to do — leave early. Newcastle won, 1-0, and held up that shiny toilet bowl seat in celebration.

You can wear the trophy around your neck and be the life of the party. That’s just adorable — almost as adorable as Mariners players dressing up in blackface and Nazi gear the next day. Ben Cousins was seen at the part asking what they were on and where he could score some of it.

That reminds me — isn’t footy season starting soon?

(Video spotted on Soccer By Ives.)

Remember when we all thought Martin Jol was going to take Tottenham Hotspur to the next level? He had led the club to two consecutive 5th-place finishes and two UEFA Cup bids, and he came within a point of knocking archrival Arsenal out of a Champions League spot in 2006. Clearly, this was the year he was going to take this club to the next level.

Apparently, Jol just got a little fat and happy after two seemingly successful seasons at White Hart Lane, and his players were getting fat and happy right along with him. They might be stuck in a relegation battle again if it weren’t for Juande Ramos coming in, changing everyone’s diet and leading the club to its first trophy in nine years. Those vegetable smoothies probably taste a lot better these when served from a silver trophy.

Meanwhile, Jol must look like the most inept manager in England this side of Steve McLaren. He took a side on the verge of a Champions League bid, added expensive players he didn’t need, left big holes in his backline — holes which Ramos continues to patch up — and watched it drop from a contender for Europe to a contender for the Coca-Cola Championship. What club could possibly consider him a good hire now?

Jol could probably use a place to hide right about now. I’d suggest MLS.

Yes, those boys at Fox Sports in Australia do love writing their headlines, don’t they?