Soccer: fast lane to dementia?

When I was 8 years old I would ferociously head heavy old leather soccer balls to the point of getting the nickname "Bullethead Smith", and this continued on as I was playing in central defense throughout my teens. After that the balls became lighter, I would say, and nowadays when I head a ball there is no shock whatsoever. But, as that fish in the restaurant aquarium tank in the Monty Python movie "Meaning of Life" said, when it saw its friend being eaten, reports like this "make you sort of think, don't they"?

2017 ORNL Futbol Game

Mentors versus Interns  it was. The Mentors always win, of course. We can't let those young punks get too cocky. So this time we were 3-2 down at half time and so we cancelled the second half due to rain. Now, in TN when you abandon a game before the second half it becomes invalid, meaning the result from last year (which we of course won) carries over and applies this year as well. So we won. And, anyway, as Budhu stated in the official FIFA match report, the rain 'prevented the greatest Mentor comeback in history'. So there.

United or City?

Well, the soccer team that I have fervently supported since I was 6 months old (ahem!) has gone down the tubes. Norwich City, languishing in the hinterlands of the English Second Division, has now lost all hope of promotion back into the limelight this year, has fired their coach and, even worse, failed to beat our sweet, dear associates Ipswich Town, even though this time I was there to see them. Inconsiderate!!

In the meantime a new entity has been born, bloomed, expanded and is enticing us.

Atlanta United!

The newest MLS franchise. 55,000 fans at the inaugural game.
Excitement. Passion.
The chance to give those Red Bulls a good licking.
Just 3 1/2 hours down the interstate.
Hmmm.......City or United? Will allegiance here be threatened?.....

Palermo's Rapid Fire Prez!

Palermo FC are in Serie A, the top Italian league. Their president, Maurizio Zamparini, is a calm and patient role model. He likes to give a coach time to develop his squad, instill his playing style in the team and slowly gel together.

Their coach at the beginning of this season was Beppe Iachini, but, unfortunately,  Zamp felt he had to quickly fire him, and replaced him by Davide Ballardini, but he also had to be  axed, then Guillermo Barros Schelotto, who was sadly laid off, then Fabio Viviani, who was, er,  sacked quicker than you can say Bettino Craxi, then Giovanni Bosi again, who got his pink slip post haste, too, then Giovanni Tedesco, who had to be, regrettably, also relieved of his duties, then Beppe Iachini, who also had to be, er, released, then Walter Novellino, who was thrown out of the pram a couple of days ago.

Nine coaching changes in the season, one every 4 games.

Davide Ballardini is now back for the Juventus game tomorrow.

According to Novellino "Juve don't give anything to anyone. The team is lacking organization. They're a little bit afraid".

You don't say!

At least they don't have to face the perplexed Sicilian tifosi.
Novellino says "Maybe they can find some calm by playing away from home."

Johan Cruyff

The Dutch Master - coaching.

So Johan Cruyff passed on today.  He wasn't the greatest soccer player ever. Only maybe the fourth or fifth greatest (!). But if you combine his playing prowess with his coaching career (he made Barcelona great)  he's definitely Number One Of All Time.  He was always My Number One anyway. Simply because of one quote, that Jerome Baudry reminded me of today:

"Technique is not being able to juggle a ball 1000 times. Anyone can do that by practicing. Then you can work in the circus. Technique is passing the ball with one touch, with the right speed, at the right foot of your team mate"

You see, I can pass the ball pretty well, always could. But for the life of me I can't juggle the cursed thing. So I really appreciate Cruyff's vision. Lets me off, you see. Flashy young teenage jugglin' show-offs be damned!......

TITAN - Taking Over the World.

Apparently Elon Musk is scared that our ORNL TITAN supercomputer might take over the world. That might be fun, but as a variant - that us evil scientists use the supercomputer to seize control.

Now, TITAN is already a 20 petaflop machine, whereas the human brain is only 10 petaflops, so we already have the raw power needed to create superintelligence. A tad more programming could lead our little toy to controlled synthetic ultraconsciousness, with a brain the size of a planet, capable of talking the hind legs off an Arcturan megadonkey*. 

But just yapping and a monster brain are not enough - you need arms, legs, weapons etc. So we'd need to hook TITAN up to mindless robots that can see to our physical needs: huge, indestructible machines with infinite strength, precision and balance that never tire and prepare perfect sushi. 

Evilly-laughing, mwaha ha ha ha, we villainous plotters would then finally flip the switch that orders the supercomputer to make the robots kill all the little people and use the fruits of our dystopian Earth to serve us, only us, their masters, in any way we desire. Hmm.....in my case that would require forming two robot soccer teams, one, that I would play in, being slightly better than the other.

