Kicked in the face

Those of you who have been peeking in here regularly probably know that I'm what the British would probably call "a bit about football".

Or, if you haven't, as we say here in the Land of the Free (Providing You Make More Than $100,000 a Year), I loves me some soccer. The Army I still serve is the Timbers Army, and I'm as proud of my green-and-white scarf - in some ways - as I ever was to wear the green of that other army, the one with the condos and the yachts (OK, trivia fans - what's the movie reference there..?).

But this isn't a great time to be a Portland supporter.

To say that we've hid a bad patch would be like saying that the Titanic had a troubled evening in the North Atlantic a hundred years ago this spring. Yesterday I had the unenviable "pleasure" of watching my club get spanked by a piss-poor expansion side from Montreal, a club that we routinely demolished when we were both down in the U.S. Second Division.

And, worse, the Boys in GreenRed LOOKED like a club going off the rails. Disorganized. Lifeless. What one of my old platoon sergeants would have described as "cotton balls" - 100% sterile. Against one of the worst defenses in the league we created something like two real attacking chances.

I can't think of a moment that summed it up better than the second half collision between Montreal's Nyassi, who was lunging for a through-ball that was headed on goal, and our goalkeeper Perkins, who ended up with a cleat to the face that tore open his nose and sent him out of the match and our chances with him. The wretched Montreal team went on to thrash us, and we lay there like a head-kicked 'keeper and simply took it.

We were a fucking disaster.

And this, in turn, brings me to the dilemma of the true supporter; whether it's of Club or Country.

I hate to keep coming back to this, but soccer is a cruel game because it is so like Life itself.

As with our lives, and with our nations, there are so many, many ways to go wrong. And, once lost, our lives, our sport, our nation are damn deadly difficult to right again. Loss and ruin, like the cold, cruel edge of the iceberg, lie just beneath the deceptively still waters ahead. One moment we seem to be gliding along listening to the band and sipping our cocktail; the next, the frigid waters are closing over our head as we try to comprehend the degree to which we have been complicit in our own fate.

Whether it is as a partisan of a soccer club or a patriot of a great nation, there is always the inclination to trust in and support the object of one's devotion. To believe that the best course is to continue to have faith that the leaders of those institutions are wise, clever, and far-seeing. That they are making decisions based on great vision and broad experience, secure in their knowledge of themselves and their craft.

And as a supporter, as a citizen, there's also the problem of power; there is very little in us as individuals. A lone angry voice floating down from the North End terraces, a puny blog against the collective "wisdom" of the Village, single vote lost in a torrent of poorly-thought, misinformed, emotionally-charged herd choices...

There's no dignity there, in kicking against the pricks. The temptation is to simply close our eyes and hope.

But what if that hope is a fool's hope?

Or, worse, what if it enables those whose task is supposed to be "leading" - leading our club, leading our country - but who are blinded by self-satisfaction, or misinformation, or prejudices, or bone-stupid, or misplaced loyalty?

When does it become the task of the "supporter" to support not the Front Office but the club itself? Not the President, or the Congress, but the nation?

Or, worse; when does it become so painfully obvious that there is no solution in sight? That the entire system is so violently distorted that the answers cannot come from the inside, as the inside of the system is presently constituted.

What does a True Supporter do, then?

Because at the moment, staring over the bloodied rag that we're holding to our shattered face, we seem to be facing a crisis; one of the many we have faced, will face, in the history of our nation and our club. And a supporter, and a citizen, are called upon to lend themselves to their countries.

But how can we both support them and change them? How can we love them yet hate what they have become? Where do we cross the line, between Reformation and Revolution? Where is the divide between a rough caress and a kick in the face?

Jogo da vida

My friend Brent sent me this link: lovely little article in the blog "Grantland" called "Soccer's Heavy Boredom".Now you who are regulars here know that I am an enraptured lover of the Beautiful Game. Which, as the article insists, means that I know better than a non-fanatic that the game itself - any match, many matches - can be an awful, dire, tedious slog.

And that's all true.

There's no sassy kickiness to watching two rec league teams thrash out a nil-nil draw in the rain. The Lingerie Football League it ain't.And a LOT of soccer is like that - a hopelessly dire kickabout where nothing happens for a long, long time.

But - and here's the odd thing - that's part of what makes it wonderful.

Because it's so like life itself.You spend hours, days, weeks, maybe even years, grinding away. Sleeping, working, eating, and sleeping again. For days at a time nothing happens to you that hasn't happened before and will surely happen again tomorrow, or the next day. And that goes on for years, one day following the next like tarnished beads on a dirty string. Get up, go to work, come home, read, sleep.But...every so often...Once a year, once a decade, once a lifetime...

