any given sunday

1. Kitchen fans: there will be more IPEs. The great news is that the reorganisation uncovered some delicious champagne truffles that are out of date and which we are therefore compelled to eat rather than give away.
2. Apologies to readers of my hockey match reports, who will have seen some of this material before. Today's highlights include me telling my sub-Nemesis Gregg Easterbrook a thing or two about coaching, why I love the ridiculous Brett Favre and GOATs. I have, this week, stood mano a mano with a GOAT, with predictable results. I also have questions for Buckeyes and (especially) Wolverines.



The best line in any movie is in Moonraker when Drax says, 'James Bond. You reappear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.' This pretty much covers what I think about Hallowe'en. Greg Brady, who commentates on the NFL here, and who I like so much on Fighting Talk that I nearly think of him as a Nemesis, once did a great rant when he said he was happy to concede that most of the time most women he knew were more sensible and reliable than he was, but in return, they had to concede that at Hallowe'en they all dressed as prostitutes.

This is the costume that really bugs me:



It is on two levels. I'm not getting into the first, but the second is that there is no fancy dress code I have ever seen, from London Underground to chav to Christmas Carols, which at least several city lawyers and media executives and so on will not be able to interpret as some variation on 'sexy cat'.

You may not have realised that the above is a sexy cat, because it just looks like a prostitute, but it is a sexy cat. I mean, look at it again. It doesn't look anything like a cat. If I'd been given a glimpse, and asked to say, I would have guessed that it was a (prostitute-style) French Maid. At least this one is paying a tiny piece of lip-service. Nope. I thought I would be able to find one that did, but they are all like the above.

Basically, fancy dress is almost inevitably the result of women wanting to embrace a slutty aesthetic in an arena of plausible deniability. I don't know why the code isn't always 'WOMEN SLUTTY, MEN DON'T BOTHER'.

My sub-Nemesis Gregg Easterbrook would include a picture of a pretty woman dressed as a sexy cat here, because he's a cheap populist. Also a space shuttle, and then he would say the space shuttle was stupid. I'll deal with Easterbrook later, like I say.



NEMESIS WATCH
Mike Tanier has, for the nth week in succession, not been sacked in my favour by the NYT, and is still writing about matchups for the Fifth Down. He starts with the 'Toilet Bowl' between the terrible Lions and terrible Rams (whose star running back is Steven Jackson).

This game will be broadcast only in sports taverns with more than 200 televisions, and it will be shown only on the low-definition set behind the pool table. There, four guys who started Steven Jackson in their fantasy leagues will huddle like Depression-era vagabonds around a trash-can fire, staring into the flickering light and trying to figure out who the heck Danny Amendola is.

Pictures are important to break these things up, I find, when I am reading interminable things. Here is one of some prize-winning golden retrievers. Did you know that the golden retriever was invented by Dudley Marjoribanks?



Anyway, on Brett Favre's return to Green Bay, where he was so beloved for so long (sorry, Americans, but some UK readers will not know even this), Tanier says:

Brett Favre’s return to Green Bay brings a late-October media fatigue usually associated with political races. Voters are now sick of even their favorite candidates, and media outlets risk low viewer turnout as they attempt to rally the constituency with more Favre’s Revenge storylines. Vikings broadcasts even have a stump-speech redundancy: Favre brings great leadership, great experience, he shoots from the hip, he’s the right man for our times, he’s a maverick, and so on.
Since losing to the Vikings in Favre Bowl I, the Packers have won two games by a combined 57-3 score. Their apparent improvement comes with a caveat: the Lions and Browns are geishas who flatter their opponents instead of challenging them.

Nice Groundhog Day gag re Carolina coach John Fox not dropping QB Jake Delhomme:

Fox saw his shadow on Wednesday, bringing six more weeks of Delhomme; Fox will run out of patience long before we run out of jokes.

