The Penultimate Ponderings of 2004.

Greetings, gentle readers.
Sometime in the hopefully not too-distant future, I'll invent a gravitational field generator which will allow me to penetrate the fabric of space-time and allow me to return to the past. Why? If for no other reason, money. Scads and scads of wonga. Filthy lucre. This year saw some of the most incredible underdog, unlikely long-shot, and unbelievable cinderella stories in sports history. Anyone who laid money on the most unheralded possibilities would have made an absolute mint. Anywhere in the world.
In South America, Once Caldas, a relatively unknown team from Colombia, won the Copa Libertadores, wresting it from all the superpower teams in Chilé, Brazil, and Argentina. In North America, the Boston Red Sox broke an 86 year jinx to win the curiously named World Series against the most expensive team in North American professional sports, the New York Yankees. Earlier in the same baseball season, 40 year-old Randy Johnson pitched a perfect game. The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup in ice hockey. Let me repeat that. A Florida expansion team won the most prestigious club cometition in ice hockey history against fellow underdog Calgary Flames, who have one of the lowest payrolls in the NHL. The Toronto Argonauts, rank outsiders at best, won North America's oldest club competition in the CFL Grey Cup. In Europe, FC Porto met fellow long-shots AS Monaco in the Champions' League Final game and won, astounding and baffling huge-spending teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, Réal Madrid, Internazionale, AC Milan, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Juventus. Argentina won their first-ever Olympic football gold medal. And Greece - the least favoured of all the teams in the entire competition with the possible exception of Latvia - captured the European Championship crown.
A year of upsets, reversals, and statistical anomalies, to be sure. It made for some stomach-churning emotional roller-coasters, but when the Davids toppled the Goliaths over and over again, it brought back some of the romance of the entire concept of sport. That any group of people playing as a team, on any given day, could emerge triumphant against the forces of determinism. Sport is about passion and commitment. It's about the human spirit striving for excellence. And you can't put a price-tag or a probability factor on that. 11 well-trained and organized Greeks, marshalled by an iron-willed German triumphed over the highly touted, and extravagantly paid superstars of the host team of Portugal. Twice. In the same tournament. A group of colleagues whose primary ambition was to make their country proud, and with a blazing desire to play for their teammates overthrew an all-star team containing some of the greatest talent of their age. As with the Boston Red Sox, and with Once Caldas, it wasn't simply a case of grit over technique, it was a case of teams triumphing over individuals.
One might notice that when watching adverts for American professional team sports, television networks and advertisers tend to glorify the indivdual. It's not the Miami Heat vs. the Indiana Pacers, it's SHAQUILLE O'NEAL and his Miami Heat taking on REGGIE MILLER and his Indiana Pacers. The quest for the superstar not only simplifies things for the presumably simple-minded public so they don't have to worry about knowing all those names on the team, but also creates marketing icons that can be used to flog all sorts of overpriced athletic rubbish. That sort of philosophy can be best demonstrated in the contrasting philosophies of two companies - Nike and Adidas. Nike adverts revel in the accomplishment of the single athlete. Their basketball commercials are almost invariably one-one one competitions, including the Michael Jordan ad several years ago where retiring Michael plays himself, fifteen years younger. Purchasing Nike products, they suggest, gives one the power to excel and be the best. Alone. Unfettered by pesky teammates or an annoying supporting cast to steal one's limelight. Adidas adverts, on the other hand, celebrate team achievement. Is this a European vs. North American concept? Odd that a continent which has been so focused on divisiveness for the better part of a millenia should start to grasp the importance of the unifications of Germany and Italy almost 150 years ago now, while the Americans are still floundering around in the concept of nationalism. Relative maturity of civilizations, one might suspect.
In recent news, Liverpool thrashed poor West Bromwich Albion on Boxing Day. If I wasn't so exuberant about the 'Pool winning just their second away match of the season in the Premier Division, I would feel sorry for the poor Baggies who are staring relegation in the face, and looked like Liliputians facing Brobdingnagians against the Merseysiders. If their manager Bryan Robson hadn't spent most of his playing career in crutches, he would have lived up to his title as "Captain Marvel" for England. As it stands, he took control of a team in a downward spiral and has not won a game since. He's driving the team bus and it's going express. Down. Their promotion to the big league now looks to be a rather large fluke, and the communal hesitancy and lack of confidence against the established teams has now turned from speculation to fact.