Something achingly beautiful, or unspeakably terrible, can happen.

A sunrise, a song, the look on someone's face after making love.

A death, a war, pain, fear, the taste of chocolate, the birth of your child.

And that changes you forever.And soccer's a little bit like that, too.

Man without a country

One of the most enduring memories I will ever have of professional soccer is the "Sunflower Goal"Timbers midfielder Ryan Pore scored the only goal in the final home match in the minor league/lower division history of the club, a lovely 83rd-minute header that brought down the the curtain on the old club and the old pitch in a haze of smoke and sunflowers.Pore was well-liked here, and was one of the first five players signed by the MLS Timbers for the past season. A friend of mine met him at the new Timbers' kit release back in December 2011; she said he was ecstatic about his future and excited about the coming season and his return to the top flight.And then it all went wrong.

Pore never found his feet with the MLS club. His game has always depended on timing, speed, and craft. And he found that the MLS defenders were big enough to horse him out of his timing but were just as quick. And he was never crafty enough.

In his eight matches with the Timbers he was clearly over his head. He never scored. He never really ever threatened to score. And for a player whose game was about scoring, well...

So after a spell in the reserves he was loaned to the Montreal club, playing for the bulk of the 2011 season back in the same second-division league he'd just left. He seems to have done well when he played, scoring seven goals in eleven matches.But not well enough.

When the Timbers announced their signings for 2012 Pore was not on the roster. His option year was declined. And then Montreal declined as well.

In less than a year Ryan Pore went from top league starter happy and excited about his future to reserve team player to out on loan to a minor league club to unemployed.

In the Lesser Depression unemployment is no surprise. And certainly Pore has had more glory and made more money than many other Americans collecting unemployment today. And he is still eligible for the re-entry draft and another club might yet pick him up.But when you hear me say that soccer is a cruel game, or when I reflect about how it speaks to our lives outside the touchlines, in this way it is no different than sport writ small. Sports, like soldiering, is a country for young men, and women. They risk their bodies in hopes of a rich return, and because of the way we value that risk - regardless of the actual worth of the act, or the goods and evils of that valuation - when they succeed they are richly rewarded.

But the side we don't like to talk or think about is the dark side, the penalty for failure, the stark reality of a 28-year-old man without a job, without a club or country to trade his skills for pay. He and his wife have no promise of tomorrow or safety today.

Somewhere the smoke and the singing of the Sunflower Goal will always be loud and fresh, and the sudden eruption of the last-minute victory in the last match of the last year of the promotion season will be ever green. And in that land I will always remember Julie's account of Pore's happiness with happiness of my own, and his success on the playing field with friendly fondness.But I'll bet that Ryan and Ashley Pore don't feel that way tonight.

Lesson Unlearned

So I had an incredible evening at the Portland v. LA match last Wednesday. You can read about it here, but, trust me, the words alone don't do it justice. I think we all showed up expecting just to do our parts as good supporters and were surprised (and delighted) by the win.But before the match I was involved in an odd incident and I thought I'd mention it just...well, just to see what you thought.

First let me explain how the seating works at Civic Stadium (a.k.a. "Jeld-Wen Field"). The North End - what we call "The Shed" - is where the Timbers Army stands. In the old soccer tradition this would be "the terraces", home of the hoi-polloi, the rabble, the working class yobbos, where the penny-ticket supporters would be herded to stand all match long. Portland has made good changes to this tradition, so the Army is made up of both men and women, young and old, and in my obviously biased opinion marries the best of the old British terrace traditions to the best of American sports fandom AND the best of Portland's happy anarchic spirit. We call ourselves the "People's Republic of Portland " for good reasons, and some of the best are on display in the Shed End on a matchday.The Army has always had open seating - since we don't use the seats - and sections 101 through 108 are "general admission"; first come, first stand.

I sit in the next section over. Well, actually, we don't sit - we stand in front of our reserved seats. I like to call us the "Timbers Army Reserves"; we're too staid for festival seating but too raucous to sit down.

Occasionally we get people with general admission tickets who sneak down before the match. We usually warn them that our section is "reserved", and that if the ticket holders show up they will get chased off, and they usually grin and admit to taking their chances. A couple of youngish guys showed up for the Toronto match and were nearly immediately evicted when the people who had the seats showed up, but they just stepped down to the front of the adjacent aisle and stood in front of the capo stand all match. Nobody had any problem with that.

