The woebegone

I’d hoped to write a long entry about Ecuador’s companions in misery in this World Cup. But, scanning the list, I found just two, maybe three, comparably disappointing teams: Türkiye (eliminated, having lost twice); Uruguay (nearly eliminated, having drawn twice); and Senegal (nearly eliminated, having lost twice). (I fancy Senegal’s chances against Iraq, however; I don’t fancy Uruguay’s against Spain.)

UPDATE: As I type, the South Koreans are losing to the South Africans; if the result holds, they’ll finish third in the group. And if they don’t scrape through in that position, it will be a tremendous disappointment.

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Other teams have been eliminated or soon will be, but none came into the tournament with the expectations of Türkiye, Uruguay, Senegal, or Ecuador (UPDATE: or South Korea). There’ve been no shocking breakthroughs (UPDATE: not unless the South Africans preserve their victory, anyway). But some teams have exceeded expectations on the field, if not in the standings. I tip my hat to the eliminated Panamanians. I tip it to Cape Verde and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each of which may yet pull through. I tip it to New Zealand (in dire straits) and Iran (in straits slightly less dire).

I might be expected, for graciousness’s sake, to tip my hat to the Curaçaoans. But I won’t unless they acquit themselves against the Ivorians. Ecuador outplayed Curaçao, after all.

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More notes. This is turning out to be a World Cup for top-drawer strikers. Messi, Haaland, and Mbappé have astounded. Vinícius Júnior and CR7 have shown flashes, if less consistently. And the whole Dutch front line looks good.

Less famous but also excellent: Germany’s Deniz Undav; Morocco’s Ismael Saibari.

I couldn’t say the same for any of the defenses, except maybe Argentina’s – which is considered fragile by some pundits. (Nor have the Mexicans and Spanish conceded, but they hardly have been tested.) The best individual defensive performance was by Bosnia & Herzegovina’s captain, Sead Kolašinac, against Canada.

As late as yesterday, it was mathematically possible for Ecuador to win the World Cup without ever scoring. I told my brothers I’d gain pleasure from such an outcome. I don’t think they agreed. Their Internet silence was rather loud.

Postmortem

So, we failed to score against Curaçao, arguably the World Cup’s weakest participant – certainly its smallest. This is no surprise. Scoring is the surprise. Every goal of the last two four-year cycles has seemed miraculous. Enner, our country’s greatest scorer, is not a reliable scorer; he, too, is gripped by the national malaise.

My blood ran cold very early on, after Enner’s first miss. I knew it would be almost impossible to win.

It wasn’t a matter of not creating chances. Enner (and others) had chances.

It wasn’t a deficiency of technique. Enner has technique. And he has noûs. He does brilliantly until the final touch, and then he scuffs, or aims at the wrong side, or shoots too softly.

What of the longer-term perspective? How might the strategists have failed?

It’s not a matter of not having dredged the talent pool for better strikers. I doubt there are better ones. One could always scout farther afield or try out prolific scorers from the domestic league. But … I’ve watched Ecuador a long time. Even our best strikers have had miserable conversion rates with the national team.

We have no automatic scorers. No Ecuadorian believes that scoring for Ecuador is his God-given right.

Ecuadorians can believe in themselves to keep goals out, to win the ball, to pass or dribble around opponents. But tabulation is of another order.

It’s like accumulating riches. Talent, luck, and elbow grease can bring in large sums. But financial dominance requires illegal or legal ruthlessness: cheating, gouging, strongarming, or hoarding. In any case: a tremendous sense of entitlement.

For better or worse – for better, I’d say – an entitled attitude is something very few Ecuadorians have. Especially when they measure themselves, as Ecuadorians, against other nationalities.

It’s a thousand times easier for another smallish and good-willed country – Norway – to produce a goal-gobbler like Erling Haaland. Firstly, because his sort never worries about getting enough to eat. And secondly, because the Norwegians know their ancestors were Vikings. (If you don’t think old history inspires them, well, you need to watch more reels of Norwegian soccer players.)

Not that Haaland is a baddie. But one can understand why he has no trouble accepting that his destiny is to score goals.

Our next game is against Germany. Ecuador must win to advance. We could outplay the Germans. They’ve not impressed, and I do think we’re that good. But will we score?

It could happen. But it would be a miracle.

October’s poem

Not a horror poem but a love poem.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(William Butler Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)

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October is for baseball, too.

Shohei Ohtani enjoyed an historic night in the NLCS. He pitched six innings and struck out ten batters, allowing two hits and zero runs. He batted three times and hit three home runs.

(Very roughly, it’s as if Erling Haaland or Pelé had tended goal for sixty minutes in a Champions League semifinal, stopped several good shots, given up a few corners, kept a clean sheet … and scored three goals.)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 62: Dalziel & Pascoe: “An autumn shroud”

VIENE EL OGRO – “The Ogre Is Coming” – is Diario AS’s announcement that Erling Haaland will play against Real Madrid during the next round of the UEFA Champions League.

World-class ogres are few and far between. Here is another: Warren Clarke.

As a younger man, he was one of Malcolm McDowell’s “droogs.” Eventually, he aged into stardom, becoming famous for playing Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel of Dalziel & Pascoe. (“Dalziel” is pronounced “dee-el” or “D.L.”)

In “An Autumn Shroud” (D & P series 1, episode 3, 1996), Pascoe, the young sidekick, is away on his honeymoon, and Dalziel – unmarried, surly, aggressively vulgar, and not a little lonesome – embarks upon a motoring holiday. His car breaks down in rural Lincolnshire, in the rain. In a scene both dismal and fantastical, a funeral procession materializes, punting down one of the fenland waterways. The mourners and casket drift along in their respective little boats. The widow glances up at Dalziel. He can see through her shroud that she is beautiful. (She is played by Francesca Annis: no longer young, but still a knockout.)

