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Cups Runneth Over

Published by Josh on August 16, 2023

A writeup of the UEFA Super Cup

Football stadium. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons

The UEFA Super Cup is an odd competition to American eyes. A matchup of the winner of the Champion’s League versus that of the Europa league feels like the NBA Champion playing the G-League champion. Or the Georgia Bulldogs, the reigning FBS national champs playing against South Dakota State, the winner of FCS. Ostensibly, these are two clubs playing at very different levels.

A team like City, coming off a historic treble, and with over €245 million in payroll, facing off against Sevilla, with just under €80 million in salaries and who finished a dismal 12th in LaLiga, and who wouldn’t have even qualified for this year’s Europa League, let alone the Champion’s League, if not for the heroics of last year’s finish in penalties over AS Roma, should be a laugher. The sort of game played by the bottom half of the team sheet to pick up some early season hardware and work out the kinks in the new squad’s strategy and spacing.

Sevilla, in fact, played City in the group stage of the Champions’ League last year, getting stomped by a combined two-leg total of 7-1, with 3 total attempts on target through 180 minutes and a 60/40 possession deficit. 

Strange things can happen in a single-leg championship, however. A young season is filled with unknowns, uncertainties, and unproven strategic and personnel decisions. One game at a neutral site can lead to unexpected results.

Throughout the match, while City maintained possession at an even better 70-30 clip, Sevilla maintained poise and answered each question put to them. Guardiola’s lineup featured both youth and novelty, with Josko Gvardiol slotting into the back line, Cole Palmer put into the wing, and Kovačić starting in the midfield. He used players like Gvardiol and Akanji in unfamiliar positions, introducing them to his system of flexibility and usage, and which recent experience shows can take a year to feel comfortable fitting into. That discomfort definitely showed today. 

With the (sadly recurrent) loss of Kevin De Bruyne to another long-term injury, City still searches for the sort of engine through the midfield to drive their attack. In further losing Ilkay Gündoğan and Riyad Mahrez from the ECL-winning team, the predictable answers to the too-oft repeated question are gone. So far, they don’t seem to have found a new one.

Meanwhile Sevilla, while short in possession, made the most of their chances. En-Nesyri tested a back line that was attempting to accomplish multiple tasks. Guardiola has built a firm defensive line and uses them in multiple ways, in defining the defensive border, driving possession through passes from the back, and allowing Akanji to be regularly sent into the midfield and further, akin to John Stones’ role late in last season. While City’s back lines of often gelled into intimidating walls of dangerously multi-talented players, this early in the season they allowed a number of questions to be asked. Youssef En-Nesyri regularly asked them.

In scoring the opening goal of the match, En-Nesyri slipped in behind Aké and found space horizontally and vertically, taking a thumped cross from Acuña across his head and into the near-side of goal. Further chances from En-Nesyri kept coming, the Moroccan finding chances off turnovers and counters, with strong efforts by Ederson the only thing keeping Sevilla from further lighting the scoreboard.

Halfway through the second half, City still seemed heavy and uncertain, toiling under the heat and humidity of a Grecian August and a pitch that slowed their passing and transition enough for Sevilla to regularly find answers.

Two fouls after the 60th minute let City set up possessions and build a sort of static momentum, leading to a ball handed back Rodri out wide to the left and behind the box. A seeking cross found Cole Palmer floating out unguarded near the far post, who cut in to the ball and equalized with a fluttering header. Palmer was the lone scorer in the Community Shield loss for City and is beginning to look like an adequate replacement for Mahrez in the three-man attacking midfield structure. Guardiola watched the goal from his seat in the dugout, looking neither excited nor relieved, but merely accounting the effort and result.

Immediately after the goal, El-Neysri found a startling opportunity, with Ederson again keeping City in the game after storming forward to close down the angle and taking the opportunity away. The remainder of the match played at a similar pace, with both teams awoken to possibilities, and the dread of a shootout looming at the end of regular time. Despite multiple great chances at both ends, the game finished drawn at a goal a piece.

Sevilla have played in four Super Cup Finals, as recurrent victors in the Europa League. All four have gone beyond 90 minutes. The competition itself has gone to penalties three times since 2019. If anything can happen in a one-game final, even more uncertainty is baked into a shootout. Team dynamics and strategy are set aside, allowing a title to come down to two men with a ball between them.

Sometimes, though, all you need is a crossbar. Through four penalties a piece, Kyle Walker’s shot came within a finger’s width of being kept out. Bounou got a half a hand to the ball, which deflected hard, bounced high, and buried itself in the top of the netting. Seeking a tying goal to keep the shootout alive, Gudelj went high and to the right, fooling Ederson who dove hard to the left. However, the power carried the ball a little high, ricocheting off the crossbar and handing a victory to City in Athens.

City have their first trophy of the season, after a disappointing showing in the Community Shield, and will look to add more hardware to the cabinet with an evolving squad and tactical approach. They weathered the persistent threat of a Sevilla team who put every effort into a victory and fell six inches short.

Short Story: “Only a Test”

Published by Josh on August 7, 2023
via Wikipedia

This is a test of the emergency alert system.

