Let’s be honest: Sports bloggers know everything. Just ask us. As part of our 2010 Year-End Sports Review, our list of things we already knew this year includes Brad Childress’ biggest fail, Wade Phillips’ demise in Dallas and John Calipari’s troubles. We also knew Kevin Durant was the next great superstar (who didn’t see that coming?), Roger Clemens is the ultimate windbag and that “Matty Ice” knows fourth-quarter comebacks. We should have gone to medical school…
Contributors: Anthony Stalter, John Paulsen, Paul Costanzo, Drew Ellis and Mike Farley
LeBron is a frontrunner.
We all were a little surprised that LeBron left Cleveland, but the writing was on the wall. Growing up, LeBron didn’t root for the local teams. He followed the Yankees, Bulls and Cowboys, which in the 1990s constituted the Holy Triumvirate of Frontrunning. He wore his Yankee cap to an Indians game and was seen hobnobbing on the Cowboy sidelines during a Browns game. He says he’s loyal, but he’s only loyal to winners…unless they only win in the regular season, of course.
Brad Childress’ biggest flaw cost him his job in the end.
There were many reasons why the Vikings decided to fire head coach Brad Childress roughly a year after they signed him to a contract extension. One of the reasons was because he lost with a talented roster. Another was because he never quite figured out how to best utilize Adrian Peterson, which is a sin given how talented AP is. But the main reason “Chilly” was ousted in Minnesota was because he didn’t know how to manage NFL-caliber personalities. He didn’t know how to handle Brett Favre, which led to blowups on the sidelines and multiple face-to-face confrontations. He also didn’t have a clue how to deal with Randy Moss’ crass attitude, so he released him just four weeks after the team acquired him in a trade from New England. Childress was hired in part to help clean up the mess in Minnesota after the whole “Love Boat” scandal. But the problem with a disciplinarian that hasn’t first earned respect is that his demands fall on deaf ears. In the end, Childress’ inability to command respect from his players cost him his job. You know, on top of the fact that he was losing with a talented roster, he didn’t know how to best utilize Adrian Peterson, he…
Love him or hate him, George Steinbrenner will forever be one of baseball’s icons.
You may have hated his brash attitude, the way he ran his team or the way he conducted his business. You may even feel that he ruined baseball. But regardless of how you may have felt about him, there’s little denying that George Steinbrenner will forever be one of Major League Baseball’s icons. Steinbrenner passed away in July of this year. He will forever be a man known for helping revolutionize the business side of baseball by being the first owner to sell TV cable rights to the MSG Network. When things eventually went south with MSG, he created the YES Network, which is currently the Yankees’ very own TV station that generates millions in revenue. During his tenure, he took the Yankees from a $10 million franchise to a $1.2 billion juggernaut. In 2005, the Yankees became the first professional sports franchise to be worth an estimated one billion dollars. While many baseball fans came to despise the way he ran his team (mainly because he purchased high priced free agents with reckless abandon due to the fact that he could and others couldn’t), don’t miss the message he often made year in and year out: The Yankees are here to win. He didn’t line his pockets with extra revenue (albeit he generated a lot of extra revenue for his club) – he dumped his money back into the on-field product. Losing wasn’t acceptable and if the Bombers came up short one year, you could bet that Steinbrenner would go after the best talent in the offseason, regardless of what others thought of the approach. How many Pirates and Royals fans wish they had an owner with the same appetite for victory?
On his show, Tosh.0, comedian Daniel Tosh laid down a nice rant about soccer.
Nothing can help me care about soccer. Oh, ‘it’s the most popular sport in the world.’ Probably because it’s cheap to play. It costs a ball. Once every four years, America pretends to care about it. And yes, I call it ‘soccer.’ Don’t correct me because I don’t care what they call it in other lands — I speak America.
Sorry world, we already have football and it’s way better. It’s supposed to be played by 300 pound men eight seconds at a time, not five-foot, six-inch fairies lightly jogging for three hours, or however long your game is…buy a scoreboard!
It’s hard for me to get into a sport that I mastered at the age of seven. Excuse me for not being able to get revved up for this corner kick that never works. Hooray! The game ends without a single goal. I want to kill myself when an NBA team doesn’t break a hundred. That’s because you don’t get a free taco.
Maybe there would be more scoring if they weren’t flopping all of the time. And hooligans, instead of killing players that screwed up, murder the ones that fall down crying because their toe got stepped on.