And very solid related work re Dolphins' wildcat offence:

No team can hide its quarterback forever, except perhaps the Dolphins.

[Further related note: as stated tediously often, the absence of wall-to-wall NFL in the UK makes it much more fun and less wearying, but still if I have to listen to another analyst say that the wildcat works for the Dolphins because they are the only team that commits to it, I think I shall scream.]

Tanier also does a good book review.

(Football Outsiders linked here last week. I liked it, but it made me nervous, since I, as I may have mentioned, don't know that much about football, and they, like, so do. It may be why I am keeping mentioning my ignorance, like a shiny shield.)

(Other related note on people who might one day become my Nemesis: why does Pod Vader on Fantasy Focus lisp like that. Is it because he thinks it's cute? Also: I play cricket with a guy called Matthew Berry - he's a nagging medium pace bowler - but I think it is a different one.)

SUBNEMESIS WATCH - EASTERBROOK
In Tuesday Morning Quarterback, he talks about how coaching doesn't make much difference - maybe ten per cent. My thoughts, which you will be eager to hear, since, and I can't repeat this too often, I don't know much about anything about American Football really, are these:

1. If it's a game of inches, ten percent is a ton. It's not new news that in a winner takes all scenario the only-very-slightly better performer demands a vast premium, but Brian Burke describes it well in terms of the NFL draft, Gladiators and Bricklayers.

2. I have neve rencountered a sport where coaching makes such a difference. Every unit of play is set up, practiced and considered. Of course there is some flexibility, and I am not saying they are super ultra masterminds, but there really is a level of considered generalship that is absent in more fluid games like soccer or basketball, or more individual ones like cricket and baseball. If you're a non-NFL fan who has wandered into the room, and stuck around for some ineexplicable reason, then I like you. I also think you might get a sense of what I mean from this video, which I can't post here. It also gives a sense of why the draft process includes intelligence testing, which I will write about in The Future.

Another picture is needed. Er. How about this. It is of a road near me where someone either ran out of Os or made a mistake and couldn't be bothered to fix it. It is one of my all time favourite pictures:



3. Calling for the coach's head. Easterbrook is right to say that it's a big, dramatic-looking fix. It happens in soccer. It makes much less sense in soccer, because managers have less impact. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski have just published a Soccer-freakonomics book called Why England Lose (or, in America, Soccernomics). The most brutal statistic in the book is that success follows wage bill. Not transfer fees, which are distorted by lunatic thinking in all kinds of way, but wage bill. If you factor that in, and remember that this is winner takes all, then even Alex Ferguson only really wins what you'd expect. A few clubs are totally mismanaged, and luck plays its part in any particular season, but only a very, very few managers and clubs have regularly beaten the wage-spread. Bill Shankley and Brian Clough are the ones mentioned in the book. Stupid Manchester City will probably win the league this year or next.

My favourite bit of Easterbrook this week is about why the NBA should raise its entry age to 20.

GOATS AND PENISES
Sixteen months ago I was commissioned to go to New Orleans and write about the post-Katrina Saints, because they were coming to London to play the Chargers. I went and it was great. The funniest thing was finding out that it is really true that reporters just wander into the locker room afterwards while all the players are wandering around with their willies everywhere. If I'd known what I know now, I'd definitely have gone and interviewed one of the dozen players no one was interested in.



I was also offered an interview with LaDainian Tomlinson, which insanely no newspaper here was interested in. At this stage, I knew almost nothing about the NFL. I had idly supported the Jets since the eighties, but I spent too much time obsessing over giant tuna to concentrate at all on the NFL or worry about how the game was actually played and run, and I barely knew who LT was.

This tuna is the GOAT, as caught by Ken Fraser. No apologies for re-posting this picture.



My initial reading up on LT told me four things:
1) He has sticky-out ears, which is funny.



