Euro 2008: Turkey 2:3 Germany

Well, I was wrong about the score, but I was right about the Turks.  Man, they are tough. I underestimated the sheer will of the Turkish second string -- mostly guys from the great Turkish clubs like Besiktas, Galatasaray, and Fenerbahce. They were playing with only three or four of their starters, and yet they managed to score two excellent goals against Germany.

Turkey came out and really took it to the Germans, who seemed listless for the first 20 minutes. Altintop showed great initiative, and Turkey looked dangerous around Germany's goal -- particularly when Kasim hit the crossbar.  The goal in the 22nd minute was kind of flukey, but it came off a well-executed throw in and cross.  Germany came quickly back and scored within 5 minutes.  Then, with 11 minutes to go, and the international video feed down, Klose got in front of the Turkish keeper and headed in what looked like a sure winner.  But of course Turkey came back and Semih scored a terrific redirect past Lehmann at the near post. 2-2 with about 5 minutes to go -- it had to be extra time.

But Germany had a little magic left -- a fantastic bit of skill on a one-two that released Lahm on the left side of the goal, and he finished like a striker, into the top corner.  Over, fittingly, in the 90th minute.

Major props to Turkey. What a performance.  They are clearly on the international stage to stay.  Germany won, but they looked beatable: shaky under pressure around their goal, unable to maintain possession in midfield, and reliant on counter-attacking against a depleted and stretched Turkish defense.  May work against Russia, but probably not as well against Spain.

Euro 2008: Redux & Semi-finals Preview

Ok, let's admit it.  Euro 2008 has been insane.  The quality of play has been excellent and a significant number of the matches have been on the knife's edge until the final whistle.  

The semi-finals will be Germany v. Turkey and Russia v. Spain.  I think you could have gotten long odds on this foursome before the tournament.  Of the four, only Germany was a stone cold favorite. The bugbear of Spanish failure in major tournaments argued for one or both of the Group of Death teams -- Holland, Italy or France -- to be in the semi's.  Certainly not Spain and Russia.  If it had to be two Group D teams, it was more likely Sweden than Russia.

But ... Germany struggled out of Group B behind the Croats; Turkey rallied bravely to beat Switzerland, then Czech Republic, then Croatia; Russia reversed their early fortunes and beat Sweden and Holland; and Spain cruised through their group before outlasting Italy in a shootout. So there you have it.  

The top five matches for me were: 

5.  Holland 4:1 France

4.  Croatia 2:1 Germany

3.  Turkey 3:2 Czech Republic

2.  Spain 0:0 Italy

1.  Holland 1:3 Russia

I think the Croatia-Turkey match was technically "better" than the Holland-France match, and would have been my #3 if the Croats had won it in extra time as it looked like they would.  But the junk Turkey goal at the end and their shootout win just ruined it for me.  I like Turkey, but that was a terrible ending to an amazing performance by Croatia in this tournament.

Turkey-Czech Republic was one of the best football matches I have ever watched.  It had everything -- high stakes (a guaranteed place in the second round for the winner, the possibility of penalties if it ended in a draw), tons of goals, and one of the most remarkable comebacks ever, as Turkey overcame a two goal lead in the last 15 minutes.  It was glorious.  Ultimately, though, I felt it was more drama than quality. 

Spain-Italy was actually drab as football matches go.  Italy played very negative football, with an occasional long ball or free kick aimed at Toni.  Bleh. Spain tried to lay siege with possession and skill, but couldn't finish.  0-0 for 120 minutes.  Not normally my favorite kind of match.

But I watched it with my Spanish father-in-law and my football-crazed seven year old, wearing their red jerseys, and we were hanging on every half-chance.  My son was so nervous he was literally bouncing up and down on the couch. When golden boy Fernando Torres was substituted for the totally overrated Guiza, we booed (we were right, too -- Torres had been inspiring, while Guiza was ineffective and then proceeded to miss a penalty in the shootout).  When Casillas saved Di Natale's penalty and Fabregas stepped up and buried his match-winner (his first ever penalty kick in an international -- no pressure, kid), we were ecstatic.

