The Other 87

With the tournament winding down, we ponder ten alternate universe scenarios from this year’s European Championship:

1. What if Croatia had beaten Spain?

Spain has won two straight major trophies (two out of three if you count the Confederations Cup, which we’re doing until 2013 because we’re patriotic). They are on the verge of cracking the greatest team of all-time debate. Croatia beats Spain, their run is stopped right there. In two years, they’re a different team. Xavi goes from midfield dominator to 20-30 minutes a game. Will Del Bosque still be there? Will two more years of heated Clasicos wear down the other Barcelona and Real Madrid players? Sure, there are plenty of good, young Spaniards. But good enough to beat the good, young Germans? The French? The Belgians? (We’re kidding about that last one… sort of).

2. What if Fabio Capello doesn’t walk out on England in the spring 2012?

Capello walked out on England like Jason Bateman walked out on Jennifer Garner in Juno. If he didn’t England come out in Euros, play some remotely attractive football. They probably still go through the group stages, but fail to impress the English media, who massively criticize the team, and they probably get spanked by Italy anyways. OK, so, nothing really changes there. But, if Capello doesn’t walk out on England, Hodgson still languishes at West Brom, Redknapp is at Tottenham, and John Terry is either captain again or has quit the team in a fit of rage.

3. What if Andrea Pirlo had been born Andrew Fall, in Carlisle, Cumbria, England?

I mean, sure he’s an undisputed genius who’s more accurate over distance with either foot than you or I would be with our good throwing hand (a couple of overhit corners aside), but is he disciplined enough to play in the center of the first of two banks of four? Or would he have been turned into a right back at age 12?

4. What if Euro 2012 had been expanded to 24 teams?

This is ground that’s already been covered elsewhere. Would it lower the standard of play? We’re a little ambivalent, as too many of the non-classic games from this tournament seemed to stem from teams not even trying to compete with some of the continent’s giants. If those minnows had more minnows to compete against, then they might set out to win a few more games rather than sit back and absorb pressure (We’re not sure we buy this argument either. Just trying to look on the bright side).

5. What if Euro 2012 had been expanded to 32 teams?

Let’s face it. It’s not going to stay at 24 for ever. It’s an awkward number to have for something like this, and nobody really likes the idea of certain third place teams going through…nobody but Russia anyway. Hopefully sense will prevail and it will be returned to sixteen; thirty-two is more than half the total membership of UEFA today, and that number will only decrease as Germany absorbs debt-ridden nations into itself.

The alternative, is to say screw it and blow the whole thing out. Forget the whole qualifying process, invite all 53 teams, plus 10 guest nations and one team of recently retired superstars, seed them, and play the whole thing out single elimination, March Madness style. Spain vs. San Marino in the first round? Gareth Bale carving up Turkey to give 12-seed Wales the upset over the favored 5-seed? The good old U.S. of A.  going on a surprise Final Four run? Bring it on.

6. What if France had actually utilized one of the wealth of attacking options on its bench from the get-go against Spain, rather than playing two right backs to try to neutralize Jordi Alba?

They’d have still lost, but the game might have been more entertaining.

7. What if Mario Balotelli had attempted a panenka with his first spot kick in the shootout against England?

A. Let’s assume he’d have missed it. Given the fact that this tends to be how stuff like that works out for him, and the fact that he’s not a Zidane or Pirlo-level living legend who can actually pull one off (just ask Cristiano, who despite his greatness isn’t quite there yet), I think this is a fair assumption.

B. Assuming that the penalty was missed or saved, we can conjecture that first, Twitter would exploded instantly. Not “filled your newsfeed” exploded, but literally self-destructed, unless it dropped and sealed its fuel rods to prevent a catastrophic meltdown. Second, Pirlo, knowing he couldn’t very well try it again during the same shootout, sends a just slightly less than inch-perfect penalty right into the path of a diving Joe Hart, who makes the save. One of the Ashley’s, doesn’t matter which, has his nerves eased by the fact that he couldn’t possibly screw up that badly and buries his. England wins the shootout. Hart is hailed as a national hero. The team score a controversial second goal against Germany that the fifth official rules is over the line even though in replays it doesn’t appear to have entirely crossed the plane. They lose to the Germans 4-2.