2) LaDainian is the sort of unique name that is very common in the NFL. Nothing beats Laveranues for me (pronounced 'Laverneus', non-NFL fans, and therefore presumably a clerical error)
3) His birthday is the same as mine, which I would use in an interview thus:
RFH: Do you believe in astrology?
LT: (Politely, media savvy, surprised) What?
RFH: Astrology, do you believe in it?
LT: Er...
RFH: Because we have the same birthday, and I'm pretty good at hockey, so I wondered if you thought there was something in it.
4) He was seriously discussed on websites as possibly one of the all-time greatest running backs.

Cut forward a year. He wasn't so productive last year, and he has been unproductive and injury-stricken this year. Running backs have short careers. They get battered around, they hit a wall, and they lose the edge and that's that. Mike Tanier made a funny joke that LT will have good fantasy week and then go to the Edgerrin House for running backs who hit the wall.

I bet LT doesn't find it funny, or Edgerrin James. I bet Adrian Peterson, who is the latest superstar to look like he might be one of the Greatest Of All Time looks at him and wonders. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe that's what makes the GOAT the GOAT. He never wonders.

Anyway, running backs get beat up and hit the wall relatively young. Every sportsman does. I have, even, if you can imagine such a thing. Some sportsmen retire as soon as they are past their peak, and some fight on, rending and tearing, refusing to give in. I love them. Brett Favre is crazy and self-absorbed, and the annual soap opera's hilarious if you're in England and only get a tiny amount of NFL coverage, but it must be tedious if you're in the states. But I love the fact that he's carrying on, and sod anyone who tells him he should quit at the top. (Do I think this because I carry on playing hockey? Yes.)



I hated Paul Ince when he played for Manchester United. I didn't even warm to him at Liverpool, when he was past his prime, but when he struggled through games in lower divisions, that I could respect. Here he is at Swindon. No. I can't find any pictures of it. but he played for them.

The best thing about David Beckham is that he hasn't taken a swansong. He hasn't said he's bigger than the team. He hasn't deselected himself like some princess because he worried about being dropped. He's said, 'Drop me. If you want me, I'll play, even if it's a few minutes. Some nutters will say it's undignified, but I'm playing for England.' You get worse at sport when you get older, and you get dropped. It's horrible but you get over yourself. Or you quit at the top, and then you are probably a preening narcissist slash princess and I say nuts to you.

I am saying, in conclusion, that this man is not a preening narcissist:



Anyway, GOATs. LT was very good, and he may still be very good, but probably he isn't a GOAT unless this injury was a glitch and people have written him off ridiculously quickly when he's been playing through an injury. GOATs are very rare. All the same, I played one this week, and here he is:



From time to time, I compete in the Quiz League of London. It's a hard league, questions are individual, and lots of Britain's top quizzers are in it. It is probably the best regular quiz league on earth. I am so stratospherically out of my depth that it causes me to mangle my physical geography metaphors just thinking of it. On Tuesday, my team, which is based at the Pineapple pub in Kentish Town (rather than the Pineapple in south London where there was a police orgy last year) played Allsorts, who are based at the Hand and Shears in Westminster. Among their players are Gavin Fuller, the youngest-ever Mastermind champion, who could probably beat us on his own. And Kevin Ashman.

He's the GOAT. There's no doubt about it. He's the current world quiz champion, he's won Mastermind, Brain of Brtain, Brain of Brains, European and world championships. He's the best Egghead. When I started this story, I had a reason. Oh, yes.

GOATs are people with long careers, but sports memory is short. Reporters on 24 hour channels are starved of new things to say and deluged with time to say them in, so they build little moments up into ridiculous significances. A point in a tennis match is game changing until the next point because the commentator has to say something. Or a goal, or at TD, or two bad games from Eli Manning or whatever.

Anyway, pundits find it almost impossible to look outside the now, so two years ago LT was the GOAT and now everyone says that Miles Austin is one of the best ten wide receivers in the NFL after two great games. I am incredibly ignorant but from outside, it seems unlikely that someone has become that from almost nothing. But I am incredibly ignorant and maybe Austin is the bomb. But my guess is Greg Jennings will score more fantasy points from here on in. But I am incredibly ignorant. And so it goes on.