Lamentably for Albion fans, their team had about as much bite as an earthworm, and their defensive shape collapsed immediately after Cosmin Contra decided that he'd rather play volleyball than football, and was consequently sent off with a red card.
Liverpool could already have been predicted winners because, despite having a number of starters missing, the cobbled-together team had Albion chasing shadows from the get go, with John-Arne Riise the most bloodthirsty of the lot, and Stevie G once more the father of invention from midfield. Once down to ten men, the Baggies were like a bleeding calf to a school of piranha. There are two important things to draw from this result from a Liverpool point of view. From an Albion point of view, the only conclusion to draw is that the opposition in the League Championship (formerly Division 1) should be scouted now, before relegation changes from possibility to fact. In terms of the Reds, two things are important: it's always great to run up the occasional cricket score to bolster the confidence of your forward players and it's always nice to keep a clean sheet while doing so; and two, the win was so comfortable that lads like Steve Finnan, Milan Baros and Stevie G were able to sub off the pitch early and thus not expend all of their energy ahead of the game against Southampton on Tuesday.
This leads nicely into the next segment: Predictions. Liverpool over So'ton. I say 4-1, because James Beattie always poaches one about every second game, and he's overdue. Stevie G has got to be chomping at the proverbial bit, having only scored once on four good attempts against WBA and the Riise is so over-full with confidence that he'll shoot on a clearance from his own end. Everyone wants to jump on the bus, and everyone wants to score. Enthusiasm is infectious.
Next: remember when I said that Barcelona would win La Liga? Who doubted me? Hang your heads. When I said they'd get turfed from the Copa Del Rey, who thought I was mad? Rue your poor judgement, little ones. And as for transfers, it looks as though Madrid will want to hang on to St. Michael, seeing as how he's spared them blushes in at least five games already this season, so I'd plump for Morientes from Madrid if I were on the board at LFC. Morientes and Mellor would be evil, Morientes and Baros might be lethal for any opponents. And with those three to play with until the return of the Djib, the striking positions are safe as houses, particularly with the Pongo doing as well as he's done without Tony the T backing him up in midfield. Those two have a strange psychic connection that I think Pongo is just now starting to extend to others. His last two goals against Olympiakos and West Brom were as the result of split-second timing and inch-perfect passes from Harry Kewell and Riise, respectively. The level of intuition and understanding necessary for such passes indicates that perhaps Flo-Sin-Po is finally learning to play with others besides his childhood friends. He's also turning into a good target man like Mellor, rather than a holder or attacker, like Morientes and Baros. Having two of each would lend Liverpool a nicely balanced strike force in the box. The big problem with Morientes, and I've said it before on this very page, is that he's cup-tied in Europe, and thus cannot play for Liverpool in any Champions' League games. That's getting very important as we head into the elimination round.
So sports in 2004 was a wacky adventure in speculation and bewilderment. Somehow, the realms of political science and entertainment just seem drab and uninteresting by comparison. How many American soldiers died unnecessarily in Afghanistan? Too many. End of story. Who won the elections in Ukraine? Was there a hard-line Communist or a Fascist totalitarian in the race? No. Then who cares? Aside from taking bets on which HIV-AIDS-ravaged and impoverished African country will experience the next round of genocidal civil war, the only thing to do internationally is marvel at the inept blunderings of the American political apparatus as it lumbers around like a drunken schoolyard bully.
Entertainment is even worse. Which fatuous, self-involved celebrity has gotten married/divorced, delivered a payload of life or been sent to rehab this year? The same cast of arrogant morons that made similarly ill-advised and catastrophic life-commitments last year. The only real drama or surprise would come from those multimillionaire miscreants that DIDN'T get hitched, ditched, preggers or busted. And the vast collection of talentless nobodies that oozes forth from that effluent of mediocrity that constitutes reality television are too contemptible for words. So let's all chant the American entertainment industry mantra together: "Lowest Common Denominator."
So happy holidays, a wonderful festive season and a merry non-denominational, politically correct, and culturally/ethnically neutral euphemism to you all. Let's all cross our extremities and hope for a very prosperous new year. Back soon to conclude my 2004 broadcasting year.
Cheers,

-mARKUS
^+Justice for the 96+^