But it was the relentless and beautiful Russian offensive onslaught against the Dutch that really made it my match of the tournament so far.  The Russians should have been scared of the Dutch, who scored the most goals of any team in the group stage (nine, allowing only one), crushed France, Italy and Romania and looked destined for the final.  Somebody forgot to mention this to Andrei Arshavin.  He terrorized the Dutch in the first 50 minutes -- I thought he had three outright chances that he basically made by himself.  When Pavlyuchenko scored the first goal, no way could you say it was against the run of play.  Russia should have won it outright, but Holland came back and Van Nistelrooy stole a goal in the last couple of minutes.  

In the second period of extra time, Arshavin, whose fitness was unbelievable, put the Dutch away.  First, he made a crazy run down the left to the end line and crossed to the far post for Torbinski's go-ahead goal.  It was Arshavin's third aggressive, dangerous cross in extra-time.  Then minutes later he took a long throw-in and turned the defender brilliantly, slotting the ball through Van Der Saar's legs for the kill shot.  Awesome football. 

Predictions for the semi's?  You have to see Germany as the heavy favorite against Turkey.  But I think it may be closer than the pundits think.  Turkey are very tough, both physically and mentally.  They are just too depleted from injuries.  I think it's 2-0, Germany.  But I wouldn't be surprised if it goes to extra time 0-0 and the Germans have to struggle to win it.

Spain will have their hands full with Russia.  Both teams are young, fast and skillful.  Spain is more experienced, better at defending, and has more international stars; Russia has the motivation, the better coach, and the one guy who can make a play when he needs to most. Spain abused Russia 4:1 in the first match of the group stage, but Arshavin was on the bench due to a red card suspension he picked up in qualifying (against Andorra -- is that even a country?), and Russia clearly didn't have their sea legs early in the tournament.  Too close to call, but it feels like 2:1 Spain in a wide-open match.

Any of the possible finals will produce intriguing story lines.  Clearly, Germany-Spain would be the marquee matchup, but Germany-Russia would be intense, too.  Russia-Turkey would have the European football world reeling -- more even than the improbable Greek run in 2004.  I can't wait.

Moving to Blogger

I'm moving Bizpunk to Blogger.  I have to move my web server up to northern California over the summer, and I want to have a stable site in the interim.  I may go back to my Typo blog after I move, but I'm here for now.

I'll try to back-fill my old posts here when I pull them off the server.

DICE

DICE is always an interesting gathering. If GDC is (or at least was) a combination job fair and tech seminar for the video game industry rank and file, and E3 was the sales and marketing orgy, then DICE is where the industry celebrates creativity and the craft -- and occasionally where the creatives confront the suits.

I was there to do one of the two Autodesk-sponsored "Fight Club" sessions. My old friend Keith Boesky and I took opposing sides of the consolidation debate. I was pro, Keith was con. In the second session, Kelly Flock and Min Kim, from Nexon, debated packaged goods vs. online. It was a lively and amusing format, with questions and catcalls coming from all sides of a stage in the middle of the crowd.

There were a couple of uncomfortable moments. A guy from Sierra Online spoke out to dispute our contention that big video game companies can't innovate creatively. He said Sierra was innovating creatively. Huh? I could only feel pity as I imagined Activision shutting Sierra Online down, as they will certainly do after the merger with Vivendi is complete.

