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It seems like yesterday but it was 20 years ago last Sunday when Slava Bilic did his corny little death rattle on the lawn at Stade de France.
He had been tapped lightly on the upper chest by Laurent Blanc of France but he fell to the grass like a man hit by a baseball bat – clutching his forehead. That’s how badly the pain was radiating. The ref went for it and showed Blanc a red card, which meant the steady French defender would miss the next match, which, as a result of the French victory, turned out to be the World Cup final. Blanc was on the sidelines, agonizing, when Zinedine Zidane played the most beautiful final in World Cup history in a 3-0 victory over Brazil. In those days, FIFA executives were so busy stuffing their gunnysacks that they had no time to update their product. Nowadays, the ref would hear a voice in his earphone and would trot over to the little VAR unit at the edge of the field to see for himself that Bilic had faked it. That was the last time Croatia was in the semifinals. On Wednesday they will be playing England in the second half of the all-European Union semifinal, after France meets Belgium on Tuesday. Floppers beware. The two men were familiar figures in world soccer. Both played and coached all over the place, intersecting on occasion, like 2011 when Bilic coached the Croatian national team and Blanc coached France and they met in a friendly. The men chatted amiably, but if Bilic has ever apologized, it is between the two of them. At the time, Bilic – a lawyer, by education -- said he was afraid he would get a yellow card for faking, and miss the final, so he exaggerated his motions. After that match, he said he told Blanc he was sorry for causing him to miss the final. “I guess I should have hit him right there,” Blanc said. Flopping is still a plague on the sport, but enlightened physicality in the scrum is done by everybody, both sides. (Where were the Croatian defenders on the late header by Russia on Saturday? All flat-footed, as if stricken by Putin nerve gas.) Bilic employed the tactics of the sport, for better or worse. In the age of VAR, he just might be rewarded with a card for bad acting. Even FIFA, with its Qatar World Cup and its threat to hold a bloated 48-team extravaganza in 2026 gets something right, once in a while. My 1998 column on the Bilic flop is here. It begins: "I once met a man who had died 100 times." https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/10/sports/sports-of-the-times-in-soccer-flopping-is-an-art-form.html For other information on the Bilic-Blanc meeting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaven_Bili%C4%87#West_Ham_United_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Blanc http://www.goal.com/en-india/news/2292/editorials/2011/03/29/2416207/it-was-laurent-blancs-fault-he-missed-the-1998-world-cup https://dailyfootballshow.com/remembering-belgium-france-england-and-croatias-last-trips-to-the-world-cup-semi-finals/
Ed Martin
7/9/2018 11:32:16 am
Not really germane, but if I were casting a British woman sports announcer for Saturday Night Live, I could not do better than this real person, “ A Really nice bloke.” Meanwhile, Peggy has turned into a real WC fan, she has had to relearn the game, of course, after watching me at Muhlenberg. I hung a Do Not Resusitate sign around the Mets’ figurative necks. Ciao.
George Vecsey
7/9/2018 12:25:45 pm
Ed: Where is Kate McKinnon when we need her?
Andy Tansey
7/9/2018 12:29:14 pm
I had the same question ("Where were the Croatian defenders on the late header by Russia on Saturday? All flat-footed, as if stricken by Putin nerve gas.") and was actually starting to worry about the conspiracy theory. But then they advanced.
Michael
7/9/2018 01:25:49 pm
George & Andy - Be nice. Flat footed? Perhaps technically you are right. Those guys had played close to 120 minutes at the time. There were no slackers out there as far as I amconcerned (same opinion for many pundits I've been listening to via podcasts, etc.). Every player on both squads had given it their all but there was little "all" left at that point. That is why the next step needs to be a PK shootout. Can't wait till tomorrow (and Wednesday). Best, Michael
George Vecsey
7/10/2018 10:42:52 am
Michael, thanks for that. I didn't mean to suggest they weren't trying; they were gassed. who wouldn't be? People keep coming up with goofus suggestions about playing til a goal, or going 7 v 7 til a score. It's all torture. You're exactly right....still, it was strange to see so many players not go up with their marks. Joe Scarborough (I seldom watch in AM, but he knows the sport) as yapping about it. He should play 120 minutes in midsummer heat. GV
Joshua Rubin
7/9/2018 03:40:32 pm
Oh, right, the Mets. Wow did they break our hearts early this year. 12-2, and then the abyss. At least they find new ways to do it each year with such ingenuity.
Mendel
7/9/2018 03:53:01 pm
I rooted for Eovaldi to throw a perfect game against us. It was fun, until the NYM even blew that chance.
Andy Tansey
7/9/2018 08:29:56 pm
Sorry, George, can't resist.
George Vecsey
7/10/2018 10:49:26 am
Andy, you are on the cusp of two great sports, parking where you do.
Brian Savin
7/10/2018 11:01:27 am
Twenty years to the day. That wasn't sports commentary; that was literature. We should send it to Stockholm. If a hermit lyricist that doesn't always make sense can snatch the Big Kahuna, then maybe it's time for a sports columnist who does (unless he gabbles in politics).
Andy Tansey
7/10/2018 10:49:47 pm
George, dunno if you noticed how I positioned my flip phone for this past preseason's "Wet Paint" shot from the Willets Point platform so that a tree would block the bank's four-letter word. :-) Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html |
