Women's Soccerball! Rekindling Memories of USA94!

I know! I know! I've been away for a very long time! You know the feeling when you were 17 and you got back home REALLY late from a night out to find your parents, up, in the living room, with the lights on (but the TV off), waiting for you, just staring at you as you close the front door behind you...

I'm sorry!! I didn't realise the time! My watch stopped! Actually I lost it! We couldn't get any cabs from where we were and the nightbus took ages! But I'm home now. Safe and sound and ready to talk football (and maybe even life).

So let's just pretend that this didn't happen let's erase this sorry episode from our minds. West Ham didn't only win 3 games in 2015, which ultimately sealed the fate of 'Big Sam'. I mean 3 games?!?! And then all the idiots come out of the woodwork and start patronising us. "What do they expect?" "I suppose they wanted to play The West Ham Way! I mean, what is that? They've never been good! They should be happy with their achievements..."

That's right, non-West Ham fans, I should be happy that my team plays abject football week in week out, that in the last half of the season my team only recorded 3 wins against teams that were relegated or just about managed to stay up, that we got dumped out of the cup by West Brom and put up no fight whatsoever. I should be happy that it cost me roughly the same amount that it cost a Manchester United, or City fan, that's right the Champions, to watch that rubbish; and that I was sent a renewal reminder in February, FEBRUARY! Telling me that I had to renew by the 17th of April!! Last time I check the season finished in May (in years gone by we were asked to renew in July)! And that I must already start thinking about how much money I should fork out for the season after when we move! Maybe that's The West Ham Way? We won't talk about that, it didn't happen.

Anyway it's all my son's (my beautiful son, who I love regardless, may I add) fault. Just like me, he is a bad luck charm for West Ham. Now we weren't winning league titles and dominating Europe before I was born, but we'd won the odd cup here and there. The last such cup? 5 Months before I was born! And not a sniff of success since! Then this year we start off on a great run, beating Manchester City at home (ahh that's probably why our season tickets cost as much as theirs!!) and Liverpool, then my son, Noah (future West Ham goalkeeper and top order West Indian batsmen) was born. And it all ended! Oh well, like father like son. He'll have to get used to a lifetime of disappointment, Fortune's always hiding, and all that.

Better than Pele

Let's also pretend that Gerrard didn't retire from the English game and get a send off that would only really befit Lionel Messi when he finally hangs up his boots. What an absolute, Anglophilic (that's not a word I know), sycophantic, short sighted joke! I said before in a previous post, it tells you everything you need to know about Gerrard's perceived as godly ability that he has tailed off so badly in the twilight of his career. The man was a good player, consistent at doing the fundamentals of the game but heavily reliant on physical aggression to fluster average players into mistakes. As soon as his body didn't allow him to play that sort of game any-more, when he was then called upon to step back and show his true class in reading the game like so many other greats did at the end of their careers (look and Hoddle and Gullit playing sweeper at Chelsea, or Lampard in the last 2/3 seasons if you want to call him a great, or Giggs moving in from the wing)...

He was found wanting, so what did he do? He hit longer unnecessary diagonal balls, charged harder at opponents and basically made himself look over the hill. It's OK though because according to Sky Sports Pele was reincarnated, despite not even being dead, came back a bestowed his talents upon "Stevie Geee" who then took the world by storm. And now the game (in England and abroad) will be worse off for it. Except it won't. Liverpool will move on, of course they'll miss him, it's not like he offered them nothing, but they'll move on and English football will get another Gerrard in the next 10 years (I mean Gerrards are ten-a-penny in some countries) and he'll hit 50 yard diagonals and score 60 yard volleys in the last minute of the Cup Final against West Ham (hopefully Noah won't be in goal for them yet). But we won't talk about that, that's gone!

What we will talk about, the reason for me putting pen to paper finger to keyboard is, not a completely new experience to me, but at the same time something which I'm not massively familiar with. We're going to talk about the Women's World Cup! That's right Mum and Dad, I have something to talk about in a vain attempt to prove that I am sober, in spite of the smell of Barcardi Breezer (stick with me on the getting home late analogy). The Women's World Cup started on Saturday. And anyone that has read this blog before will know, I love a World Cup! And that includes European and Women's.

Ohhhhhhhhhhh! Canadaaaaaaaa!

As a result of my love for a Copa Mundial (that's Spanish that, I'm right cultured me!), this isn't the first time I've watched any of the Women's tournament. I have vague recollections of watching bits the last one on BBC Three, especially extra time in the final. But that's all, vague recollections, I've never sat and got engrossed in a Women's tournament they way I do the Men's. Well that was until a week or so ago.

I'm not really sure what happened? What clicked and made me think, "I want to see this..." But I want to. Ladies of UEFA, CONCACAF, CAF, CONMEBOL, AFC and Oceania you have my full attention for the next 4 weeks. And I'm a little excited. Here's why.

This kinda reminds me of a mixture of Italia 90 and USA 94, the first two Men's World Cup tournaments that got me hooked, bit like when you do drugs right? I've never really done or got drugs, and I'm not just saying that, I haven't. Not even tobacco. But what I've heard is that first "hit", that first "high" or "rush" is the best and those addicted to drugs are often searching, in vain, to recreate that feeling.

I mean look at that headband!

That's what this is, my drug is the World Cup, and this year's Women's tournament is giving the the mystique that Italia 90 had; in that back in 1990 as a 9 year old boy I knew nothing of global football. You could even argue I didn't know much beyond say West Ham and the bigger clubs in England. The World Cup introduced me to players with funny names like Marius Lăcătuș (I copied his name from a Google search there's no way I know how to type those characters), Francois Oman Beyik (what a header) and Claudio Caniggia. I mean Caniggia wore a headband! Not an Eric Young sweatband, which was weird enough, but an Alice Band style headband!! A man! A footballer! In 1990! It was all so exotic!

This tournament is a bit like that, I've heard of Jill Scott and Martha and Kaylyn Kyle (I remember her from the London 2012 tournament) but some of these other players might as well be Lăcătuș for all I know! So basically what I'm saying is Jill Scott is Steve McMahon, Eniola Aluko is Gary Lineker (except for he was a bit of a World Cup legend back in 1990), Martha is Maradona and Abby Wambach is... erm Butragueño?!?

Then there's the whole North American, "let's call it Soccer" spin that this tournament has. That's so USA 94 (the best World Cup I've ever seen in my opinion)! All the games seemed to be played in the brightest of sunshine and the goals rained down. Much like what has happened so far. There was also none of this group matches at 2pm in the middle of the day rubbish that we had with South Africa and Germany!

I say that but there are some really daft match times in this year's tournament. Most games seem to start around 11 or 12 at night; and the final, YES THE FINAL, is at 1am?!? FIFA clearly not thinking about their European audiences. This is why I have no interest in a World Cup being held in Australia, Korea/Japan was bad enough, and I managed to get through that by purposely not getting a job after I'd left University (well not until after the tournament). Never again!!

Then we had the curious scheduling that put the Ecuador v Cameroon game on while the USA were playing Australia? What?!? Somebody's missed a trick here! The World Cup isn't about the big games, I mean it is a bit, but half of the charm is in watching Marius Lăcătuș' Romania play Oman Beyik's Cameroon. With comical defending and insane fouls and players that's get snapped up by a desperate English club the following season off the back of one decent performance. Come on FIFA I need to see every game live where possible!*

As a result of the awful scheduling I find myself doing the EXACT same thing I did back in the summer of 94 every morning. The BBC have a catch up program on the red button channel (980 on Sky) and I end up watching that  to get my fix of the action from the early hours on the morning. It's all very Goal Morning America (god I can still remember that program now).

The one thing I will say about watching the Women's World Cup is that it brings out the inner Male Chauvinist in many of the people (blokes) I speak to about the tournament. I hear so many, "The standard is shocking...", "...it's not football...", "...They'd get battered by a non-league men's team..." comments I'm astonished. While I am in agreement that there are some things that happen in games that you would rarely (I wouldn't say never) see in the Men's game

1.  I'm pretty certain we don't all watch football because of the standard that is being played. Otherwise the Premier League would have lower viewing figures and nobody would ever watch any of the games in the Football League. In fact we'd all just be watching Champions League Semi-Finals involving Barcelona and Bayern Munich. While I appreciate that a better standard of football will probably attract a bigger audience a lot of the attraction in a football match is the contest between the two sides rather than the flawlessness of the game.
2. Some of the football on show is really good, fair enough it's slower and less powerful than the Men's game (and that is what the Men's game is all about, pace and power), but that's always gonna happen. It's the reason why Women's tennis is slower and has more returnable serves, why the Women's 100m world record is almost a second slower than the men's. That doesn't make either of those sports less of a contest when women play them.
3. The Women's game is about 20-30 years old. Think about that. If we watched a game of Men's football from 1900-1910 we'd probably laugh at how tactically naive they were and the technical flaws of the players would be obvious. I mean you don't even have to go back that far, look at the amount of space the like of Pele and Maradona are afforded in some old clips, there's no high pressing on defences and forwards aren't expected to track back and that's in the 1970's/80's after circa 100 years of development in the Men's game. They've had a third of that time at best. The players from the smaller nations have probably never played against professionals or in a big stadium. They don't have the exposure that their male compatriots would have had in the Champions/Europa Leagues. Fair enough they can learn from watching the Men's game, but due to to anatomical differences tactics and techniques will probably have differing success. For example can a Woman's team rely as heavily on the long ball game? How many big centre forwards do people have at their disposal? Is it the same for a goalkeeper flinging themselves low down on the ground in an attempt to stop a driven shot if they have a pair of breast impeding them (that's a serious point)?

It is was it is, in terms of a sport, and there's definitely some entertainment in there. If people don't want to watch there's nothing wrong with that. But because it's different it doesn't make it any less valid or entertaining as a competition. The tendency for a defensive error also has an 80's/90's World Cup feel about it. I long for the days when both teams always score in the World Cup final (that happened in every final up to 1986), when teams didn't just play for penalties. When football was't so sterile and full of smaller teams packing the midfield with 5 and Parking The Bus.

Rant over!

Finally, the one thing the tournament has had that directly mimics the Men's edition, and that I love, is great celebrations from African teams. The other night I was fuming when Sweden blew the lead twice, one of them when they were two goals up, to ruin my bet that I had on them winning and over 3.5 goals being scored. But then I saw the Nigerians dancing and I couldn't help but smile!

For some reason I can't find any match highlights that include the Nigerian or Cameroon goal celebrations so you'll have to take my word for it. "Probably because they couldn't beat Staines Town 2nds..." and so on.

Here's Pablo Armero...

And Asamoah Gyan (the King of World Cup goal celebrations)...

That'll do. I'm off to bed, Mum and Dad, I'll probably have a headache and be throwing up in the morning, but that has nothing to do with the consumption of alcopops.

See you soon!

*Obviously I know the last group matches have to be played simultaneously in the interests of fairness.