The second uncomfortable moment came when a strange guy in a baggy, cream-colored linen suit, wearing wrap-around, Paris Hilton shades, approached the microphone. He rudely suggested that I had no business talking about innovation because I published JAMDAT Bowling. This is a common fanboy posture, which I have heard many times before. It completely misapprehends the nature of innovation in mobile gaming -- a casual, accessible, immensely fun game that you can play with one thumb on a tiny screen while in line at the theater is the very essence of innovation. What made this confrontation remarkable is that the oddly dressed fellow was Mark Ollila, the head of games at Nokia. Wow. Maybe he thought he was being funny. Maybe he was bitter about the failing high-end mobile game startup he founded, Telcogames. [UPDATE: Telcogames has since gone bankrupt, torching its creditors]

I also attended a couple of the big hall lectures. The one by the senior team from Blizzard made me realize something. Blizzard is lionized for its creative independence as a developer, but remember that Blizzard has been owned by a large corporation of one sort or another since 1994. They were only independent, in the business sense, for 3 of the 17 years they have been operating. So, I wonder how useful their comments about killing bad projects, taking as much time as necessary, etc., are to actual developers, since Blizzard hasn't had to worry about the common developer headaches of payroll, milestone-based cash flow, or securing a publisher for their next project. They've been attached to a corporate teat throughout their period of peak creativity.

Their genius (aside from their immense and obvious game-making genius) seems to be in keeping the suits at bay. They have the amazing ability to retain their creative independence while under the corporate boot. It's a lesson for Activision and EA to learn (happily, from reports I heard of John Riccitiello's comments on Friday, he seems to have learned it).

The other illuminating lecture I saw was by Robin Kaminsky from Activision. She gave a brave talk about the limits of creativity and the importance of marketing -- a tough message to deliver to the DICE crowd. It was very thoughtful and well-researched (but her presentation materials were appalling -- Robin, go read Presentation Zen right now!).

What caught my attention was that Robin's talk showed, precisely, why the suits will never vanquish the creatives. Activision has been masterful at getting behind hits. Whether it was MechWarrior, or Quake 3, or Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in my era there; Spider-man, Call of Duty, or Guitar Hero in this era, they max out hits like no other publisher.

But that marketing machine is dependent on the existence of great games. Robin talked at length about engineering Call of Duty 4's success. But that was relatively safe -- Call of Duty had several successful previous incarnations, it was being built by an A+ team at Infinity Ward, and COD itself was built on the genre-making success of EA's Medal of Honor. Same with Guitar Hero -- that was the creative brainchild of Harmonix, and it was Red Octane who took the market-acceptance risk, shipping a game with a plastic guitar. The contrast between Blizzard's approach and Activision's was stark. Should make for an interesting merger.

Packaged goods executives come from industries where you can create products by consumer and market research. But in creative businesses, it's impossible to do research on something nobody has ever seen before. That's the realm of creative genius and risk. There is a quote that I've heard attributed to both Tripp Hawkins and Dan Scherlis: that a video game genre is just a successful product and its imitators. The packaged goods marketers have been great at mining existing genres, but not so good at creating the new ones.

Microsoft

In early 2000, Microsoft was at the top of its game. Windows 95 and it's successor Windows 98 had achieved worldwide dominance. Apple was still a year away from releasing OS X and the iPod, marking the beginning of the company's renaissance. Internet Explorer had wrested leading market share from Netscape, repositioning Microsoft as a leading internet company and dooming the dot-com darling to an ignominious marriage with AOL. The Xbox was poised to take significant market share in the video game market, unprecedented for a non-Japanese console. And, of course, Outlook and the productivity suite were near-monopolies in businesses worldwide, without significant challengers.

Sure, there were chinks in the armor. Linux (aligned with MySQL, Apache, and various open-source programming languages) was clearly taking significant share on the server side from NT, SQL Server, and Internet Server. But Microsoft had such enormous advantages through its monopoly in desktop OS that it seemed unstoppable.

Now, eight years later, it all seems to have gone very, very wrong. Microsoft has never seemed so vulnerable. Apple is taking share on the desktop with better user interface and a superior media suite (iTunes/iPod, iLife), giving customers what they actually want. Ubuntu is clunky but credible, challenging at the low end. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Myspace, in aggregate, have built more market value than Microsoft with pure internet plays, in just a few short years. Xbox 360 is incinerating billions of dollars of capital; the Zune is DOA. And Vista is a massive dud -- never has a major Microsoft OS release been met with less enthusiasm. They've completely lost the web serving and file serving markets to the open-source stacks.