8. What if Sweden had turned on before their last group game?

It’s fairly easy to imagine. One player marking the biggest Ukrainian threat of the game in the second half, one time. One more goal during either of their first two games. Danny Welbeck not getting really, really lucky with that incredibly brilliant backheel, and suddenly the Swedes are through. Granted, the French might have played a little harder if elimination was on the line, but given how poorly they did I’m not sure how much it would have mattered. Any of those, and suddenly we get the Swedes’ forest-worth of six-foot-bodies charging into the Spanish box on every set piece and lumbering around the midfield chasing red shirts and the ball. Stylistically, it had the potential to be thrilling, and another game of Zlatan would be infinitely better than what the French through out there.

9. What if Portugal or Italy actually manage to upset Spain or Germany, setting up a group stage rematch in the final?

Not really sure, to be honest. I mean Spain-Italy was a pretty good game, right? Germany-Portugal a little less so. Could Cristiano succeed in completing his single-handed conquest of the tournament? Would Spain actually try to score the second time around? Or would we all just rather prefer to see what Spain’s tiny judo masters do against a team that might bother to try to attack them constantly?

10. What if Estonia had beaten Ireland in their qualification playoff?

Probably the exact same thing as what happened to Ireland.

Forget the Bailout Bowl or the Lalas v. Ballack grudge match, the erudite among us know that Friday’s Germany-Greece quarterfinal is really a replay of the two nation’s infamous 1972 International Philosophy final, seen here:

(Never mind that that’s likely what a group stage game between Greece and England would have looked like: 90 minutes of both teams standing behind the ball then a late goal.)

In tribute to the play and thought of those 22 great minds, we’ve decided to construct our own philosopher’s XI here:

GK – Zeno of Citium – The original Stoic taught that negative emotions could be snuffed out by the virtue of Reason, and so he never dwells on giving up a goal.

SW – Rene Descartes – Useful to have as the last man back, since unlike many of the others on this team his cogito ergo sum pronouncement means he almost never gets caught unprepared while trying to think himself out of existence.

Bacon goes for the Alexi Lalas look.

LCB – Francis Bacon – Uses the knowledge gained via senses to save his teams…uhh, chances in the defensive end.

RCB – Soren Kierkegaard – The first existentialist isn’t really a team player or a system guy, but he makes up for it with his ferocious individual man marking.

CDM – Thomas Hobbes – Ensures the lives of opposing playmakers are nasty, brutish and short.

Left carillero – Friedrich Nietzsche – Philosophy’s own Jermaine Jones, always bending the laws of the game and claiming he has surpassed soccer’s primitive value system.

Right carillero – Confucius – The ultimate teammate, always serving as a model for others. He knows that he would not appreciate it if one of his teammates were to hog the ball and never pass, and so he does not do it himself.

Looks like we called up the wrong Socrates.

CAM – Sócrates – An unfortunate smudge on the manager’s team sheet means Brazilian attacking midfielder Sócrates – who replaced Hippocrates as the team’s physician/philosopher – starts over favored Greek philosopher Socrates.

LW – Thomas Aquinas – No tiki-taka for the ever-incisive Saint Thomas, who recognizes that just as the object of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are God Himself, the object of the footballing virtues – dribbling, passing and shooting – are goals themselves.

CF – Martin Heidegger – Has apparently decided that the reason there is something rather than nothing is because nothing is awfully hard to score goals into.

RW – John Locke – Begins each game with his own tabula rasa, learning from the opponent and adapting his ideas and methods to them in order to liberate his forwards upon the goal.

With Fabian Johnson and Jose Torres questionable and Edgar Castillo out for tonight’s USMNT match against Guatemala, the situation in the back for the USA is looking pretty grim. Thankfully, we’re here with ten alternate left back suggestions for Jurgen Klinsmann, none of which involve Oguchi Onyewu going anywhere near the field of play.

1. A turnstile – At least attackers would have to go through one at a time.

Other plans? What could be more important than representing your country?

2. James Harden – Credit to the Shin Guardian for throwing the name of this natural lefty into the mix on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. Some might say he’s got other things to do Tuesday night, but we’re sure his sense of patriotism would prevail upon him to come help out the U.S.A.

