Thursday, June 25, 2009

Coming Soon: Luchametrics

By El Chupacabra

All the numbers said the United States should have lost to Spain in South Africa on Wednesday. But Bob Bradley’s boys beat the statisticians, which raises an interesting question.
What role, if any, should statistics, and especially the sort of sophisticated statistical tools used for years in some American sports (see Baseball) play in our enjoyment and understanding of the beautiful game?

A recent post at The Offside suggests that more stats would make the beautiful game more appealing to American sports fans. And as this article from the Wall Street Journal shows, the big clubs are now using sophisticated statistical categories and sophisticated metrics to analyze player and team performance.

My esteemed comrade El Luchador and I obviously couldn’t care less whether football is made more appealing to the average American sports fan, a cretin whose intake of Bud Light and other “premium” beers has left him overweight, underliterate, provincial, with a sexual prowess lying somewhere between a Galapagos Tortoise and an 80-year-old Shriner in a diaper.

However, we are interested in what the numbers teach us about what we think we know from watching the beautiful game every spare moment of our lives. And most of all, we are interested in assisting our brothers and sisters who reside in less oppressive countries where betting is legal. We hope to increase profits for those who bet on the beautiful game. (A $10 bet on the U.S. to win v Spain paid more than $100).

El Chupacabra is currently working on a project which he hopes will do for football what Bill James and Sabermetrics did for Baseball, and he has been asked by his eminence El Luchador to crunch the numbers and report back regularly to his many readers on what he learns. As Chupa uncovers objective knowledge about the beautiful game, he will report it here first. Check back often to learn the results of this Sisyphean effort.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Shaolin Soccer

David Carradine's tragic, auto-erotic death is a time to reflect on the meaning of life ... and of soccer.

"Grasshopper, when you can snatch this football from my foot, you will have achieved eternal consciousness. And you will have that going for you, which is nice."

Friday, June 5, 2009

This Is Our House

El Luchador must now weigh in on the pro-profanity side of the Nordecke debate.

By now, my brothers and sisters, you are sadly aware that GM Mark McCullers and his band of bourgeois ninny Dublin soccer mom's are conspiring to put the middle-class milquetoast mediocrity back in Crew Stadium by bringing in the jackbooted thugs to enforce strict prohibitions on chants like "This is our house, get the fuck out."

Don't worry Brittany Bubblehead, your kids are already doing, seeing and hearing much worse every Friday night while you're drinking cosmopolitans at the club than anything they will ever witness at Crew stadium.

It's like Eminem said: "Of course they gonna know what intercourse is by the time they hit fourth grade. They got the Discovery Channel don't they?


We, the unwashed, uncouth, uncivilized rabble of the Nordecke hereby resolve that we will not be beaten into comfortable conformity by the likes of Mark McCullers and the country club cougars who gladly support water boarding and the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan but worry that their children might get the wrong idea if they hear the F-bomb at a soccer game.

It all comes down to this: What kind of world do you want to live in? A predictable, safe world ruled by fat, white, conservative, rule-bound suburbanites?

To all douches who have a problem with the profanity and other untidy aspects of Nordecke, El Luchador has a message: "This is our house. Get the fuck out."