The surest sign of Microsoft's vulnerability is the recent challenges they've faced on productivity apps. Zimbra for email and the iCal standard for PIM, cutting into Outlook. OS X "Leopard", slated for release later this month, promises even better calendar and email integration. Apple's iWork suite, Google apps, etc. -- not great, yet, but getting there. We see a lot of pitches from internet and media companies, and I'd say a good 25% of them show presentations on Macs with Keynote. Completely unimaginable 8 years ago.

The management's view on all this seems hard to read. Balmer continues to snark it up, calling Google a "one-trick pony" and Facebook "a fad" -- it's not that he doesn't have a point, but you'd hope for a little more clarity of strategy and a little less schoolyard dissing.

So, as Lenin would say, "What is to be done?" I've heard glib chatter that Microsoft would have been better off had it been broken up by the antitrust courts into smaller companies. I am not so sure I buy that. But clearly something needs to give. The current strategy is just not maximizing the considerable assets.

Galaxy-Chelsea

I went to the match with my family on Saturday. I'll have more to say about the atmosphere and Beckham-mania later, but first, the match.
It was very entertaining. Chelsea, clearly still in pre-season form, played most of their great players (Robben was a notable exception). In the course of the afternoon, Drogba, Lampard, Kalou, Terry, Joe Cole, Sean Wright-Phillips, Essien, Makalele, Shevchenko and Carvahlo saw action, as well as newcomers like Malouda, Ben Haim, and Sidwell. That's some A+ talent. Some of the most expensive footballers in the world. Getting to see these guys in the cozy confines of the Home Depot Center was a thrill in itself.

The Galaxy - dismissed in the English press as little more than a "pub team" after getting spanked 3-0 by Tigres earlier in the week - were inspired. They are not a great team; only Landon Donavan, Abel Xavier and maybe Carlos Pavon could really be considered world class, and none of them could dream of starting for Chelsea. But the supporting cast produced a scrappy performance and managed to keep the explosive Chelsea largely in check.

The first half felt quite even. Both keepers made great saves - Joe Cannon had to fend off hard shots from Wright-Phillips, Malouda and Drogba; Cech was nearly beaten by Kyle Martino's diving header, and had to tip a dangerous Xavier header inches over the crossbar. The Galaxy defense was a mess, but they were lucky and, frankly, Chelsea wasn't all that crisp. Could have been 0-3 Chelsea at the half, but could just as easily have been 1-0 Galaxy.

The Galaxy's luck ran out at the start of the second half, and the poor defending gave Chelsea the chance they needed as Terry scored off a lose ball, just in off the upright. That proved to be the winner. The crowd thought it was 0-2 just 5 minutes later when Shevchenko created some magic on the left side, but was flagged for offside. In the 70th minute, Donavan had a great chance - probably the Galaxy's best of the game - but put his header high over the bar.

The crowd was excellent - lots of Chelsea supporters and lots of old and new Galaxy fans wearing the just-released white and blue colors, which are a huge improvement over the tacky gold and green. The fans were pretty knowledgeable, too. It's a great stadium for LA - lots of social spaces, very intimate. I ran into a bunch of people I know, and had a chance to talk to them, which never happens at a Dodgers game. With a reported 27,000 in attendance, including a bunch of celebs, it was noisy and crowded, but not out of control. More like a Lakers game than an NFL game.

Ok, Beckham. The hype is out of control. I'm sick of Posh, and all the Coming to America bullshit, etc. But his debut in the 78th minute of the match was pure theater. He kicked an errant ball back onto the pitch; the crowd roared. He laced up his boots; the crowd roared. He stretched; the crowd roared. He disappeared into the tunnel (apparently to retape his ankle, and to pee); the crowd groaned. Finally, he stripped off his warm-up jacket and jogged to the sideline, resplendent in his white Galaxy home kit. The crowd went wild. A huge cheer, and flashbulbs, went up every time he touched the ball.