A FUNNY GOAT



Sea The Stars is up there with the GOATs, horsewise. NFL fans will remember this piece of over-excited commetary from the end of the Broncos-Bengals opener.



This radio commentary on Sea The Stars at the Arc de Triomphe, is better. Oh! Oh no! I can't find it anywhere. It's a tragedy. Trust me, though. Here's the race:



All sports have their seminal bits of commentary. 'They think it's all over' is special to the English, but it isn't as good as the Bjorge Lillelian saying, when Norway beat England in 1981: 'Lord Nelson! Lord Beaverbrook! Sir Winston Churchill! Sir Anthony Eden! Clement Attlee! Henry Cooper! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher - can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher! Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!' One of these people is pictured here. If you tell me who, you will get a prize.



And Bjorge isn't as good as Sid Waddell talking about darts. Not about Phil 'the Power' Taylor, ten times world darts champion and another cast-iron GOAT, but about the Crafty Cockney, Eric Bristow, golden boy of darting's first golden age:

When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Bristow is only 27.

This is off the point. I mentioned Sea The Stars because he is now retired, and the BBC wrote about it thus:

Champion racehorse Sea The Stars will breed with fellow Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe winner Zarkava at "the earliest possible opportunity".

Yes! As early as possible! This sex must happen without delay!

The Aga Khan, who owns the 2008 winner Zarkava, will send his unbeaten filly to the colt, who also won the Derby and the 2000 Guineas. "I believe the last two Arc winners were made for each other," he said.

Yes! It's like When Harry Met Sally! And so on. It will be true love for ten minutes, like in life.

The best commentary isn't real. Look up 12th Man on Spotify. The thirty minute spoof '12th Man Again' is hilarious (I am told) if you don't know about cricket. If you do, it's up there with the funniest things ever done. All the subcontinental names are very nearly the names of real cricketers.

I've gone on way, way too long, but I have some questions.

1. College Ball
We've got nothing like it in Europe. My questions are:
- Did Colt McCoy choose his name from a list discarded by the makers of a bad movie about a high school quarteback because they thought it sounded like a bit of a cliche?
(- I have never thought this before, but presumably former qb prospect Johnny Utah was an amalgam of Johny Unitas and Joe Montana)
- Michigan and Ohio. I really want to go to this game. My question about Michigan is: what is the relationship between the state and the Wolverines? And the state and the Lions? Is there a blue-collar/white-collar thing going on? What is the cause-effect relationship between bad football, the recession and general downness of mood in Michigan?

2. Sports Night
1. How common is the name 'Stackhouse' in the USA? I ask because it is used in The West Wing, Sports Night and - it's not just Sorkin - True Blood. Is it the name of some producer?
2. When Jason la Canfora was looking for work, how much did the fact that he is basically Jeremy off Sports Night stand him in good stead? Is this something everyone said when he started getting gigs? For now, I do not think of Jason la Canfora as my Nemesis, but he has some potential.

NEMESIS WATCH - FANTASY EDITION
My Nemesis Ben Sweetman is going to win our Fantasy League. It is a ridiculously shallow league, so all five teams are silly, and seeing as we were very fresh to American-style fantasy systems (in Britain it is all cumulative points, and salary cap-based with most managers picking the same few players), we are playing cumulative points rather than a luck-inclusive match-up league, which Ben will win, barring injury. I am clinging to his shirt tails only by hustling in the transfer market, but probably will not recover from choosing Tomlinson and Forte first up (5 and 6 overall).

Anyway, I have picked up Darren Sharper for Eric Weddle, like that will transform anything. It's just hustle. I am vacillating between Forte and LT to go with Ronnie Brown, and between Greg Jennings and the Giants' Steve Smith.