One of the cool things about living on the west coast is that most of the global football that I enjoy watching happens early in the morning, especially on weekends. I can squeeze in a match or two before getting on with my day. Likewise, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the only NHL hockey team I follow, usually play in the afternoon, while I am wrapping up work and preparing dinner.
This weekend I snuck a few games in. The Africa Cup of Nations has progressed into the Quarter Final stage, and I watch Nigeria v Algeria yesterday morning. Nigeria put on an absolute clinic and look to be favourites for the cup going forward. Having missed out on World Cup qualifying, this is their chance to acquire some national silverware this year, and they are taking it. They were brilliant. They kettled Algeria into their own end for most of the match, with their defenders playing an extremely high line and a persist press forcing turnovers. The midfield was a quagmire of peril for Algeria trying to break out, and times when they managed a counter attack, Nigerias defenders were too fast and too strong to allow anything to develop. It was a fantastic display of individual and collective intent and the west Africans won 2-0 but it could easily have been 4-0.
ALos yesterday morning, the classic FA Cup third round happened in England, which is the moment that the Premier League teams join the competition. This makes for fun match ups as there are still a few lower league teams in the mix and these matches provide historic events for the smaller clubs, sometimes even resulting in giant killings that will define a club’s identity for generations. The biggest mismatch of the round might have been Manchester City v Exeter City, which the Premier League team won 10-1, but other matchups in the round were alos interesting. Grimsby Town, a team I have some connection to, needed 86 minutes to beat Weston-Super-Mare 3-2, a semi-professional side playing in the sixth division of English football, the National League South. Despite the loss, Weston-Super-Mare will remember this day forever. Making it this far in the FA Cup is a huge accomplishment.
Tottenham lost to Aston Villa, in a match that seems consistent with our recent run of form. I wasn’t able to watch it as I didn’t have a feed to the game, but I’m not sad. The game was strange. Afterwards, a brawl broke out between the teams and that seems to rather capture the mood at the club at the moment. The wheels have come off and changes re going to be needed, or we will have to consign ourselves to a future of mid table football.
Tottenham were trying to commemorate the 125th anniversary of our first FA Cup win in 1901, still the only time a non-league has won the trophy, and they did so with a a kit that was all white. The badge and sponsor logos were white and the players had no names on the back. It looked strange and in retrospect after the match was over, one couldn’t help feeling that instead of a throw back it rather represented a deletion and erasure of everything. Our elimination from the competition at the first opportunity means we won’t see those kits again.
Later in the day The Leafs took on the Canucks at home, in a game that had family implications. Despite my best efforts both of my children have adopted other NHL teams as their favourites and Finn is a moderate Canucks fan. I can’t blame him as that is the team he has grown up with, and last year when we went to see the Leafs’ visit to Vancouver he walked away with a 2-1 win shining in his eyes. Last night was vengeance. The Leafs looked really good in an unstoppable 5-0 win. Vancouver is bad this year, but the Leafs seem to have overcome some of the troubling apathy that plagued the first half of the season, and despite some key injuries, they are clicking at the moment.
And finally this morning, waking early to catch Bayern Munich v Wolfsburg to watch two of my favourite ex-Tottenham players. Christian Erikson captains Wolfsburg and Harry Kane leads the line for Bayern. Kane is on 19 goals this season in the league and the season is only half over. He scored his 20th in one of the prettiest goals you might ever see, a curling shot that bounced of the crossbar and the post in the upper corner to find it’s way in. Bayern won 8-1. In the stadium they play the Can-Can Dance every time they score. It was getting a bit tiresome today.
Now it’s off to walk in the rain, as an atmospheric river has settled in over our part of the coast and it’s dark and warm and moist. Love it.
The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year’s Day.
A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path. All told its about a 7 kilometre loop and it takes you through forest, down creeks, past waterfalls and along the cliff tops of Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, the edge of the world, the edge of Squamish territory, the southern edge of Atl’ka’7tsem/Howe Sound. It’s my favourite place on Bowen, looking out over the wide open Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea. From the bluffs one can see, on a clear day, the islands of Puget Sound to the south and the norther Gulf Islands of Texada and Lasquiti to the north. Across the Strait the Mountains of Vancouver Island rise, and nearly all of the northern Coast Salish territories are visible. It’s an amazing place.
Today we saw 23 species of birds, including a pair of marbled murrelets, several hooded mergansers, buffleheads, red necked grebes, and a few of the hundreds of surf scoters that spend the winter around our islands. This is going to be a big year of birdwatching, with planned trips to Costa Rica and France and several trips to eastern Canada on the docket for this year. I’m wondering if I can make it to 365 birds for the year so we’ll see.
Back at home, Spurs drew Brentford 0-0 in an insipid draw, but in the hockey world, my Maple Leafs came back twice from being two goals down to win an 11 goal thriller 6-5. Auston Matthews scored a hat trick. Hopefully this signals a change in form for one of my blue and white teams. The other one may need to do some business in the January transfer window to regain some dignity.
Yes the World Junior hockey tournament is coming up (and that is a big end of year tradition in many Canadian homes ) but the African Cup of Nations is also on and that is the best continental tournament for the neutral. It’s unpredictable, features many top world players and you find yourself pulling for countries like Botswana who are currently holding their own against the powerhouse of Senegal. If you love underdog football, this is for you.
The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.
So many of the principles for work and community I use in my life have come through the people I met and who supported me back in the early 2000s when I started consulting (it’s the only job I’ve had this century!). One of those networks and collections of people were the folks associated with the Berkana Institute with whomI worked for many years. My buddy Tennesson, one of the OG Berkana guys and still one of my best friends, pulled up a set of principles that Berkana used back in the early days, and I’m grateful to notice how they continue to inform my practice today:
- We relay on human goodness.
- We depend on diversity.
- We treasure the power of community.
- We trust life’s capacity to create order without control.
- We nourish our relationships and ourselves.
A few others I gained from Berkana include, “no matter the question, the answer is community” and “proceed until apprehended.”
Your algorithm may be giving you a false sense of confidence about what you know. I find this anecdotally true. Stuff I learn about through facebook or LinkedIn seems to make me feel knowledgeable especially on quicker moving issues, like the North Coast tanker ban. But stuff that comes through Bluesky, Mastodon or my RSS feeds are much more nuanced because of who I choose to follow.
Football is a game played with principles, becasue it’s a complex game and requires players to react and respond to a constantly changing environment. It was a joy watching Tottenham today cover some sense of purpose after a series of poor results, especially at home. Visiting Brentfod was no match for Spurs, and we dominated possession and played incredible defence off the ball. Van der Ven and Romero are probably amongst the best centre back pairs in the world when they are on their game, which they were today. Xavi Simons finally got the start at the number 10 position and generated the first goal and scored the second. Spurs were positive and exciting to watch and won 2-0. More of that would be much welcomed.
Elsewhere in the football world, today the Vancouver Whitecaps will play Inter Miami for their first MLS trophy in the MLS Cup Final. I used to be a huge supporter of the Whitecaps and for all kinds of reasons I stepped back from supporting that organization. But many of my friends are core parts of the Whitecaps supporters movements and they are having the time of their lives. Vancouver has played their best season of football in their 41 year history and have made every final they have competed in, winning the Canadian Championship and losing in the CONCACAF Champions Cup down in Mexico. But today they have a chance to make it two from three. They beat Miami on the way to that continental cup final, and the likes of Messi and Suarez will be side-eyeing the ‘Caps today who are on a wonderful run of form. We will see what happens.