The only good thing about soccer is the movie “Ladybugs.” That’s a classic. Don’t try to re-do it, Hollywood. I love women’s soccer. It’s a beautiful game, and America is actually good at it. Probably because we’re the only country that allows women to wear shorts.
It’s nice to have an activity that terrorist countries can excel at. Enjoy your 15 minutes, Algeria. Then go back to being number one at car bombs. But just know that the only reason you’re beating us is because our best athletes are busy playing real sports. You think LeBron James might make an okay goalie? Oh, and good move, giving us Beckham ten years past his prime. That really panned out.
Funny, funny, funny. But I still say soccer is more entertaining than baseball.
When fans decided to celebrate Germany’s third place finish in this year’s FIFA World Cup, they took to the streets by driving around waiving their country’s flag in utter splendor and jubilation. It was a fun day had by all.
Well, all except for this guy, whose buddy forgot he was still sitting on the back of his car when the a-hole decided to speed up:
Not only did he fall off the back of the car, but his buddy also left him standing there and he got laughed at by a bunch of chicks. That’s a triple-whammy of embarrassment right there.
At first, I thought this was another case of a high-on-adrenalin/alcohol celebrity overstepping his bounds a la Adrien Brody’s planting a kiss on Halle Berry after winning an Oscar or Joe Namath telling Suzy Kolber he just wanted to kiss her on the Jets sideline. But Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas and reporter Sara Carbanero have been dating for a while, so Casillas closed the interview with a kiss.
Watch for a strange moment at 0:25 where they both seem to choke up a little.
In a nail-biting, rough-and-tumble match that went into extra time tied, 0-0, Spain broke through and scored in the 116th minute on Andres Iniesta’s goal.
The match was quite physical, as there were a record-number of yellow cards handed out. The Netherlands’ gameplan was to be aggressive and it eventually led to a red card that gave Spain a one-man advantage and led to Iniesta’s goal.
The funny thing is that the Netherlands could have won 2-0 had Arjen Robben capitalized on a pair of second half one-on-one opportunities at goal. But Spain’s excellent goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, turned him away both times.
In fairness, Spain blew a couple of nice opportunities at well. It was just an ugly match between two very good teams, and Spain did a better job of controlling the ball. Unfortunately, it’s not the type of match that is going to win any soccer converts in the U.S., but at least the World Cup wasn’t decided by penalty kicks.
This is the first time Spain has won the World Cup, while the Netherlands falls to 0-3 in World Cup Finals.
Germany beat Uruguay, 3-2, in an entertaining third place match, and Spain will square off today against the Netherlands in the World Cup Final. Coverage starts at 1:30 PM ET on ABC, though the match will start closer to 2:30 PM.
Jeff Carlisle, ESPN.com: The match will feature two highly technical sides that love to possess the ball. But Spain has turned ownership of the ball into a fine art. Its midfield not only wears out opponents with its movement and slick passing but also does plenty to win the ball back. There are times when Spain’s attack can lack width, and the cure is to get fullbacks Joan Capdevila and Sergio Ramos into the attack. Not only does this twist opposing defenses out of shape, it also allows midfielders such as Andres Iniesta to tuck inside and outnumber opponents in the center of the park… The Netherlands’ attack, while perhaps not as stylish as Spain’s, has been more effective. The Dutch have scored 12 goals, just one behind tournament leader Germany. The key is a varied approach that combines the distribution and goal scoring of Wesley Sneijder, the dribbling ability of Arjen Robben and the tenacity of Dirk Kuyt.