But this week I ran into something a bit different. We arrived to find a woman and her daughter standing in front of our seats. I informed her that they WERE our seats, and she replied that we were wrong and that our section was general admission.

Now I'm a fairly peaceable guy; not VERY peaceable, but enough to keep me out of casual brawls. But this woman was visibly not interested in discussion. She was a bulbous, tattooed sort of Southeast Portland gal. The uncharitable description would be "trashy" and I'm inclined to be uncharitable, since when I informed her that she was wrong and that she was in a reserved section she loudly informed me that I was full of shit and that she was damn well not moving.

I suggested that she look at the number of the seat she was standing in front of and the number on my ticket, at which point she said she didn't care what was on my damn ticket, ripped it out of my hand, and repeated that she wasn't moving.

At that point I stopped being peaceable.

Now while she was an obnoxious fat slag she was also a woman who had not offered physical violence, so I held back on my initial impulse to step in and pop her one. Instead I stepped up and put myself right up against her, well inside her personal space, chest-to-chest, and suggested pretty sternly that she move her fat slag ass to another place.She started protesting loudly that I was threatening her and that she had a twelve-year-old daughter with her. I repeated that I didn't care if she had a chimpanzee monkey with her and that she and her daughter needed to go find their seats. She moved, cursing and loud, and I sat down and went about my business.

And then came the odd part. About ten minutes later along comes one of the staff who informs me that the woman has reported me to the ushers as threatening her, that the woman was misinformed by the stadium staff about the seating so she was not "at fault", that her daughter was crying because of what happend, and that I needed to go to the ushers if I was confronted by another similar "misunderstanding" in the future rather than confronting the offender.

My first reaction was just surprise; that the woman, who must have found out from the ushers that she was wrong about the seating, would have been indignant rather than ashamed and have tried to set the ushers on me rather than slink away quietly. But on reflection I recognized that shame is a rare quality in 2011.

But my second reaction was irritation with the officialdom. The ushers had not bothered to find out what had happened, and, having done their job poorly to begin with, were upset with me because I corrected their error in a way that caused a rude and stupid woman's child some distress. I informed the usher that I was perfectly capable of corrective training for both present and future Gresham hootchies and that, while I had not so much as raised a hand to the woman, that she had obviously been looking for trouble, picked the wrong person, and found it. And that I had no intention of deputizing other people to stand up for me; I was perfectly capable of that myself, being over the age of consent and all that.

The usher repeated her warning, I repeated my position, and we parted in mutual dissatisfaction.

My final opinion on the whole ridiculous business is that the worst part of it is that the woman whose aggressive ignorance was the cause of the entire mess is still out there, still convinced that she was hard done by and browbeaten by the mean nasty man, still ready to jump up in the next unsuspecting chump's face with the same rough insistence of her own rights - whether she's right or not.

She learned nothing from the entire mess, other than perhaps to feel more grieved, more put-upon than before; nothing about the evening, other than perhaps my ferocity, gave her a moment's pause.Reasoning did not touch her, reflection or self-doubt was not in her, civility was useless against her...nothing moved her but raw, naked force. And even when she was exposed as a misinformed fool her reaction was not shame or remorse but self-righteous anger.

What the hell can you do with someone like that?

Gutted

Such a day. I'm gutted. Let me tell you why.

It started this morning, when I got up to watch the US women play Brazil in the last of the quarterfinals. I thought it would be a tight match and predicted it would go to penalties...but not the way it did.I can't do justice to the match; that would take a Victor Hugo, who would have painted the late afternoon's events in his Romantic palette of dark and light and the chiaroscuro of heroism and villainy; the thunderous opening own-goal, the grumbling gathering storm of Brazilian pressure...the sudden lightning-strike of the Buehler sending-off and the saved...and then retaken and made...Brazil penalty. The unbending resolve of the U.S. women, like a rock against the storm-surge of the Brazilian attack. The individual brilliance of Marta, rising like the spirit of the storm itself to score Brazil's second and force the American women to attack relentlessly just for a chance to continue playing. The collective beauty of Megan Rapinoe's lovely service and Abby Wambach's precise header that sent the match to penalties.And then, of course, the horrible whiteknuckle lottery of the PKs, and Hope Solo's redemption on the Brazilian third effort, where she denied the very defender - Daiane - whose own-goal had begun the storm what seemed so many aeons ago.So I was already emotionally drained on my way down to Jeld-Wen Field for THE match of our Timbers' season, the home engagement with our loathed rivals the Seattle Sounders.For this match, though, you would have needed a more tragic muse. Poe, perhaps, or one of the Greek tragedians, to tell the tale of triumph and disaster, of Portland leads gained and lost, of individual heroics but of, finally, the tragedy of a team unable to play together for an hour and a half.

