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.
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.
I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.