Tunku Varadarajan, The Daily Beast: For the neutral, the game is a feast of conflicting sentiment. It is hard to plump, unequivocally, for one side over the other. Both play deft, thrilling football, and have a recent record that is dauntingly unscarred by defeat. (The Spanish did, however, lose their first game in this cup to Switzerland, bizarrely, a defeat that appears to have stung them back into dominant form). Neither side is so flecked with past triumph that the neutral might say, Let the one who has not won before win this time. We have a truly open game, free from the instinctual biases that would have come to neutral viewers in a game between the Netherlands and Germany, say, or Spain versus Brazil. Spain, many predict, will win, not because their hunger is greater (the Dutch are just as ravenous) but because few sides in the history of the game have mastered the art of ball-possession as well, and as asphyxiatingly, as Vicente el Bosque’s team. Have you ever seen 11 players with a relationship so adhesive to the ball? It’s as if a Spanish version of magic glue were smeared on their cleats, so relentless is their ability to keep hold of the Jabulani, rendering other sides—as was the case with Germany in the semis—mere spectators, mere chasers of shadows. Brian Straus, FanHouse: A year ago, Sneijder was a Real Madrid castoff. Now, the 26-year-old is 90 minutes away from bringing his long-suffering country its first world title and securing an unprecedented array of honors for himself. He wasn’t big enough to warrant inclusion in Nike”s “Write the Future” ad — overhyped pitchmen like Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Ronaldinho are the ones foisted repeatedly on the public. Instead, Sneijder will have to be content with the opportunity to rewrite soccer history. In May Sneijder helped his new club, Inter Milan, to its first UEFA Champions League crown in 45 years. He scored several critical goals during the competition, set up Diego Milito’s winner in the final and helped engineer the semifinal upset of mighty Barcelona. That result marked the first significant setback for a club that had steamrolled everyone in its path for two years and which employs one-third of the Spain team that Sneijder’s Holland will face Sunday at Soccer City. Sneijder has continued that run of excellence here in South Africa. He has been by far the most important player on an efficient Dutch team that has gone 6-0-0 in the World Cup. He’s scored five goals, including four in the knockout stages, and has built cohesion for a famously fractured side with his intelligent passing, creativity, dangerous free kicks and work rate.
Steven Stark and Harrison Stark, The Cup Running Over: Not to go out on a limb or anything, but Spain should win this game, in a style similar to the German game, except more one-sided. Playing at altitude is much more conducive to the Spanish style; this will also be its fourth game in the heights while only Holland’s second. Holland’s best chance is to score first, which would cause the Spanish to open up, allow more counters, and distribute possession more evenly. But if this doesn’t happen, Spain is going to play this game exactly as it played the last three. If we have to give it a score, we say 2-0 as the Dutch continue to be the best team never to win a Cup. Except this time, they’re not the best team.
Paul Hayward, Guardian: Whichever the new name on the trophy a swell of satisfaction washes up to Soccer City. “This World Cup has shown a non-sexist, non-racist, democratic South Africa,” Jordaan said. “There has been a special unity. It was only 20 years ago with apartheid when black and white couldn’t have sat together, couldn’t have attended the same school or gone to the same beach. Now you see white faces painted in Ghana colours.” The lugubrious Vicente del Bosque, Spain’s coach, who asks the country’s regions to “unite” in the style of his team, will not guarantee a rare smile if his men win. He said: “My joy is on the inside.” His team’s joy is all around.
Spain had the right combination of ball control and creativity to upend the coolly efficient Germans, 1-0, and advance to play the Netherlands in Sunday’s World Cup Final.
The game-winner came in the 73rd minute, when Carles Puyol came from waaaay outside to head the cornerkick into the net. Germany threatened a few times, but Spain controlled the ball for much of the game and kept the Germans under nearly constant pressure.
Sunday’s matchup between Spain and the Netherlands means that we’ll have a new winner this year.
This guy goes to extreme measures to ensure that the Vuvuzela (the annoying horn that can be heard during all the World Cup games this year) doesn’t ruin his morning.
We’d like to wake up every morning to that girl on the bike…hey-yo!
You may have hated his brash attitude, the way he ran his team or the way he conducted his business. You may even feel that he ruined baseball. But regardless of how you may have felt about him, there’s little denying that George Steinbrenner will forever be one of Major League Baseball’s icons. Steinbrenner passed away in July of this year. He will forever be a man known for helping revolutionize the business side of baseball by being the first owner to sell TV cable rights to the MSG Network. When things eventually went south with MSG, he created the YES Network, which is currently the Yankees’ very own TV station that generates millions in revenue. During his tenure, he took the Yankees from a $10 million franchise to a $1.2 billion juggernaut. In 2005, the Yankees became the first professional sports franchise to be worth an estimated one billion dollars. While many baseball fans came to despise the way he ran his team (mainly because he purchased high priced free agents with reckless abandon due to the fact that he could and others couldn’t), don’t miss the message he often made year in and year out: The Yankees are here to win. He didn’t line his pockets with extra revenue (albeit he generated a lot of extra revenue for his club) – he dumped his money back into the on-field product. Losing wasn’t acceptable and if the Bombers came up short one year, you could bet that Steinbrenner would go after the best talent in the offseason, regardless of what others thought of the approach. How many Pirates and Royals fans wish they had an owner with the same appetite for victory?