3. Jonathan Quick – At least the LA Kings goalie is definitely free on Tuesday, and is apparently pretty good at not letting people by him. Also has a fantastic name. I would buy a jersey with “QUICK” on the back, if only for the false advertising purposes.

4. Andriy Shevchenko – Maybe we can swing a trade for him and convince him to switch positions, now that his career is over and he’s been reduced to being a bit player in an overmatched Ukraine side who will be going home nearly immediately from their own tournament.

5. One of these guys –

Or we could just skip the process of trying to recruit them and have Jermaine Jones do it.

6. Don Draper – I keep hearing that the old Don Draper is back now. Let’s see him prove it on the field.

7. A tree stump – No, really, it might trip a Guatemalan trying to go down that side. I swear there’s a Peanuts strip or TV special or something where Lucy drafts a stump sitting in foul territory over Charlie Brown, puts a glove on it, and the stump ends up catching a foul pop-up, but I can find no evidence of its existence. What good are you to me, Internet?

Does whatever Philipp Lahm can.

8. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man – How about Sony up the cross-promotional ante by loaning the wall-crawler to the Red, White and Blue for a match?

9.  An Engineer – Would have been nice if Prometheus’ alien master race had genetically crafted us a decent left-footed back-up while they were working on humanity.

10. Eric Lichaj – Nah…

We here at The Other 87 get a lot of fan mail, and until recently we’ve been nervously stuffing it in the freezer like Andy from Parks and Recreation. But now that we’re pretty certain our parents aren’t the only people following this blog (Hi Big Mike, in Stateville, who writes us once a day!) we owe it to you, our readers, to answer the questions you thought only we could answer. I’m channeling Sally Field here…You like us! You really like us!

Okay, the truth is we don’t get any fan mail.  But we’re not going to let that bother us. Instead, today’s feature is an exercise in self-delusion. We scoured all the search queries that led to our site and picked our absolute favorites (basically, anything that wasn’t a search for Ivan Drago or Fergie, not that there’s anything wrong with searching for Ivan Drago). While the names and places are fictionalized, each question below is an honest-to-God unedited Google referral.

Without further ado, the O87 Mailbag. Oh, and if you wanna email us questions in the future, hit us up at o87minutes@gmail.com.

How is babby formed?
Salvador Limones, Brentwood, Calif. 

Whoa, looks like someone doesn’t believe in leading off with a softball question. I’m frightened to try to investigate how this might have led to our site, but we’re professionals here, so we’re going to do our best anyway.

Making a babby is a lot like scoring a goal. There’s only one way to do it — put the ball in the back of the net — but a lot of people have different styles. Some are patient and probing, using timing and slick moves to create a goal. Others just pump the ball forward as often as possible and try to knock it on frame. To counteract these styles, some teams pay money for a top-level goalie.

If he’s a good goalie and he’s used properly, then much of the time he’s going to block these shots, and sometimes they’ll miss entirely and make a mess in the stands. But every so often, the goalie gets caught out of position, or sometimes the goalie thinks he’s in good position to block the shot but it squirts through, and then you get to celebrate the miracle of scoring, and that 2-0 scoreline will, nine months later, become a 3-0.

How to win every game on football manager 2012?
Bill Rizer, Unnamed South American Island

Load game, answer no when it asks you to save, load last game, try again. There, that was easy.

Andrew Jackson national bank.
Pitfall Harry, The Amazon

Ahh, another one of these, some poor lost soul desperately searching for help for a presentation that’s due next period. Try this: 

There, that cleared it all up, didn’t it?

Roy Hodgson wife.

Lance Bean, Same unnamed South American Island

Someone’s scraping the bottom of the WAG barrel, aren’t they?

Why can’t they stop diving in soccer? 
Kin Korn Karn, Detroit, Michigan

As with any other societal problem, particularly one involving something as addictive as diving, it’s important to consider the big picture. What’s wrong with the lives or abilities of these players that they have to resort to diving? Why do our young players grow up thinking there’s no alternative to diving? Is it right that our referees fill their books with names of players just because they dove a little when so many greater offenses are going unpunished?

In other words, watch all five seasons of The Wire and call me in the morning.

Who is bo jackson?
Ryu Hayabusa, Eugene, Oregon

My reaction to this question was pretty much this, beginning at the 18 second mark: