When I was covering the World Cup -- eight of them -- I always welcomed the day between rounds as a chance to sleep, move on to the next town, get laundry done.  Stuff like that.

Watching at home, there is an empty feeling to the one-day space between the group stage and the knockout rounds. While sizing up the teams that survived, I want to take one more day to think about the teams that gave me pleasure but have now gone home.

I already miss the two African teams that supplied so much energy and charisma, but could not hold on for 90-plus minutes. I will miss the field leader of Nigeria, John Obi Mikel, and the manager of Senegal, Aliou Cissé, who roamed the sidelines with his Richard Pryor eyes, the only African manager of the 32.

Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia are also gone. Egypt was the biggest loser of all, making its base in the wild-east Russian province of Chechnya, with its opportunistic leader who glommed onto Mohamed Salah, the pride of Egypt, the star of Liverpool.

Being used so blatantly by a regional lord (a friend of Putin) and the moronic Egyptian federation apparently nettled Salah so badly that he is considering not playing for his homeland any more. Nice going.

I’ll miss the two vecinos – neighbors of the U.S. – Costa Rica and Panama, who managed to qualify ahead of the hapless soccer giant of the north.

And I’ll miss the tireless and combative players of South Korea, who took Germany down in the third and final game.

Will I miss Germany? I slobbered all over them after their reflexive comeback against Sweden in the second match, but ignored warning signs that their expiration date had expired.
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So much for the departed. Of the 16 survivors, I am rooting for two more vecinos, Colombia and Mexico. (How can I not love El Tri, with its opportunistic star nicknamed Chucky, from the movie character with the fiendish grin?)

I always love Brazil, going back to the great, failed team of Sócrates in 1982, and I love Spain and Andres Iniesta, trying to hang on, plus France, just because, but also in homage to the glorious final of Zidane in 1998.

And then there are the two survivors from Thursday’s last group: England has more energy than I’ve ever seen from an English squad, and Belgium won its third match with its three offensive stars all being rested, and a sub made a jitterbug goal that sunk England.

I was conflicted with England-Belgium. My mom, part Irish, was born in England. There’s that. And she mourned her two Belgian-Irish cousins from Brussels who died young after being caught participating in the Resistance. So there's that.

I’m rooting for Belgium because of the family connection, and because they have never won, and because I got to see Vincent Kompany, one of my all-time favorite defenders and soccer adults, who was honored with a quarter-hour cameo on Thursday, playing on knees “turned to sand,” as one of my Euro pals put it.
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Who else won in the group stage of the 2018 World Cup? I’m choosing the Fox broadcasting team of J.P. Dellacamera and Tony Meola, because (a) I know them, and (b) because they are soccer people who do not talk too much.

J.P and Tony let the game breathe, like many European broadcasters. They don’t feel the very American need to blather every personal fact about every player that was discussed in the pre-game production meeting. Meola has grown into this profession, dissecting the game, not just the keepers. (And he was a good one, playing in 1990 and 1994, and a backup in 2002.)  

Honorable mention goes to Jorge Perez-Navarro and Mariano Trujillo, totally bilingual and working in English, who supply just enough Latin flavor to make it different, and enjoyable.

Trujillo, a former player from Mexico, has the charming tendency to excuse some players who try something that fails. "But that’s all right,” he says, transmitting the enlightened optimism of players who keep trying stuff and fail, until something works, which, come to think of it, is the essence of this grand sport.

Now, on to the knockout round. 

(I am thinking of leaving this World Cup match post up for a while. Please feel free to chime in, whenever. The NYT is doing a great job from Russia. And my former Times soccer pal, Jeffrey Marcus, now free-lancing, has his own learned World Cup newsletter. To sign up: http://jointhebanter.com/about/)
 
June 14. Russia 5, Saudi Arabia 0. Knowing nothing about either team, I put on Fox five minutes before kickoff. I noticed that Russia had a defender named Fernandes (from Sao Caetano del Sur, Brazil) and a defender named Ignashevich whose face looks like hardened cement and who does not sing the beautiful Russian anthem. (Turned out, he’s 38, hasn’t played for the national team since 2011, so he may be out of practice for singing the anthem. Or his lips don’t move.)

Then I noticed a lanky midfielder named Golovin, with a Lyle Lovett hairdo, who reminded me of one of the most charismatic and talented leaders I have ever met, Mrs. Gollobin, the director of the Jamaica High School choir and chorus back in the day. She once snapped at me, “George, be a mensch,” and I straightened right up, in her presence, anyway.  

I decided to root for Aleksandr Golovin. Good choice. He set up the first three Russian goals for adept passes through the gaping Saudi players. I looked him up – 22, and being scouted by Juventus. He showed his youth by picking up a pointless yellow card in the final minutes. By the time he curled a free kick into the corner in the closing seconds for the fifth goal, Golovin had surely confirmed his ticket to Torino. Mrs. Gollobin would be proud of him.

Having covered eight World Cups for the NYT way back when, and having written a book about them, (https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2014/0530/Eight-World-Cups-by-George-Vecsey-decodes-international-soccer-for-newbies,) I tried to compare this day (on the tube) with openers I attended: 

The fans were a classic World Cup mix; could have been anywhere -- international types who could afford a ticket. Pretty woman in a red and white folk dress; guys with goofy headgear.  

One other observation: how nice it is to hear old World Cup hands, J.P. Dellacamera and Tony Meola, working for Fox, and confirming that one does not need a British accent to call a match for U.S. television.

How was your first match?

Check out the colorful outfits. Listen to the music. Pay attention to the message of inclusivity.

I am speaking here of the international flavor of the FA Cup Final on Saturday from sunny Wembley.

Chelsea – owned by a Russian, coached by an Italian – beat Manchester United -- owned by an American and coached by a Portuguese – by a 1-0 score -- on a penalty kick by a Belgian.

The FA Cup is one of the more romantic club championships in the world (even as FIFA threatens to pollute football with an extravagant quadrennial club tournament.)

Talk about democracy: the FA Cup tournament began last summer with amateurs and semi-professionals and other back-benchers but competition eventually produced two finalists from the top third of the Premier League, or as they say at Windsor, la crème de la crème.

The FA final was held after the royal marriage had taken place earlier, so that one great event did not intrude upon the other. (Anybody go to both?)  

The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, an American actress of biracial background, was a blend of royal tradition with a warm sermon by an American clergyman quoting Martin Luther King, plus that old English cathedral favorite, “Stand By Me,” written by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The queen's chaplain, born in Jamaica, and a 19-year-old cellist from Nottingham but clearly also of African descent, added to the new feeling of inclusion.

The buzz of the wedding inspired Lourdes, a friend in Manhattan, to prepare a veddy English tea for the big event. And in Deepest Pennsylvania, a group of women donned millinery in the murky dawn to watch the great event.

Not everybody was charmed. I checked in with a favorite relly, Jen From Islington, to see if she was watching. “Nah,” she wrote back. But then she checked a few photos on line and was inspired to write: “Underwhelmed by it all. Esp. since I learned they invited 1800 of the wretched of the earth to Windsor to watch but failed to provide them with a packed lunch. If you are having a party, have a party, I think. Don’t have a pay-as-you-go bar, or make people kick in for the cake. 
But then, I am a republican. xxJ.”

At the very least, the royals may be catching up with soccer, which has gone international in recent generations, with the old dump-and-chase English style made irrelevant by ball skills and intricate passing and devastating marksmanship, as performed in the Premier League by some of the greatest players from around the world.

(The influx of world-level players does not seem to rub off on English players, who have qualified for the upcoming World Cup – better than some nations I could mention -- but are not likely to be around long.)

(On the official Chelsea roster, 21 of 27 players are from outside England; on the official Man U roster, 19 of 27 are registered with other national federations.)

Presumably, this international flavor will continue after the implementation of Brexit diminishes the quality of life -- and probably football -- in Great Britain.

Somebody has to make Britain great again. On FA Cup final Saturday, Harry and Meghan did their bit. ​

Catering to the Thumb Generation (of which I am a fringe member), Major League Baseball disappeared a game from television on Wednesday.

The business that still charmingly thinks of itself as The National Pastime has a new partnership with the dippy kid in the gray t-shirt, Mark Zuckerberg.

I think that means all information on Mets Nation -- all we scruffy, gauche losers who root for one miracle every generation – is now in the hands of Comrade Vladimir in the Kremlin.

Facebook was already chums with something called Cambridge Analytica which seems to have been in cahoots with various apparatchiks during the 2016 election including the possible next national security advisor, Mad Dog Bolton.