This is only a test.

In the case of a real emergency, this alert would be followed by emergency information, news, or instructions from local, state, or national authorities.

These instructions would be assuring, calm in tone and demeanor, in word choice and diction. Specifically general and generally specific. Intentional.

They would be referenced from a curated database, generated many years ago. Committees of serious people with serious-sounding but blatantly vague titles collaborated on just how to communicate this message, at this time, to this audience. How best to make clear what to do, what was to be done in this form of an imagined now. Preparation, along with the appearance of preparation. Ease as an undertone, caution in the undertow.

In some folder, in some file drawer, in some warehouse, their dusty records will have been amended to note their participation in the committee. Solid marks provided all around for their efforts. Their imagined prophecies of terrible futures and their contributions to The Plans.

Their messages would be simple, memorable, and clear. Brief and unmistakeable. And yet you will have barely heard them over the dull ringing panic in your mind’s ear.

You would sit for a moment, attempting to come to terms with what these words meant, what this alert meant. What any of it meant. Lost in the diction of the artificial orator, or the voice of some long gone stranger, one person who knew the punchline to the joke decades before it was ever told.

You would pause for a moment, thinking this must be some sort of farce, some elaborate prank, playing out in panic. Orson’s ghost come to haunt once more, his rumbling chuckle echoing down through time.

You would cycle through channels, pressing buttons or turning dials, to find the reassuring normalcy a frequency or two away. You would instead find the same message, in the same solemn, solitary tone, continuing to repeat its somber instructions.

Your mind would start to splinter, to fragment, thoughts racing, grasping to surface from the prosaic depths of fractured normalcy from which they’d just been loosed. Finding undiscovered countries of possibility amid a metamorphic now.

You would count those around you, tally those not. You would ask yourself about your family, your friends, their statuses, would you see them soon. Would you see them again. Would they be there to see? Would they continue to be?

Would you? How? Why?

What does this mean, what does it augur?

What did we do to deserve this? What fait has made it so?

Was it your fault, somehow? Should you have been kinder to people on the bus? At the store? The foreign faces on the corner, who teemed to our shore, who were another’s wretched refuse which you in turn refused?

Did you disagree too forcefully, too fearfully, too frightened of difference to find some common thread? Too worried about the tapestry it would weave? That it would muddy your pattern? Your memory? Your belief in what rightfully is and what must always continue to be?

Was it some madman? Some lunatic, unaided and left to fend, who found in fending a frenzy to be feasted upon the world? Could they have been reasoned with? Listened to? Assured or assuaged or otherwise made normal enough to not have taken the only action they saw through a cloud of rage and fear?

Was it ignorance and inaction? Opportunities to collective task not taken by individual wills?

Could something have been done? Had we only listened to those who demanded something different, not seen them as inconvenient, annoying, other. Had we heeded them, heard them, treated their concerns as potential truths, asked for answers to their, in immediate and ringing retrospect, reasonable questions. Had we not kept along a convenient course that required nothing of us but to acquiesce, to trust in those who assured us of their trustworthiness. Their righteousness.

Was it coming for millennia, unseen until unmistakeable, a force beyond reckoning or recognition? Is it the same blazing joke the sauropods laughed at? Is it the slow choke of the Silurian? The raining Permian permanence? Was it sent from afar, jostled by fate, to resound a final greeting to a fearful people and an indifferent planet? Will any hear the pealing of the echo of this bell, or will all pass with its chime thrumming through them, a union of vibration into oblivion? Does the Earth glee at a renewal, shudder at a loss, or see nothing but another brief moment in a time that stretches beyond our small comprehension?

Will what comes after remember us? Mourn us? Study our choices, our mistakes, our triumphs and our tragic self-defeating tendencies? Add us all en masse to the history of subtractions, our many multiplications driving our divisions, to an end that equaled nothing? Know we were at all?

Does it matter?

Once calamity arrives, does fault for faults still resonate? Is blame anything but easing the mental guilt amassed for inescapable consequence? Does it do us any favors? Is it a kindness or a curse?

Should you have prepared? Could you have, for this? Could anyone truly have? Is there preparation that would make this better? Can it be measured in gallons, in ounces, in the gross weight of a packed away, labeled, sorted and catalogued, nervously awaited world?

Was anyone who prepared for anything like this, in some way, willing it to have happened? Are those who did happy? Grateful, to themselves, but also to those who justified their choices? And do they feel guilt for it? Or glee? Will they reconsider once they’ve been made to consider? Will their children thank them or wonder at their mindsets? Would we recognize what they become? Would they recognize what we were?

Is the fate thrust upon you both your just reward? Is it the cool calculation of chance in a cold, black universe? Will it matter? Will you spend the thin thread left on the spool to contemplate such unwoven tapestries?

How will you live until living’s end? How should you? How can you? How must?

But it’s ok.

You’re alright. Everything is alright. Will continue to be alright, alight, upright, intact, maintained.

The voice continues as it did once more, concluding its repeated message before the two-part tone returns, echoes, concludes.

