Dave’s Football Blog

Y’know, I don’t think the laws of the game allow the football to be quite so large…

(Spotted on With Leather)

New England Patriots kicker Stephen Gostkowski once famously said, “I don’t know much about football. I know about kicking.” That puts him in contrast to the Houston Dynamo fullback Craig Waibel — Waibel! — who clearly knows something about (Association) football and kicking. As you can see in this video, he’s also thrown down the gauntlet on every NFL kicker out there by kicking this 63-yard field goal for charity.

Granted, he didn’t do it with 290-pound men in riot gear coming after him, but hey, anyone who can kick a 63-yard field goal will probably get some phone calls from NFL teams. The Kansas City Chiefs considered giving Mia Hamm a job after she kicked a few 50-yarders in practice. Given what MLS pays these days, I actually wouldn’t be all that surprised if Waibel listened.

(Spotted on The Offside.)

A few weeks ago, I was having an IM chat with our pal Unsilent Majority, he of Kissing Suzy Kolber and Deadspin fame. He started prattling on about how there would be a Worldwide Champions League in 20 years, with D.C. United, Boca Juniors, Ajax and Inter Milan in Group A. I asked him how they planned to pull off the travel for that. His reply?

“Tubes. There will be tubes. Like the internet, but for people. I have some patents pending.”

Yesterday, Richard Branson introduced us to White Knight Two, the new Virgin Galactic mothership that will carry the winged rocket tube known as SpaceShipTwo into the air to make astronauts out of anyone with $200,000 to burn. For now, the press is making suborbital space flight sound like a flight of fancy, but Branson has a much grander vision of the future:

“If, in 10 or 15 years, we’re not getting to London in 45 minutes from Sydney, then we will have gone backwards.”

Ponder that for a moment — Sydney to London in 45 minutes. Would that not be the biggest game-changer in world football this side of Lionel Messi? If getting halfway across the world was doable, why couldn’t you have a World Champions League? Imagine the top footballers in the world becoming astronauts, zooming over the stratosphere to their next big match, filling stadiums in cities they can’t pronounce, playing for the highest stakes imaginable. Hell, Virgin Galactic would probably sponsor the competition, just to show people how they made it possible.

Of course, we’re decades away from this. SpaceShipTwo only holds about 8 people, so maybe by SpaceShipFour or so, Virgin Galactic will launch a rocket capable of carrying an entire football club anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Then there’s the matter of organizing the whole competition around domestic league schedules and international breaks, and there’s a pretty good chance MLS still won’t have its collective head out of its arse by then.

Plus, if the rockets of the future make the Association game a truly global game in this fashion, what happens to all the other football codes out there? Would the AFL and NFL never escape their home countries? Would rugby union remain “stuck in a ghetto”? Would the flavor of regional sports be blown away by a planet-wide monoculture of soccer, basketball and Twenty20 cricket?

I suppose you can’t eliminate the barriers to world travel without side effects, especially when it comes to world sport. Still, I hope I’m around long enough to see Branson pull this off. It would make for a more interesting world.

Good luck with those tubes, UM.

Seriously, this is the best description of GolTV's Ray Hudson that I've ever read. Go check it out.

Laurie at The Offside looks at the state of MLS and the notion that Americans who talk about soccer often feel like imposters. What does that say about Americans who talk about Aussie Rules?

DC Sports Bog caught a D.C. United fan wearing a life vest during the team's second waterlogged home game in a row. Awesome.

The Offside serves up this handy translation guide for the silly season. "I have always wanted to play for Aston Villa." = "I can't believe Man U wouldn't return my calls."

Over at Soccer FanHouse, I’ve been writing a little about the so-called rumble between Columbus Crew fans and the Inter City Firm, a band of West Ham United hooligans. As you can see from this video, the actual confrontation turned out to be quite lame.

Well, guess what shows up in my inbox today?

Hello Dave,

I am currently working on the cinema release of Cass, which is based on the life of Cass Pennant member of West Ham’s ICF.

The film is due for released on 1st August and I was hoping you might be interested in feature the trailer and information about the film on your blog.

Please let me know if this is possible, I have placed the synopsis and trailer links for you below and here is a link to the website - http://www.cassmovie.co.uk/

I hope to hear from you soon.

Yes, it’s a movie about the Inter City Firm — just four days after the Inter City Firm shows up in the news, attempting to make trouble at an MLS match in America. Could it be that this so-called hooligan attack was really *gasp* a publicity stunt for this film?

If so, it’s either utter baloney or utter genius. Or both. I haven’t figured it out just yet. Either way, I have a hard time believing this is a total coincidence.

(Photo by Mike Thorn)

Deuce of Davenport finds all sorts of NFL-licensed products that he thinks shouldn't be NFL-licensed products. I, on the other hand, think a Steelers pool chlorinator would be AWESOME. If I had a pool, anyway...

Live in North Carolina? Want to know what it’s like to be an away supporter for your soccer club without actually going to an away game? Come cheer for the Carolina Railhawks when they play a friendly against any club from Mexico.

The Railhawks played Monterrey on Sunday, and that video doesn’t really do the scene justice. There were about 20 of us and 7,000 Mexicans. We had to get there an hour before kickoff to make sure we could set up our drums in our usual spot on the south stand, and even then it was half full of Los Rayodos and El Tri supporters. 10 minutes before kickoff, guys in Mexican wrestling masks showed up waving Monterrey flag and throwing boxes full of whistles at the crowd.

Somehow, we managed to stand our ground. When they chanted “Monterrey! Monterrey!”, we came right back at them with “Railhawks! Railhawks!” We flew our flags and beat our drums for everyone to see. We also have a guy who shows up to almost every game with giant laminated yellow and red cards, and during the game, whenever someone ran by with a Monterrey flag, he would chase after him holding up the red card.

Then there was my favorite chant of the afternoon. Whenever a Monterrey player missed a wide open shot, we pointed at him and sang, “That’s why you’re not in Superliga!” (That was almost as much fun as the “You lost to Hollywood!” Guantanamera chant we threw at Portland a few weeks ago.)

I only saw one ugly incident. At the end of the game, when it became clear that we were going to get away with a 0-0 draw, one of our supporters lit up an orange smoke bomb — the second or third one of the match — and Monterrey fans start throwing water bottles and Tecate cans at him. Another supporter told me later that he got hit with a half-empty Coke bottle during a flag run. All told, though, it was still much less ugly than your average Philadelphia Eagles game.

95-degree heat aside, it was a fun afternoon. Plus, after the game, some of the Monterrey fans who stood outside waiting for their own players applauded the Railhawks as emerged from the locker rooms. They were especially nice to Brian Levey, our backup goalkeeper, who managed to keep international players like Jared Borgetti and Humberto Suazo out of goal. I think some of those fans will be back — wearing orange and cheering for the home side. Works for me. We’ll be in section 204, amigos. Come sing with us.