*Acknowledgement: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Why do we do it?

As some readers know, I am a supporter of Norwich City, the football team from where I was born and grew up. Today was a momentous day for City, as they gained promotion back into the English Premier League by beating Middlesbrough 2-0 in the packed National Stadium at Wembley. The match was worth about 200 million dollars to the winner, the richest single game in all of football.

 I actually think we have a better team than when we were  in the Prem last year and so one can look forward to next season with some anticipation. As long as Liverpool don't re-hire Suarez we'll be OK (he scored 11 goals against us in 5 games).

But it was hard to enjoy the playoff final today, and most serious sports fans know what I mean. You see, it was just too important,  with too much riding on it. The result really mattered, and when that's the case it's difficult to relax enough to actually derive the slightest pleasure from viewing. Of course, the opposite; being miserable and depressed when they lose a big game; comes easy to the serious fan. Crazy. You wonder why we do it.

Don't Ban Suarez!

So Luis Suarez has been biting again.  A 7-match ban for a nibbling Bakkal in 2010, a 10-match ban for nipping Ivanovic in 2013, and now he does it to Chiellini in the World Cup.

And everyone is screaming to lock him up and throw away the key.
Take the English pundits.

Robbie Savage claims "He should never play international football again."
Alan Shearer says "Three bites and you're out. They should absolutely hammer him".
Danny Mills: "It has to be the longest ban in football, ever".

No, gentlemen! No! Why?

Biting is childish and, indeed disgusting. But the physical injury caused was minor - just a few toothmarks. Compare that to players head butting the referee, as did one of my team mates in Knoxville last year, deliberately trying to breaking legs, such as Roy Keane against Alf Inge Haaland in April 2001, or the sickening forearm smash of Ben Thatcher that knocked out Pedro Mendes in 2006. In 2010 an English Sunday League player was jailed for 6 months for a horrific tackle, shattering an opponent's leg in two places and ending his playing career. Those are acts of extreme violence, and players try to perpetrate them in nearly every professional match. Put yourself in the victim's shoes, Mr. Shearer: of which indiscretion would you prefer to be on the receiving end?   Suarez's regressive behavior offends us culturally. But the punishment will not be  objective, I'm afraid.

On the cusp of the unthinkable

For the last three years Norwich City have been basking in the limelight of the Premier Division, while our arch-rivals Ipswich Town languished in the neglected backwaters of the second division  (called the 'Championship').  Of course, we reveled in this situation.  Moreover, as last year it looked as if Ipswich would even be relegated from the Championship to the third division,  City fans, polled as to whether they would like this to happen,  nearly unanimously voted 'yes', even though this may have condemned us to several years without derby games against them.

But, as things are right now, Ipswich are just one point from the play-offs for a place in the Premier League, while we look like we'll have to beat at least one of the elite clubs,  Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal, to stay up. So there's a significant chance that the unthinkable will happen - THEY WILL GO UP AS WE  GO DOWN. 

My future job

Mr. Neil Doncaster,

Chief Executive,

Norwich City Football Club,

Carrow Road

Norwich NR2 3EW

Dear Neil,

After the debacles against Hull and Spurs, whereby in both games the lads managed to reduce themselves within 5 minutes to lurching after the shadows of the opposition like blinded zombies, it’s clear that Carrow Road needs some big changes.

So I am hereby applying for the obviously-soon-to-be-vacant position of manager of Norwich City FC.

You’ll probably want to know what experience I have in running a football club? The answer is: none whatsoever!

So what? I’ll run the show using a three-point principle broadly inspired by the athletics department of my current employer.

Firstly, I’ll get rid of the best players. This will engender an unprecedented level of solidarity in the remainder, leading to their being psychologically solidly impenetrable.

Anyway it’ll be quite easy to do because my predecessor Hughton has already voided the club of all but a couple of the good players – there’s only Hoolahan and the lad Redmond left. They’ll have to go!

Secondly, in a revolutionary step, I’ll remove the goalkeeper from the team! Knowing that our goal is gaping and unprotected will give our outfield players tremendous incentive to never let the opposition have the ball.

Thirdly, I’ll stop all training sessions. This will make the players so keen to play so that, come Saturday afternoon they’ll all run around like demented threshing machines, reducing even our dear friends from Ipswich to a bunch of whimpering blue babies.

It’s time the Canaries opened up a can of Norfolk Whoop Ass on the Premier League.

On the Ball City!

Let’s get to work!

Yours,  Jeremy C. Smith. 