We sang and chanted, cheered and celebrated...but in the end, as it often does in this cruel game, as it has recently for our Boys, it came to naught. Seattle ran off a 3-2 victor, and we were left to sing a last song to them to tell them we were proud of their efforts and still supported them...but I know we all left sadder than we would have as winners.I've said this before, but it bears repeating; soccer is like life because it is so often unforgiving. You hope and believe, and in return you receive a handful of ashes.

But just as a steadfast faith that dies unseen and unknown is in itself a gift, the heart of the Beautiful Game is in the giving, not the receiving. The true supporters sing proudly even in - especially in - defeat. Because they know that the road leads through dark places, and the last measured act of defiant Life is to go down that dark road head up and singing. Because - like the young women on the field in Dresden, like the supporters in the stands in Portland - where there is love, and faith, there can never be despair, only defeat. And the undespairing heart is never truly defeated.

Cracked Pane

Well, it had to happen.And two weeks ago it did.

(Here's where I admit that I'm SO far behind on my blogging. I wish I had a good excuse. But the ugly fact is that I have a job I love, and a wife I love, and two kiddos I love when I'm not wanting to choke them senseless. So all of those things tend to come before blogging. I'm sorry, but that's the truth, and I can't pretend differently.)

What happened is that my Timbers lost at home.

You might remember here, when I talked about the feeling of singing the team on to win, of being part of the crowd, and the evening, and the Game, of

"...the almost-frightening power of the voice of that love that rose up over the darkened city, over the streets and bridges, over the rivers and the wooded mountains and the cold peaks glimmering under the stars until the daylight returns to awaken us all to our daily lives again."

Well.

The team was there, and we were there. The songs were there, shaking and roaring through the old Shed End, and the Game was there in all its terrible, heartbreaking beauty.But the victory was not.

D.C. United came into the House of Pane and broke out our windows; escaping with a 2-3 road win. The match was possibly one of the oddest I have ever watched, or played in, and in amateur soccer in this country you see some very odd things. Perhaps the strangest was a series of penalties all taken from the same foul. Portland's Cooper was pulled down inside the D.C. penalty area and the referee very correctly pointed to the penalty spot. The teams lined up along the edge of the area, Cooper spotted the ball down, the D.C. keeper Hamid set up, Cooper approached the ball, shot...and Hamid saved the PK.

But he didn't.

Lost amid the initial rush and roar was the far-side linesman, standing on the goalline with his flag up to signal that Hamid had moved illegally. The D.C. players went wild, but the referee upheld the call, the ball was respotted, Hamid again bounced on his line, Cooper again stutter-stepped up to the ball, shot...

...and Hamid saved. Again.

But he didn't.The linesman - a hell of a courageous man, in my opinion - had his flag up again. Hamid had moved forward off his line too soon - again.

This time the D.C. players REALLY went apeshit. Hamid received a booking for his protest, the teams milled about for a while, Cooper had an ugly little spat with Jack Jewsbury over who would take the PK, the old barn went quiet again...

...and then erupted, because Jewsbury slotted the kick home and the Timbers were tied 1-1.

It didn't last.

D.C. got themselves a penalty, scored it, and then took another goal from the run of play. The Boys got a late goal, but not enough. The unbeaten home run was over. The House of Pane was just another soccer stadium again.

So we sang our anthems (Timbers Army tradition is to sing "You are my Sunshine" on the 80th minute, and "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You on the 85th). We chanted, and roared abuse at the bastards in black, and at the officials, and dared the handful of cross-continent visitors to sing US a song. But the clock ticked up, and finally the long whistle went, and we had lost.The team took a slow walk around the pitch, applauding their supporters. They slowly filed out through the gate, leaving the pitch to a dwindling crowd, and the groundskeepers emerging to bed the place down for the night.

But in the North End we sang, and chanted; the Shed thuttered with the stamping of hundreds of feet. Jack Jewsbury and Jorge Perlaza emerged to receive their log slices for scoring, although they looked as subdued as you'd expect. But long after they returned to their lockers, we sang for them, and the team, and ourselves, and our city. We roared our pride, our disappointment for the loss, and our hope that we would all be here together again.

Soccer, by its cruelty and caprice, reminds us that Life itself is a cruel joke; that all our plans, all our hopes, all our wishes and dreams, will, in the end, come back to the grass.

