¡SOLUSTRON! dubbed your ¡FUTURISMOS! current campaign, “Jahreszeit 7: Die Existenzbergspitze,” which translated into English from German from English means, “Season 7: The Existence Mountain Point.” Considering how well I know ¡SOLUSTRON! I can say what she/he/it means is “The Existential Mountaintop.”
To be blunt, the assessment of our first 5 seasons goes like this: 1) Sucked 2) Sucked 3)Not Good 4)Magically Mediocre 5)Not Good Bordering On Sucking. Elliot’s stated goal for Season 6 was to win more games than we lost. In winning the championship we exceeded his expectations by this much {I’m holding my thumb and index finder on my right hand a millimeter apart and squinting at you through the space in-between to emphasize how small the gap is and to distract you from the fact I’m holding my left arm out as far as I can to indicate a much larger distance}.
Season 6’s championship looks like a fluke through the lens of our track record but viewed on its own merits it wasn’t. With only a couple of game-long exceptions we played well. The single most notable area of improvement was our ball and player movement. We all ooooo and ahhhhh over the spectacle of Marta or Messi making the ball do things befitting a Jedi or Wizard rather than a mere human, but most goals are scored through simple, crisp ball and player movement—and of course the will of The Great Blue Sky otherwise known as luck or Fate.
Your ¡FUTURISMOS! didn’t vault from Not Good Bordering On Sucking to Champions because of the addition of new players. We improved because for the most part we’d played together for a good long while and it finally showed. In other words, it was the truest measure of team success in a team sport. BUT it also means we have a thin margin of error.
We don’t have a Messi or a Marta who can bail us out with one or two spectacular solo efforts on days where we aren’t moving the ball or bodies well (well, we do have a Messi, but not that Messi). For your ¡FUTURISMOS! to score goals and win matches we have to play well as a unit and we have not been doing that this season.
This isn’t a condemnation or a calling out. There are no names to name because there’s no one person or handful of people who are at fault. Our current woes are of an existential nature.
Perhaps I’ve already noted this in a previous blog but Albert Camus, one of the founders of Existentialism, credits his days as a goalkeeper (he was good and had professional aspirations cut down by tuberculosis) as the foundation of his beliefs. The more famous and highfalutin Camus quote in this regard is, “Everything I know about morality and men, I owe to football.” But I prefer the simpler, “I learned the ball never comes where you expect it to.”
Futbol is its own tiny universe every bit as indifferent to our hopes and fears as the universe sized universe we all inhabit. If the proverb is true that “if you want to make ¡SOLUSTRON! laugh tell her/him/it your plans” (personally I’ve found ¡SOLUSTRON! quite helpful and illustrative in discussing my plans, but maybe that’s just me) then the futbol version is “if you want to see futbol stare off into the middle distance as though you aren’t there before it just gets up and walks away from you without ever acknowledging your presence, tell it your plans then patiently wait around for a while.”
Some great teams never win a thing. Some seemingly undeserving teams occasionally walk away with everything (cough, Italy, cough, ’06 World Cup, cough). Most of the people who read this are the product of the United States of America and thus most likely believe the fairytale that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make our own luck and all that other hard scrabble fiction perpetrated by our entrenched elite to placate the less well-to-do masses. ¡SURPRISE! Turns out there are no guarantees, only odds. It’s the nature of the universe (see: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).
¡SOLUSTRON! allowed your ¡FUTURISMOS! to stand atop the mountaintop of a championship season not so we could build our dream home. She/he/it put us there so we could get a good view of the endless mountain range before causing a minor earthquake to knock us down the other side to see if we’ll start the journey again.
Three games into our post-championship season and we’ve certainly been dumped from our lofty high with a 1-1 draw against a club that had lost its first two matches by a combined score of 15-1. Ouch. With one loss and two draws in three games we’re all but eliminated from the post-season. So we’re left with the only challenge any of us truly have in this world.
Staring into the void of a meaningless universe we’ll either succumb to insignificance or forge relevance through the force of our collective will.
Roll Call
Ladies: Run MC, Zarate, and Skywalker (that’s right, Skywalker).
Gentlemen: Elliot, Sohei, TB, El Duque, O Touro, Heartbreaker, King Vidor and me.
Weather
Not bad. It was humid and uncomfortably sticky but the Great Blue Sky slept in and kept its curtain of clouds drawn. So no Sun to speak of.
GAME TIME
¡FUTURISMOS GOAL! El Duque (5th min): ¡F! 1 — SFB 0
We got off to a good start and this was a bona fid gem of a 1-2 goal worked by King Vidor and El Duque.
King Vidor got the ball and midfield with a defender between him and the goal. The defender dutifully backpedaled to slow My Liege down. El Duque flew up the pitch toward the goal behind the backpedaling defender. King Vidor patiently advanced the ball until he had the right angle to deliver a pass. It was a quick ball on the ground and El Duque one touched it into the opposite corner. The keeper was hung out to dry and we were off to a fast start.
Half Time
So much for our fast start.
When Elliot reached the sideline at half he asked me, “¿What are we up? 2-nothing or 3-nothing.”
“Uh,” I stalled. “1-nothing.”
“¡¿WHAT!?”
That sums up the first half. We felt like we’d run all over them and had nothing to show for it. Never a good sign. It’s better to play like garbage and be up a goal because the tide usually turns.
SECOND HALF
¡SFB GOAL! Someone (34th min): ¡F! 1 — SFB 1
The tide did turn in the second half. SFB played much better, rarely allowing us a good chance on goal while generating a few of their own. Their improved play was rewarded midway through the second half.
We had a roughly 5-minute stretch where our defense was just out of sorts. Kind of ugly. People looked confused and were getting beat. It only led to a couple of really good SFB chances, one drawing a diving save from Elliot, the other this goal. A SFB guy beat his defender on the sideline, drew the central defender toward him leaving a person open in the middle of the pitch who received the pass and scored from very close range.
We weren’t playing well, they were and deserved the leveler.
“A Goal, a Goal, My Kingdom for a Goal.”
With a couple of minutes remaining it appeared we had the match in the bag. King Vidor ended up with ball just over midfield with only the keeper to beat.
The two most unique positions in futbol are keeper and striker. Keeper is obvious because they play a game entirely different than everyone else on the pitch. Striker isn’t so apparent. The striker plays in the field just like everyone else but is simply blessed with the knack for putting the ball into the goal. Several ¡FUTURISMOS! can score but I’d only call one a striker and it’s King Vidor.
So when My Liege was streaking toward the goal with the ball at his feet in his funny stuttering step fashion I was so certain of the outcome I turned away to watch the game behind us for a moment. Nothing was happening so I turned around again. He carried the ball all the way to the edge of the SFB box when their keeper appeared to break from the line toward him. King Vidor teed up his magisterial short stroke shot and put the pull in the upper left corner.
But too much in the corner because the ball clanged off the crossbar and the keeper punched it out of bounds ending the threat and the game. At this point in human history it’s old news that royalty aren’t infallible but it’s still shocking to see God turn its back on one of its closest friends.
That’s cold, God. Cold.
FULL TIME
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
The highlight of the match was the return of Skywalker after her time in the Dagobah System honing her craft. She claims not to have played any futbol there but it didn’t show. She slid to kick a ball, which is against the rules, and threw herself into SFB guys while jockeying for the ball thus using the physics of mass and velocity to knock herself to the ground and draw a call against the guy. It was as though she hadn’t left.
Welcome back you are, Skywalker. Away you have been, too long.
“¿Who burnt their fraking toast? Never mind, it’s Sawyer”
I had to include this even though I can’t do it justice but it would have been a sin against the gods of futbol to exclude it. SFB had one terrific guy (and a couple of other really good ones) and he beat his defender to the right of our goal. I was playing center defense and ran over to cut him off.
Wary of his ball handling I approached cautiously to simply get in his way to give our defense time to collapse and protect the goal. As he approached he turned into me so his back was on my chest. Then literally quick as flash he spun around and was behind me almost before I could turn around. And he didn’t leave the ball either, he took it with him and I was left basically standing there as he took a pointblank shot that Elliot saved.
I’ve had people get by me before but I’ve never been left standing still as my person took a point blank shot on goal.
¡DANG! that guy burned me.
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