Baseball is letting the t-shirt guy put the occasional major-league game on Facebook so people can like or dislike what transpires on the field. The price for one MLB game a week is $30-million for the season – that’s what matters, isn’t it?

In real life, it’s not that hard to tell if baseball fans like or dislike something. Just the other day, Giancarlo Stanton struck out five times in his Yankee Stadium debut and Yankee fans faithfully gave him something called a Bronx Cheer.

Schnooky old baseball managed to distract from Wednesday’s Mets-Phillies game in Queens. James Wagner of the Times appropriately wrote an entire sagacious article about the t-shirt guy’s coup rather than the Mets’ bullpen or the clutch hit. (Tyler Kepner did write a column about the game itself.)

What with all the teeth-gnashing about baseball’s sellout, it seemed the game itself vanished into the dark hole of likes and dislikes.

Not true. I caught most of that game on this strange medium called radio.

The Mets’ game was on WOR – 710 on the AM dial – described by Howie Rose and Josh Lewin. Rose, aware the game had vanished from the tube, offered the observation, “I think radio is here to stay.”

Home-town fans get used to their TV and radio broadcasters. When the national broadcast pre-empts a Met game, I opt for radio. Mets fans don’t need national drop-in experts telling them stuff they already know.

Plus, the sellout by #ShamelessMLB on Wednesday meant that Mets-TV addicts were forever deprived of possible weird dialogues such as the one that ensued during Thursday’s game in Washington, with Gary Cohen monitoring the banter between old teammates from 1986, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling.

Darling to Hernandez on Good Old SNY: Were you this funny when we played together? You’re pretty funny.
Cohen: He was the Prince of Darkness back then.

That's what Mets fans expect – not twiddling of thumbs.

At least the t-shirt guy hasn’t sold all of baseball to Cambridge Analytica. (Memo to Mark Zuckerberg: when you are hauled into Congress next week, go find a suit. Play dressup.)
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Speaking of Queens and baseball, my friend-the-writer, Rabbi Mendel Horowitz, has written about following baseball in Israel during Passover:  Enjoy:
 
http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/232675/why-is-this-sport-different/

The contrast between baseball and soccer, my two favorite sports, was never more apparent than this past week.

With baseball acknowledging the yawning length of games – now over three hours and getting worse – soccer returned (was it ever away?) in Europe with matches under two hours.

This is a huge advantage for soccer. A fan can commit to a match, or even half a match, without falling into a slack-jawed stupor in front of one of those four-hour Sunday-night horrors the Yanks always seem to be playing.

I made the decision last Saturday morning that I could afford to watch the first half of Manchester United and was rewarded with the delicious sense that it was 2013-14 all over again. (Man U, lost, 2-1.) Then I came back from chores to watch the second half of Everton, with Tim Howard picking up where he left off for the USA in the World Cup, trying to overcome a weak back four. (Everton coughed up a tying goal, late.)  

Two welcome chunks of the Premiership, and it was not yet noon.

Meantime, baseball is acknowledging that the average time of a game has gone from 2 hours 35 minutes to 3 hours 2 minutes 47 seconds -- the longest on record,  according to Tyler Kepner in the Times.

One reason the games get longer was noted by Howard Kitt, once a promising lefty in the Yankee chain, who has been a specialist in antitrust issues with a keen eye on sports business. (I covered him helping win county titles in basketball and baseball at Oceanside High around 1960.)

Kitt, who advanced as high as AAA ball, listed one cause of long games – “the number of pitching changes per game, especially in the late innings.

“When I played, there were three categories of pitchers: starters, long relievers and short relievers. Starters were expected to finish; long relievers were used when a starter didn't have it; and short relievers were used when a starter ran out of gas and/or when a fresh arm was needed to finish a tight game. Closers? Never hoid of 'em!

“Now, the last three innings frequently take at least as long as the first six because of the number of pitching changes by each side. Think about it: A manager walks out to the mound; signals for a reliever; who comes in from somewhere beyond the outfield fence; who then proceeds to take eight warmup pitches (hardly necessary simply to get a feel for the mound, given that the pitcher is already warm); after which--finally--the game resumes. Multiply that time two or three times per team, and some real time elapses (this can easily be verified with a stopwatch).”

Kitt, who understands the importance of commercials in televised sports, added: “If this is required by TV sponsors, understood; if not, limit the number of changes per inning and watch the game speed up.”