This was a test.

This was only a test.

Under Review: Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway

Published by Josh on August 4, 2023

As I mentioned in my previous review of one of his books (for Angelmaker), Nick Harkaway is an author I find myself needing to get a running start at. Like bouncing off a tightrope before slinging back and flying into continued motion. Or maybe like being thrown into a pool and instinctively lunging for the safety of the solid sides, for an exit, before learning the strokes to propel forward and onward into the narrative river beyond. Pick a metaphor for failing to launch at your leisure.

This one took more runs than most, and should have, because once the stone crested the hill, it ran ragged, inevitably installing itself within me. Themes I’d pondered a dozen years prior were discovered within, developed further and with more style and gusto than I’d hope to be able to muster, even with an audience of only one.

Collective voting systems, cultivated narratives, multitudes created within the one, magic as knowing the true names of things. Reality shown to be as thin as paper and as thick as ink. Harmonic and ideological resonance across spaces, times, states. Roko’s Basilisk with fins and a nose for blood. Harkaway resonated on some wavelength I’d also tuned into and wrapped these themes and theses into something whole and entrancing.

The book scratched at itches so deep, so long held, I’d forgotten they yearned for the nail.

The obsessions explored, shared, invited within to live, a little while, a span of six-hundred-some-odd pages and a lifetime nestled within the connectome, deep within the grey matter.

Great reading is experiencing and conducting a fugue. Living within, between, among. Coexisting with an author’s construction and doing the work beside them, in the way one brings themselves into any involved work. In Gnomon, this felt much more literal, in that the reader, if they believed, had faith, if they followed far enough down the rabbit hole, secreted an operating system for a narrative universe into themselves, allowing new dimension to unfold in the interstitials, to slip in through art and artifice until they existed as not just assumptions but stated facts, as states of being.

Nick’s real sneaky that way.

I hesitate to talk plot and character for fear of revealing the trick to it. You don’t deserve to be seated to the side of the stage for this one, to have the various ropes and levers and mirrors pointed to and commented upon before watching the magic for yourself, feeling the awe unspoiled. All I will intend is that you feel the gravity of my gratitude for the experience. Harkaway is a master and this was another masterpiece. It’s worth the dive, all the way to the bottom.

Vocabulary:
(Harkaway’s like any great author in using the right words, even if it’s not certain his audience will know them inherently. He trusts a reader to care enough to learn, and I’m repaying that trust by, well, learning.)

oneiric – adjective
of, relating to, or characteristic of dreams.
“A small alteration in the oneiric psychoscape would have caused her difference to become extremely dysfunctional.”

apocatastasis – noun
the state of being restored or reestablished; restitution.

catabasis – noun
a retreat, especially a military retreat. (Used, in cases in this novel, discussing an escape from an underworld.)1Later defined as “The mystical journey of Orpheus into the kingdom of Hades, and by extension any voyage into darkness. Greek, kata: against, down; basis: the place on which you stand. Literally, a pedestal. Therefore “catabasis”, a journey down beneath the place where we stand.”
“After a moment, she enters STEGANOGRAPHY, CRYPTOGRAPHY, APOCATASTASIS and CATABASIS into the mix. The overall picture shifts a little as if shrugging, but does not change. She shrugs back, almost irritated: No, I don’t know what to do with those either. Don’t look at me like that.”

bouquinistes – noun
Via Wikipedia: “The Bouquinistes of Paris, France, are booksellers of used and antiquarian books who ply their trade along large sections of the banks of the Seine: on the right bank from the Pont Marie to the Quai du Louvre, and on the left bank from the Quai de la Tournelle to Quai Voltaire. The Seine is thus described as ‘the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves”
“This is no lair of chattering bouquinistes; be assured there will be no tote bags and no branded pencils.”
(Editor’s note: one of my great regrets in visiting Paris some twenty years ago now is not having spent more time leisurely perusing these booksellers and artists and stands along the Seine. The whole trip, though random, felt at times rushed. Some day I’d like to get back and do the thing again at a slower pace.)

affray – noun
a public fight; a noisy quarrel; brawl. (Now I wonder where it split from the shorter ‘fray’ but am not ready to pop for a copy of the OED)
“He loved affray.”

catafalque – noun
a raised structure on which the body of a deceased person lies or is carried in state.
“And here, at last, is the damned catafalque, the unwelcome coffin, arrived as it always does between the moments so that I cannot see and stamp on whatever kobold drags it in.”

One other vocabulary note that I found interesting in reading was the two contrasting definitions of fugue:

fugue – noun
1: Music – a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2: Psychiatry – a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

Overall, a highly recommended read, even if you, like I, need to repeatedly roll your stone up the hill to its tip. You will not remain as Sisyphus. It will crest, and roll down the other side, carrying you along with it to the crash of conclusion.

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Notes:

  • 1
    Later defined as “The mystical journey of Orpheus into the kingdom of Hades, and by extension any voyage into darkness. Greek, kata: against, down; basis: the place on which you stand. Literally, a pedestal. Therefore “catabasis”, a journey down beneath the place where we stand.”