In football, the Sunday night national stage...which has pretty much supplanted the famed Monday Night Football spotlight of decades earlier, "my" Miami Dolphins were in the spotlight as they were finally in a featured game, this one on the road against the "Los Angeles" Chargers. I put that location in quotes because I still think of them as belonging to San Diego. It seems that ever since they went into general decline following Jimmy Johnson's retirement as head coach after the 1999 season, Miami has been pushed to the background with network sports attention, only getting coverage when something negative is going on. But this year they are doing better in the standings with first year head coach Mike McDaniel being heralded as some king of genius (they say it, I don't) and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa seeming to hit his stride, with star receivers Jaylen Waddle and Tyreek Hill beginning to resemble Dan Marino's famed receivers of the past, Mark Clayton and Mark Duper. NBC sports announcer Chris Collinsworth even went so far before the game to proclaim the Dolphins as Super Bowl bound...ha, ha, ha, I'll believe it when I see it! True to form, the Dolphins, already known for being a poor road team on the Pacific Coast, quickly fell behind to the Chargers as Tua seemed to choke up earlier under all the media focus and the highly touted Dolphins defense found itself full of holes for San Diego Los Angeles to run right through. Still, they nearly pulled the game out but now have lost two in a row, with a difficult road contest against Buffalo next week...
As for the other "football", that is, the sport that most of the world gives this designation, the men's World Cup soccer semifinals are set to be played: Argentina vs. Croatia at 1 pm today and France vs. Morocco tomorrow at the same time. The overwhelming consensus has Argentina and France winning to play each other in the finale on December 18th. I've written before about begin bummed out over excessive nationalism in sports, so I haven't been giving all this hoopla much coverage...or thought, for that matter. I like more to watch different leagues play, most notably the English Premier League and Mexico's Liga MX with my favorite teams in them Leicester City and UANL Tigres, respectively. On the league level, different teams hire their players across national borders and usually aren't so hung up about national divisions, the opposite of what happens with this highly politicized World Cup scene. Since I happen to like Lionel Messi, I'm going to root for his Argentina team to win it all, but otherwise I couldn't care less about this tournament of nationalism and waving flags...
No comments:
Post a Comment