Safe to say this isn’t exactly how you’d picture your debut at your new club to go.
Goalkeeper Radu Mitu played his first game for Moldovan side Milsami-Ursidos on Saturday. Hopefully it wasn’t his last.
After saving a weak shot from distance, Mitu attempted to quickly throw the ball out to a team-mate, but instead the ball (perhaps sticking to his gloves) incredulously lands in his own net! A goalkeeper’s worst nightmare.
(via sport1.md)
MLS and the folks over at Howler have teamed up to bring North American soccer fans a cool (and free!) digital magazine. The inaugural issue of Overlap is out now at the App Store; the next issue will drop around the league’s All-Star game this summer.
The ‘zine combines Howler’s cutting-edge design with several multimedia features, including interviews with players and some interactive graphics. Features include a profile of Sporting KC’s Graham Zusi and a history of MLS, relative to other North American sports leagues.
Overlap also contains an unintentional nod towards American soccer magazines of the past.When the editor of this website founded the late Kick! Magazine in the 1990s, he asked George Vecsey to write the lead article. Editors Greg Lalas and George Quaraishi had Vecsey write the lead here. Both articles are classics.
So you wanna be a goalie eh?
Lesson #1: Don’t do this.
Seriously, we’ve seen a bad number of goalie errors this weekend, but can anyone really top this entry from the Eredivisie? Utrecht’s Robbin Ruiter has a complete brain fart here and can only watch as NEC gladly accepts his early holiday present.
Al-Habsi eat your heart out!
Oh dear!
Simon Mignolet has arguably been Sunderland’s best player this season, but this moment will certainly not be in his highlight reel. His blunder proved costly in a 2-4 loss to West Brom.
Guess we know what Shane Long is thankful for this year!
So that happened…
Atletico Rafaela goalkeeper Guillermo Sara is the guilty party here on this horrific gaffe that gave Estudiantes the final goal of a 3-1 win in a recent league game in Argentina.
Just kick it away!
Any sport covetous of the mainstream is without hope if it doesn’t attract a media following commensurate to its ambitions. Happily, we can report that American soccer writing is entering a golden age as the sport burrows itself deeper into the national conscience.
For some years websites like ours have invested considerable time and money into dropping writers amidst the action, taking sharp angles and crafting good sentences. Mainstream magazines like the New Yorker and Newsweek no longer hesitate to profile American soccer players, or even stick them on the cover.
But the real breakthrough is the advent of soccer literature. Already prevalent in Europe through magazines such as When Saturday Comes, Hard Gras and The Blizzard (edited and founded by our own Jonathan Wilson,) not to mention a pile of books dedicated to the philosophies of the sport’s luminaries and its cultural and anthropological impact, the U.S. is about to enter this rarified realm.
XI Quarterly.
The first ever issue of XI Quarterly (including a story on Johan Cruyff’s tumultuous NASL days co-authored by yours truly) should be sliding through mail boxes any day now. The maiden run of Howler (for which, full disclosure, I have a standing assignment), also a quarterly, is at the printers.
Daily coverage, analysis and profiling in shorter pieces in spaces like ours will remain the sport’s bread and butter. But now, at last, the long-form format is available to the considerable talent on the soccer beat, for the benefit of its readers too. For those stories that merit being told in 4,000 words.
People often ask me when soccer will “arrive”. I’ve never believed it will suddenly displace basketball or football in one seminal moment. (Nor should it want to, because sports that rise quickly tend to travel just as swiftly in the opposite direction.)
Instead, I tell them to look for small indicators that a sea change is creeping in. This would be one of them: a hint that enough people are presumed willing to sit down with a single soccer story for half an hour that they will sustain two ambitious magazines. — Leander Schaerlaeckens
Howler.
Check out a teaser for XI’s first issue here.
And an excerpted article on the history of the U.S. Men’s National Team’s tactics here.