Asked about the number of pitchers who seem to fall apart these days, Kitt cited the high salaries since free agency. Players don’t have to take off-season jobs as they did back in the 60’s and can work out virtually all year. Do their bodies ever really rest?

However, no sport grinds its players down more greedily than soccer. We saw Champions League-level players trudge into the World Cup in early June and many of them were still slogging into July. A few weeks after the final, my favorite-named player, Bastian Schweinsteiger of Germany, flew across the world for a meaningless friendly and was creamed by a red-hot player from Major League Soccer. Now he’s out six weeks.

Soccer, under the see-no-evil “leadership” of Sepp Blatter, does not care. On Monday, Neymar of Brazil, last seen writhing on the grass with a broken back on July 4, was running around Camp Nou on Barcelona, along with his new playmate, Luis Suarez, he of the health-hazard choppers.

I know Suarez is suspended from some league and national matches, but shouldn’t he be banned from going out in public until he is trained?

On Tuesday, some of the lads were playing in an early round of the Champions League.

But at least soccer league matches are over in two hours, whereas baseball could be dawdling toward irrelevancy.  

Because I am slow, I needed my son (and later, in print, Maureen Dowd) to explain to me that the Stephen Colbert I see in fragments is his entire act.

In my tangential relationship to much of television, I assumed this was one facet of Colbert’s persona, that sometimes he was actually Stephen Colbert.

But, no, I was patiently told, he does this all the time.

So now Colbert is about to replace David Letterman in the next year or so. As somebody who has grown older along with Letterman, I admit to misgivings.

Wait, they have given a terrific forum to somebody who mimics right-wing wackos?

How will that work in interviewing guests? Will Colbert switch a dial and draw out guests the way Dave does in his own twitchy way?

(My inner adolescent loves Dave talking about Martha Stewart and the justice system: “She shot a guy.” And how Dave made poor addled John McCain squirm for ducking him in 2008. And the quacking noises when Dr. Phil arrives. And Dave’s flat-out crushes on Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett, and why not?)  

Probably it’s just me, but I don’t find Colbert funny. (I know he’s a good, smart family guy.) I think it’s because, in addition to soccer and baseball, I watch mostly news on television and they are all over the place.

Ted Cruz? Louie Gohmert? Darrell Issa? Mitch McConnell? The Koch Brothers? The Fox lot? Rand Paul? Eric Cantor? Frothing preachers? Avaricious bankers? State legislators trying to make it harder to vote? Beyond satire.

The first time I saw much of Colbert was via the televised correspondents’ dinner in 2006 when he made fun of President Bush, who was there. My politics are the same as Colbert’s, but I still thought it was tacky. Remember this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7FTF4Oz4dI

I have the feeling Colbert has created a role that may be hard to put behind him – much like another good man, James Gandolfini, who in his later work still seemed about to reach for his pistol. Not his fault. He had done too good a job creating Tony Soprano.

We’ll see.

Next Tuesday, Colbert will appear on the Letterman show.  The tastes of late-night audiences shift by the generation, of course. I tried watching Jimmy Fallon for his first few weeks. Love his band, but Fallon seems on a perpetual sugar rush. I dialed back to Dave, fiddling with papers on his desk, puzzling over electronics.

I’m hoping Dave, in his late-maturing way, will draw out the inner Stephen Colbert.

As somebody who could not watch a second of Jay Leno, ever, I was charmed by Jimmy Fallon’s first show Monday night.

I’m a total Letterman fan, attuned to his twitchy moods, his dark history, his world view, his infatuations – Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett. But Fallon can be an outlet during reruns, commercials, stupid pet tricks.

I love that Fallon is young (39), agile and musical. I love the brothers in the shades in his band (The Roots) and hope they get more of a chance to play whole riffs than Letterman allows Paul’s talented band to do, on air.

My one question about the Fallon show is the presence of his announcer pal Steve Higgins. As an old guy, I kept saying, “Why is Steve Allen standing there? Is he a ghost who materializes from the walls of the ancient studio?”

I also love the Spike Lee intro for Fallon – need to catch more of the references – and love the ‘30’s set, so New York, so Rockefeller Plaza. Two shows from The Greatest City in the World, as Letterman’s announcer used to call it. 

Welcome to Big Town. It may be time to learn how to download TV shows.