Up the City!

Well, I've kept my trap shut concerning Norwich City since the unlikely day of their ascension to the Premier League. Why? Because it has all been too much, too nerve-wracking, despairing, elating, rousing, deflating and inspiring.

We didn't belong here, you see. At the beginning of the campaign we were 8/11 favourites to go straight back down. After all, everyone knows that to shine in the world's most-watched arena you had better avail yourself of a $200M team of silky, experienced, speedy World-Cup Ghanaians, Brazilians and Ukrainians, not a cut-price gaggle of crass, verdant British amateurs uprooted from the lower leagues.

But today we beat Tottenham Hotspurs 2-1 away. Our little team of country yokels stauched the supposedly unstoppable flow of flair and brilliance in London - the vaunted Spurs: Adebayor, Modric, and Gareth Bale, the last of those men himself alone valued at three times the cost of the whole Norwich team. And we didn't simply score 2 to their 1, we robbed them everywhere on the pitch. Throughout the whole match we were first to the ball then quicker thinking when we had it.

Paul Lambert, the gaffer, has mixed in some systematics he learned with Borussia Dortmund in Germany. But perhaps more tellingly he has assembled a kit of hungry lads. Football mirrors life: you can have whatever pedigree you like, whatever past successes, whatever mega-salary, whatever fame, but if, like Spurs, you lose that edge, that hunger, that raw desire and intent, you will lose the game.

And now we're safe, more than safe, we're even perusing a top-half finish, and I can finally breathe, relax, pour a glass of red and enjoy the Summer.

High Productivity - an Aging Phenomenon?

The soccer field is so frustrating. With age I have learned exactly what to do on the field but physically am no longer capable of actually doing it. Meanwhile the young punks mindlessly whizz by and crash out of bounds. Is it the same with science?

The conventional wisdom has been that scientific productivity dwindles with age - brilliant young scientists making outstanding conceptual leaps. However, recent work suggests that this is not the case, and that prime productivity is maybe around 50 years old.

Well, I'm beginning to come round to the idea that older folks maybe aren't as clapped out as we all used to think. For example, members of our center had the pleasure this last month of lecturing on "The Molecules of Life" to ORICL - the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning. The class was mostly retired scientists and engineers and, let me tell you, they were the liveliest bunch of students I have lectured to in quite a while. This begs the question as to whether they were always that engaged or have perked up with the advancing decades. I know the latter is true of myself - the reason I interminably interrupt and yap about in seminars others give is experience - whereas 30 years ago I could understand hardly anything scientists were talking about, these days it comes much more easily, and I think the same may have been true of our ORICL audience. And some scientists I know keep working for ever and ever, it seems. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a 102-year-old Nobel winning scientist (pictured above) said: 'Above all, don't fear the difficult moments - the best comes from them."

So maybe instead of prematurely fretting about retirement planning, 51-year-olds like myself should realise that the best years of our lives are still ahead? This maybe true in science, but it doesn't alter the fact that I'd still like to punt those mindless young punks off the soccer field - if only I could catch them!

Stardom, Sex, Scandal, Shame, Suicide and Soccer..

While playing for the Norfolk U15 and U18 soccer teams in the backwaters of England in 1975-1978 we players had no idea we were at the birth of the making of social history concerning sex, racism and sport - only years later did we learn that we were witnessing the making of the first openly gay and the first million-pound black soccer superstar, and that our coach was perpetrating child sex abuse that would trigger a worldwide revolution in sports management.

Justin Fashanu (above) was in our U18 team, then became the first black million-pound soccer player, and was the third highest goalscorer in the English Premier League in 1980-81. He was also the first gay to out in the sport, suffered greatly for it, and committed suicide in 1998 after allegations of an improper relationship in the US with a 17-year-old (although the charges had been dropped).

Nick Baker is now writing a book about him, and this is what I communicated to Nick about the quiet, tall striker:

"Justin told me he didn't really want to play football - he was more interested in boxing as a kid, having, I believe, won the English Schools championship. At the time it struck us as weird that a kid with talent actually wouldn't want to play football.

Later on I wondered how many gay boxing champions there have ever been - to me that concept in itself invalidates the perception that no gays can be tough, aggressive and manly, a perception that I suspect underlies the public distaste for gays in the US military.

But in our games on rainy, windswept, muddy Norfolk fields, Justin wasn't the hardest fighter, and would sometimes lose enthusiasm completely, shivering, standing around with his arms folded while the rest of us were huffing and puffing. But then, before anyone noticed, the ball was suddenly in the back of the net and he had put it there. It was like he played in a different dimension.