She invites him to stay over in her large country house. He is intrigued. He “fancies” this widow. But he also wishes to follow up on a hunch, even though Lincolnshire isn’t on his policeman’s beat.

It turns out that the deceased is the widow’s second husband to have died by misadventure. He fell off a ladder and onto a power drill which tunnelled into his heart.

There is a distinct possibility that the next person who cozies up to this woman also will die.

Other circumstances are suspicious, too:

A young man of the household has gone missing.

The housekeeper/cook neither cooks nor keeps house, and she appears to have a lover in one of the upstairs rooms. Is it her father, the old groundskeeper? – Dalziel cynically asks.

Unpleasant spongers – adult children of the deceased and his widow – lurk about on the property. Is their mutual hatred genuine? Or does it mask a conspiracy that involves them all? They glare at Dalziel, hoping that his car will be repaired so that he can leave them to perpetrate whatever it is they wish to perpetrate.

Only the widow seems glad for Dalziel’s company – and perhaps also the patriarch, the widow’s father-in-law, a distinguished, egotistical poet. When Dalziel first meets him, he is reciting some Tennyson – the other Lincolnshire poet, the old man explains. Later, some literati travel over from the United States to award him a prize. This recognition is long overdue, he proclaims in his acceptance speech. But this bluster is another exercise in misdirection: the patriarch is more calculating than he seems. And it’s likely that the warmhearted, beautiful widow is, too.

“An Autumn Shroud” isn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t even a movie: it’s an installment in a TV show that would play for another decade. What it is is an excellent genre specimen, a satisfying piece of low-key, cozy, rainy-evening entertainment. And yet it’s a departure for the TV show as a whole. There’s little of the “another day at the police station” vibe; instead, we’re treated to a classic country-house mystery. This would be odd, except that many other serials have taken this same detour – most notably, perhaps, The Adventures of Tintin, in The Castafiore Emerald.

Think of a Western (or Red Harvest). A stranger arrives. It’s his task to “clean up the town,” to trace out how disparate threads make up the same filthy cobweb. But in a country-house mystery, the “town” has shrunk to household size. Economic and political motives still exist, but they’re dwarfed by motives of the heart.

P.S. I wrote, last month, of Cold Comfort Farm, in which a similar dynamic is at play. The renowned novelist, academic, and sometime-TV-writer Malcolm Bradbury adapted that novel for the screen. He also wrote the teleplay for “An Autumn Shroud,” adapting Reginald Hill’s novel, An April Shroud.

The sports

We watch the White Sox’s starting pitcher give up his first hit against the Twins, after 8 2/3 innings. He looks like his dog just died.

We tried, he says. But they got us.

Yeah, if by “they got us” he means they spoiled his no-hitter but still lost thirteen to zero and ran out of pitchers. (Two of their position players had to take the mound. What’s wrong with that guy’s wind-up? What’s wrong with his hair? Since when do pitchers look like that?, I wondered before I realized what was going on.)

Still, I bet the Twins are drinking champagne and dancing a conga back in the clubhouse. Back in Minneapolis, even. Because the Sox didn’t get a no-hitter against them.

Well, maybe they are doing those things. What do I know. Baseball culture is so bizarre to me.

Why is that player spitting so much?, Karin asks.

They always spit.

You know what I miss from playing tee-ball and softball? she says. When we’d line up and tell each other “Good game.”

Then:

Who is that ancient guy in the Medicare commercial?

I squint at the TV. It’s late. My contact lenses are drying up inside my eyelids.

Joe Namath.

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Were I a loyal South Bender, I’d watch Notre Dame get beaten by Ohio State. But I must not be one, because no matter what I do with the antennae and the remote control, I can’t get ABC to come in on the TV.

I really do want to watch, honest. I really do want to see the Irish lose. How the years have changed me.

This game is all they were talking about at work today, Karin says.

Is it being played here, or in Columbus?, I ask. (Don’t shake your head at me. I really don’t know. I seldom leave the house.)

Traffic hasn’t been all that bad, says Karin.

So the game must be in Columbus.

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For several years, I’ve been watching video highlights of Erling Haaland without ever seeing him in real time. Until today, that is, when he suits up for his new club, Manchester City, against Aston Villa.

Some stats from the TV:

In his first half-dozen English Premier League matches, Haaland has scored ten goals; only one other person has done that.

During the season’s first five matches, Haaland scored one goal for every fifteen touches of the ball. One goal per twenty-five touches is supposed to be a world-class scoring rate. (The announcers don’t explain what they mean by “world class,” but I assume it’s something good.)

In six games, Haaland has scored more goals from within the six-yard box than any other EPL player has scored – except for one other (unnamed) player – since the beginning of last season. That is, he leads virtually everyone in that category even though he’s been eligible during 30–40 fewer games.

Scoring so many goals from inside the six-yard box means this. The player has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. And the defenders know this about him, and they still lose track of him.

In other words, he’s very, very smart.

Haaland gets today’s goal from inside the six-yard box; indeed, he scores it with his very first touch from inside the penalty box. He’s been marked so carefully that it’s taken him until the second half to get that touch. (It isn’t as if his positioning has been bad. His runs into open spaces have been impeccable all day long, although the passes to him haven’t been.)

But what most impresses me is his hold-up and linking play. Even with defenders climbing up his back or wrenching him to the ground, he controls waist-high passes and lays the ball off, smoothly and with perfect timing, to onrunning teammates. I’d start him on my team even if he never scored any goals. Teams have won with non-scoring strikers who did superb hold-up work. Haaland does that, and he’ll probably end up scoring more goals than anybody else.