If the Roman Catholic church needs spending money – and what religion doesn’t? – I have a modest proposal: brand the tolerant words of Pope Francis about gays and sell t-shirts and ball caps with the revolutionary phrase, which sounds like the sayings of the Jewish preacher of two millennia ago.

The new Pope’s words on his trip home from Brazil suggest an inclusivity not always seen in the era of the various hand hand-choppers of modern religions. You’re not like me? Whack!

Speaking of judging, how about the interview by Lauren Green of Fox, apparently the occupier of the Glenn Beck Chair of Philosophy at the network of fair-and-balanced?

Green was interviewing Reza Aslan, author of a new book about Jesus, called Zealot. She asked how he, as an American of Iranian descent, who is Muslim, could possibly write a book about Christianity. (He had been Christian for a time, but she did not seem to know that.)

In the official Fox judgment, this rule would disqualify Hindus from writing about Islam, Christians from writing about Judaism, and so on. Academic research and opinion, be damned. The academic was forced on the defense, to stress his degrees and past work. In Beck-ish, O’Reilly-ish tones, the Foxite asserted her position: Stick to your own kind.

The good news is that Zealot is selling very well. In appearances with Chris Hayes and others, Aslan has come off as wry, complicated and earnest. Perhaps he should have done the Fox interview with a t-shirt quoting this new Pope.

At first I thought Chris Hayes was a trifle callow when he began making cameos on MSNBC, but he has quickly become one of the most thoughtful talk-show hosts on television.

And my long-time impression of Christopher Hitchens was of a skanky mixture of alcohol, tobacco and ego, but now I am enjoying his last collection of essays.

My wife kept saying there was more to both of them, and she’s usually right. (She told me to take a fresh look at the noted wingnut Ted Turner during his hilariously epic Goodwill Games venture with the old Soviet Union in the late ‘80’s.)

Hayes was tall and young and enthusiastic when he started to pop up on the Rachel Maddow show. It wasn’t that I disagreed with him about much, but I just didn’t think the world needed another true believer on the left or right.

Fortunately, somebody saw enough to give Hayes his own show, Up w/Chris Hayes, on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 8 to 10 on MSNBC. He knows his stuff, and he also lets his guests speak – in paragraphs, in complete thoughts  – without shouting them down or belittling them, which is surely the mode on cable these days.

Hayes is a master of getting smart guests, most of them from the liberal end, but he is gracious and fair to all guests (as is the well-prepared Maddow.)

Last Sunday Hayes had three panelists I did not know, all of them interesting, as well as Edward Conard, who helped build Bain Capital and is the author of the current book, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong.

In the course of a civil conversation, Conard agreed that Mitt Romney was “legally” the CEO of Bain until 2002, a point Romney does not choose to concede.

I could not tell if Conard felt he was able to fully represent his book, but he seemed to fit in with the other panelists.

(Melissa Harris-Perry strikes pretty much the same thoughtful tone on MSNBC on weekends from 10 to noon. May their tribe increase.)

Christopher Hitchens was an acquired taste. I had caught him preening and pontificating over the years and was mostly turned off. (As my friend Pincus once said about somebody at work, we grew up in different schoolyards.)

A few years ago, at my wife’s urging, I read Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch-22, about a life far more Dickensian than I could have imagined. After he died, I began reading his last book, Arguably: Essays.

Hitchens takes readers places we do not have time to explore – authors, countries, mind sets. I have no idea how he managed to know so many people, be so many places. He even had himself waterboarded -- without Dick Cheney ordering it.

Just one essay will stand in for all of them. Given the ferment that has come out of Tunisia in the past few years, I was delighted to discover Hitchens had visited there for a July 2007 essay in Vanity Fair. It began:

If we all indeed come from Africa, then the very idea of Africa itself comes from the antique northern coast of the great landmass, where the cosmology is subtly different and where the inhabitants look north to Europe and southward at the Sahara. Here was the mighty civilization known as Carthage, which came as close as possible to reversing what we think of as the course of “history” and conquering Europe from Africa instead of the other way around. With its elephants and armies and under the brilliant generalship of Hannibal, it penetrated all the way through Spain and France and down over the Alps…

Hitchens soon introduces us to the wine and cuisine and feminism and education level of modern Tunisia as well as the tensions within Islam that more or less prepare the reader for the revolution that followed.  

I am going through the Hitchens collection slowly, hoping somehow it will keep expanding. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that avowed atheist found a way to file from the beyond?