I remember trying in vain to mark him in practice games (I was a defender). In one of these he twice just popped out of nowhere, stuck a foot out and the ball was in the net. The U18 coach, Graeme Morgan, knew what talent he had (and let the rest of us lesser mortals know about it!) - and within a year or so Fashanu was the Norwich City side in what is now the Premier League, and scoring profusely"

We were just tough, scrapping footballing teenagers.

We had no idea what a star Fashanu would become or that he was gay.

We had no idea what News-of-the-World style tabloid controversy would haunt him later.

And we had no idea that our U15 soccer coach, Paul Hickson, would go on to become Chief Coach of the British Olympic Swimming team, leading them to their best ever performance at the Seoul games. His record-breaking 1988 squad had seven Olympic finalists and included stars like Adrian Moorhouse and Nick Gillingham, who scooped three golds, and silver and bronze medals.

And we had no idea that while we were playing for Hickson he was abusing young female swimmers from our local schools, that he would be doing this for over ten years, that 15 years later, he would be jailed for 17 years for the sex attacks on teenagers in his elite squads, and that his conviction would trigger an ongoing worldwide clean-up.............

Scruffy, scrapping soccer kids unwittingly at the budding of a nexus of change, oblivious to the gathering storm that redefined homosexuality, racism and child abuse in sport....

Extraordinary!

On 8 August 2009 Norwich City, who had just sunk to the doldrums of League One (the English Third Division) were hammered 7-1 at home, the worst home defeat in their 107-year history, by the tiny minnows of Colchester United. That day of humiliation will ne'er be forgotten. However, the hitherto useless Board then miraculously saw the light, as they then summarily sacked the Norwich coach and (ahem, illegally) stole the Colchester coach, Paul Lambert (below), instead!



..............................Tough Glaswegian................


Now, 21 months later, Lambert has steered City not only to the League One championship but, today, to the English Premier League. Back to back promotions, on a shoestring budget, and trashing Ipswich twice (4-1 and 5-1) along the way! Surely the greatest achievement in City's history? Although 23 million pounds in debt, the club will now receive a slightly obscene 90 million pounds for joining the big guys.

Now in 2009 I did write a bitter, angry poem to accompany them on the way down to oblivion. But somehow poetry excels only in times of grief so there will be no lines of verse this time round.

But, ahh, the heart could sing like a Norwich Canary!

Watch out Chelsea, Arsenal, Man U: you're all in for a serious pecking next season!

Update: this is why teams have difficulty in scoring against Norwich.

They're the Champions...

Norwich City just won the League One Championship.

Hence I should keep my promise and again lend them my support.

BUT

Let us not forget the team's 2005-2009 elegant swan dive from the heights of the Premier League to the sleepy backwaters of England's third division, which at times drew serious comparison with Britain's Official Worst Football Team (AFC Aldermaston, who recently scraped a draw after 40 consecutive losses).

Hopefully, the return to the second tier signals the swan dive was in reality just the first half of a sweet sinusoidal bungee jump back to the very top.....

This is Simply Ridiculous

Above is the 1992-1993 strip of Norwich City Football Club, frequently voted in the 'worst kits of all time' lists - it looks like a flock of gulls circled overhead for a couple of hours before the game. However, that team finished third in the premier league.......


Now, I know that since Norwich City Football Club were relegated to "League One" (in reality the THIRD division) on that fateful day of May 3rd 2009 (see here for appropriate poetry marking the occasion) I am no longer a supporter and care not one tinker's cuss about how they do. However, I did accidentally click on a link that happened to give me the result of their first encounter in the nether reaches of English soccer yesterday - a 7-1 defeat at home to Colchester!
25,000 flag-waving fans giving them a thunderous welcome as the team walked out to play a side whose complete national support consists of one 87-year-old ex-postman who keeps mistaking them for Ipswich, the manager's farm-boy nephew who gets a free season ticket and his rosetted horse, Kenneth,.. and then... Two City fans marched onto the pitch at 0-4 and flung their season tickets at Bryan Gunn, the manager. What a load of rubbish, and that's putting it politely!

Knoxville in hunt for World Cup matches

Yes, the World Cup is coming to East Tennessee!

Well, maybe!

Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard at Neyland Stadium?





I giggled at this comment on it from 'VolGraduate":

"Hope this comes to Knoxville. It would be a great thing for all the East TN hillbillies to experience some culture"

Crunch match at The Valley

..against Charlton on Sunday that could send my home town soccer club, Norwich City, down to the British Third Division for the first time in 40 years. A few thousand supporters like those above will travel to London for the final push.....