So, what to make of it. I guess I come away largely optimistic about the whole Beckham experiment. Commerce drives sports in America, and great product drives commerce. It's hard to argue with the marketing campaign so far, given the number of shirts I saw on the backs of fans, and the fact that Adidas is claiming the new #23 Galaxy jersey is currently the world's best selling kit. The stadium was packed with enthusiastic fans. It was a very tough ticket.

The product was pretty darn good, too. Let's not forget, amid the Galaxy's woes this season, that Donavan is a great play-maker, that Xavier has defended at the highest levels of the sport, and that Pavon is an athletic New World striker. They've got some work to do on defense, but with Beckham in central midfield, they'll have some sick wing play and counter-attacking. You could feel them feeding off the crowd and playing at a higher level. And they'll have huge crowds on the road, too, cheering for Beckham and, by association, for them. Oh, and TV coverage on ESPN doesn't hurt.

One last thing: this is great for English football, a fact which the yobs in the British press are too thick to appreciate. All these new Beckham fans are going to be England fans, when he returns to do his duty in the Euro 2008 qualifiers. The increase in exposure, fan base, and even merchandise sales for England in America is a huge growth opportunity. I predict American fans will be traveling to Austria and Switzerland in '08, to cheer on the LA boy.

Gold Cup Semi: USA-Canada

USA 2-1 Canada. USA heads to the final despite playing a weak and sloppy game, again. And, frankly, they probably shouldn't have won -- give that an end-of-injury-time equalizer by Canada was called offside, when it clearly was not. However, given that the match was in the 5th minute of a supposedly 4 minute extra time, it's hard to get too worked up about it, unless of course you are Canadian.

Ironically, the USA had it's best start of the tournament. They just flew at Canada in the first 10 minutes, threatening to score on a couple of early chances. Tons of energy. I was surprised to see Eddie Johnson and Michael Bradley starting; I think they both have had appalling tournaments. But given Twellman's three howler misses in the last match, I can at least understand Coach Bradley's thinking on Johnson. Starting his son again, that's looking a little weird.

As it turns out, my fears were justified. Bradley had a shockingly bad game. He looked like a pathetic college player out there. And Johnson was equally terrible. Twellman may have missed his chances, but at least he created chances. Johnson was listless and lacked any creativity. I would be surprised if he had a single shot on goal.

The opener from Hejduk - his first goal in 7 years with the national team - was a good one. Nice set up from Donavan. Nice finish. The penalty that turned out to be the winner was also clear as day. Dempsey released Beasley with an astonishing through ball and while the Canadian keeper, Onstad, complained bitterly that Beasley dove, the replay showed the keeper tripping him up well off the ball. Landon finished the spot kick brilliantly.

Then, the wheels started coming off for the USA in the second half. The Canadians just had much more energy and looked dangerous on a couple of occasions. The USA had trouble keeping possession and looked incredibly tentative on the ball. There were a few chances, but mostly they were flubbed by Johnson playing with his back to goal. In one especially laughable moment, Donavan fell on his ass in the box with a clear shot on goal and the keeper beaten. Ooof.

Hume came on for the Canadians in the 64th minute and made a huge impact, scoring once and looking dangerous a couple of other times. Then, true to form, Bradley (fils, not pere) took a ridiculous swipe at a Canadian player who had beaten him like a redheaded stepchild, and was shown the red card. Idiot. At least we won't have to see his sorry ass on the field for the final.

Hard to feel good about this one. If Mexico wasn't equally shambolic, I'd say we were going to get pounded in the final 3-0. But since Mexico is just as bad, it should be a good match. That is, if Mexico makes it past Guadalupe.