Posts from — August 2010

I‘ll start by separating the contenders from the pretenders to see who will be left standing come next summer.

The ‘real’ contenders (in no particular order) are as follows:

Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City & Liverpool.

The pretenders:

No shot at the top 4:

Everyone else.

In looking at the contenders, I am hard pressed to find any team that can beat Chelsea this season. Consider this: Chelsea won the EPL last year without Michael Essien (R), who in my estimation is one of the top 10 midfielders in the world. Essien, who also missed the World Cup for Ghana because of injuries, is the motor of the Chelsea attack. His passes that picked apart Wigan last week will be crucial for Chelsea as they seek to repeat and win their first Champions League title this season.

The team has already proved that they can win without him, but with Essien orchestrating the attack and the plethora of goal scoring options (Anelka, Drogba, Kalou, Malouda, Lampard…) at his disposal I think they are easily the deepest team in Europe.

Well, the earnings of players are going up at an unprecedented pace. Great players have always made a lot of money, but now good to average players are breaking the bank, and the trickledown effect is creating a huge chasm in European football between the mega rich clubs and everyone else. In this era of “mo money mo problems,” a disciplinarian such as SAF is a relic. You could see this shift with the rise of Beckham’s popularity and the tension with the coach. It happened again with Cristiano Ronaldo. Guardiola at Barcelona and Mourinho at Chelsea/Milan and now Madrid understand this new dynamic, and their ability to harness the egos of multiple stars on a team has been key to their respective successes.

For over 20 years, the biggest star at Old Trafford has been Sir Alex, and unless that old dog learns a few new tricks, they will be quickly entering another period of dark, trophy less days. That being said, the young players that United have in their squad are very good and will keep them in the chase all season long.

There are a lot of players in the English Premier League who have something to prove after the World Cup. Wayne Rooney is at the top of that list. He was invisible in South Africa, and this past season was the first since his initial season at Man U that the team did not win a single title. Can he rebound? My answer would be yes, and Man U has helped him by reloading to go after Chelsea. Javier Hernandez, Valencia, Nani and Macheda are all expected to play major roles this season. Can they ascend to the throne of best team in England again this season? I do not see it happening, and they may be hard pressed to claim the mantle of best team in Manchester.

Man U will be top 4 again this season, but they don’t have enough top flight players to maintain a sustained challenge for the EPL and CL trophies.

Liverpool is a strange team. They have one of the best English players of the last decade in Steve Gerrard, one of the top 5 strikers in the world in Fernando Torres, and a solid defense anchored by Javier Mascherano. They won the Champions league title in the last decade in the same season where they floundered in the domestic league. In the offseason they made no major additions. Their defense with the aggressive Skrtel and Mascherano is solid, but they are not a team that can go toe to toe each week with the other big teams vying for the EPL title. The gap between them and the other contenders have widened. They will be no better than fourth this season.

Dark horses in the EPL:

I do believe that Marouane Chamakh (R) can eventually fill that blank. It will take him a little while to get used to the pace and physical play of English football, but I see him as a future star. Keeping Fabregas, Van Persie and adding Chamakh and Laurent Koscielny has created a very good and exciting group of young players.

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It was announced today that Roger Clemens (R) is going to be indicted on federal perjury charges relative to his testimony before Congress about steroid use in baseball. It’s not surprising to me and shouldnt be to anyone else who has followed this story.

What makes this decision interesting is the dual specters of race and steroids. In a nutshell, as McGwire goes, so does, or should, one Barry Lamar Bonds. I will note a caveat here: I am and have always been a fan of Barry Bonds. He is surly, petulant, unfriendly and without a doubt the best baseball player my generation has seen. It is debatable if he is the best of all time, but in my opinion, a ranking or list of the players who could be the GOAT starts with him.

What about Babe Ruth you ask? Well, i’ll answer in one word-segregation. If Blacks were allowed to play when Ruth played, everyone would be looking up in the record books to Josh Gibson’s home run total, Ruth included. Do the research if you don’t believe. And Bonds has erased Babe Ruth’s name from the record books over the past few years, passing him in every statistical category-further adding to the ire of so-called ‘baseball purists.’