But that until then there IS hope, and life, and love. And that you may lose today, your enemies may confound you, and yet you may still find yourself halting for a moment, your hands on the door of your locker ready to close it on the dregs of defeat, and hear far above you the thunder and the glory of that hope, and that love, becauseWe'll sing for you Timbers,'Til you finish the fight.There's a party in Portland,No one's sleepin' tonight...

Nos somos Timbers

I'm utterly whacked, it's 1:15 in the morning, and I have to get some sleep.But I can't.Because tonight was one of those times when you feel like your skin is electric; you are shot full of energy like the glowing filament of an incandescent light. As tired as I am I'm still floating and I haven't come down.Because 18,000 other people and I made the old Civic Stadium rock and roar like it was a living creature and a thunderous one, at that.Because something as simple and fundamentally silly as eleven men kicking a ball made the heavens open amid the thunder of drums and the songs of thousands of voices.Because for just a moment, the brightly-lit turf seemed so green, so pure, that you felt like if you could step out onto it you could run and run and never tire. That you could sing and shout and your voice would never crack and never fail.Because the supporters sang their love of the Game, and the Team, and the team took that love and made it a force, gave it hearts and lungs and legs and sent it flying into the night sky and left us all shattered and hoarse, reveling in the love, and the joy of victory hard-won, and the almost-frightening power of the voice of that love that rose up over the darkened city, over the streets and bridges, over the rivers and the wooded mountains and the cold peaks glimmering under the stars until the daylight returns to awaken us all to our daily lives again.Because...There's a party in Portland;Nobody's sleeping tonight.

The Offside Rule

One curious thing I've noticed is how often we know so little about what we do.

The past month I've been helping out coaching the kid soccer (U-8) team on which a friend's son plays defense. I don't pretend to be a good coach of the game in general but I do know goalkeeping and defense tactics, so I've been helping out with the 'keepers. Goaltending is tenuous at the kid level - it requires a level of concentration you just don't have at seven or eight. I'm pleased when my little goalies just remember to focus on stopping shots, never mind the game tactics.But as a bye-the-bye I tend to get volunteered to run the line at the kiddo games.

Linesman (I despise the "referee's assistant" term that FIFA now insists on. You judge the sideline, you're a linesman) is really a simple job about 95% of the time. You watch the play and assess who was last in contact with the ball when it goes into touch (i.e. over the side line).

It's the final 5% that seems to give most soccer parents and volunteer coaches trouble, and that's calling Offside.Soccer "offside" is a VERY judgement call. But the fundamentals of running the line aren't. You need to be level with the last defender, you need to watch both the lead attacker AND the player with the ball. You need to know the Laws of the Game.

I'm always amazed at the number of volunteer linesmen who loiter about the midfield stripe, who fail to make the call when one of the kiddos is clearly offside, or who don't know the simple facets of the rule, like the fact that there is no offside on a throw-in or a corner kick.It has always seemed to me (at least since I got old enough to understand the connection) incumbent on a person interested in anything, whether it be sport or politics or lovemaking, to learn all that he or she can about the thing in order to be the most adept, the most creative, the best informed about it, and the best - in terms of satisfying themselves and those involved with them - at whatever it is.That often doesn't seem to be the case. And it makes me wonder; why?

The last sunflowers

I was working my ass off, frankly, and so I didn't get to blog about the game at the Civic Sta - oh, sorry, PGE Park - last Thursday.It was a terrific game; scoreless until the 83rd minute when Ryan Pore dove to meet terrific service from Doug DeMartin and headed it past the Puerto Rico keeper, the Boys made the goal stand up and the crowd of 15,000-some went home singing and happy.But it was a poignant moment, too, as it was the last game in the old barn for the team that has played there since the first year of this decade. Next year the team will return, but as part of the highest U.S. division, Major League Soccer, and likely with many new names on the back of the jerseys. The players on the field Thursday night, many of them, were there for a reason. Many of them had tried, and failed, at the top flight.In a sweet gesture many of the fans brought sunflowers and their formal dress to celebrate the end of summer, and the end of a meeting of place, people, and deeds we have treasured, both the good and the ill of, and will look back on with the sort of lingering goodwill we hold for things loved and lost, not through tragedy but merely though time and the rise and fall of tide.There will be new joys, and new heartbreaks to come, and we will surely return to the new pitch and cheer the new players. But I didn't want to talk about that. That's for next season, and a new spring, and new hopes and dreams; the perennial hopes and dreams of all players, and all fans, and all people, at the outset of any endeavor.

No, this time I'm just thinking about the last bright golden sunflowers of the summer, and the happy farewell to much that I have loved and will not see again.