But back to McGwire. He is the ultimate one-dimensional player-a limited fielder who struck out a lot but with a big home run bat. That bat hit over 500 home runs, a phenomenal amount. Anyone who thinks his achievements are tainted is right, but when healthy, throughout his career going back to his rookie season, he put up consistently good power numbers. His first year with Oakland, he broke the AL rookie record of 31 home runs that had stood for over a decade by hitting 49. Was he on steroids then? Doubtful, but no one knows. He carried a lot less weight and bulk then in 1987 than he did when he hit 70 in 1998. But for that matter, so did I, and most likely, the same goes for a lot of people, athletes and regular joes alike.


Mark McGwire, unlike Bonds, is very likeable, and while he is considered ‘a private person’ (media speak for someone who politely declines interviews,) he is viewed favorably by the media. The same media has never, not for one second, liked Barry Bonds. And it’s a mutual hatred. Yes, they are the ones that vote for MVP, and yes, Bonds has won the award more times than anyone in the history of baseball, but that’s more of a testament to his incredible talent that yearly separated him from his contemporaries than an urge on the part of voters to reward him. The years where it was a close choice, the media voted for others (Terry freakin’ Pendleton? c’mon.)


And now Mark McGwire is on the Hall of Fame ballot. His numbers says he is a lock. But if McGwire is elected, how do you not elect Bonds when his turn comes up? Or Sammy Sosa? How about the other ‘Great White Knight’ that amazingly no one is talking about, Roger Clemens? His name was brought up as a frequent steroid user by an indicted ballplayer/supplier this year-what about him? Where do you draw the line?


The reason there is no public uproar is that this is not about them. It’s not even about steroids, since nothing has been proven, can be proven and at the end of the day, it wasn’t against the rules of baseball to use steroids.

Even if they all used steroids, the use of steroids was not banned by Major League Baseball until 2005. Yes it was banned throughout most of the country, but the organization that employed him, Major League Baseball, banned other substances but not steroids. They had no rule in place for it and that analomy makes it, or should make it, a non-issue. What Bonds did, if anything, was make a leap from being the greatest player of his generation to the greatest player of all time. McGwire on the other hand, went from a good slugger with decent but not mind boggling numbers to a hall-of-famer.


The other fact that needs to be considered is that steroids never helped anyone hit a baseball. Did it make these players stronger? Yes. Recover from injuries faster? Yes. Improve hand/eye coordination? Unlikely. Most of the players who were busted under the drug testing program had middling careers, proof enough that taking performance enhancing drugs in and of itself s not going to make anyone turn into Superman overnight.

As someone who used to participate in sports and specifically the sport most tainted by steroid use over the last twenty years, track & field, I am against steroid use and all in favor of banning it. It’s cheating, plain and simple. You cheat, you’re out. Forever. But I also believe in a clear set of rules. Major League Baseball had no rules about steroids, even after a former MVP turned crackhead, Ken Camminetti, stated ten years ago that ‘most’ baseball players were on steroids. Nothing was done when an even more famous player, Jose Canseco, blew the lid off the problem, detailing how it was done, why, and who did it. Nothing was done until the federal government stepped in and threatened to put rules in place for them. Even then it was a halfhearted attempt that was more mockery than punishment in comparison to other sports rules and punishment for steroid use. This would lead me to believe that MLB knew full well what was going on and chose to ignore it. Considering how the sport was losing fans to other sports, especially after the strike/lockout in the early nineties, its not a stretch.


Remember this; the entire BALCO/MLB investigation was started by an IRS agent Jeff Novitzky, who was a baseball fan and disliked Bonds and his pursuit of the homerun record. According to the very first interview/story about BALCO that was published three years ago (in Playboy magazine,) Novitsky “thought Bonds was an asshole and a steroid user and wanted to bust him.”

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Sooo….instead of down goes Tyson, down goes Bolt.  The Diamond League meet today in Stockholm was the venue, initially billed as a clash of the three fastest sprinters ever turned into the 10 second massacre as Tyson Gay convincingly beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter finals.

Now that the *aura* of invincibility around Bolt is gone, lets see how they both do going forward. Will Bolt go the route of Mike Tyson or the route of Mike Jordan-the other Mike that decided the challenges of basketball weren’t enough, decided to try playing baseball and was an embarrassing failure?

Jordan came back to his senses and basketball to win the second of his three in a row championships and securing his place in the pantheon of greatest ever athletes. Tyson….not so much.

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