Center for a New American Security

Heard this past weekend in a bar in Chattanooga, Tennessee:

Lane Kiffin is the Sarah Palin of college football. He's never stayed anywhere long enough to actually accomplish anything, and aside from a small minority of people for whom he can do no wrong, everyone else in the country thinks he's obnoxious.

Greg Carlstrom noticed that the AFC managed to squeeze Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the same group in January's Asia Cup. (Plus the UAE, which is surely wondering what it did to deserve getting lumped in with the original Axis of Evil.) My prediction is the Pentagon will deploy Landon Donovan & Co. to Abu Dhabi to take care of these jokers once and for all ... but, true to form, it will only plan for the first ten minutes of each game, abandon the field for 70 minutes and then rush everyone back into the stadium with ten minutes left in order to secure a hard-fought draw and spare the United States and its allies blushes. Bob Bradley will play a 4-3-3 in the final ten minutes of the game, which Andrew Bacevich will say is unsustainable in the long term (and demand to know how long stoppage time will be) and which Gian Gentile will say is exactly the same as the 4-4-2 we were using in 2006 and, besides, probably won't work anyway. The U.S. public (too busy eating Cheeze-Its, whining about their taxes and playing FIFA Soccer 10 on their X-Boxes to pay much attention to the actual game being played in the Middle East) will wonder whether or not the soccer game was worth it in the first place, but that won't prevent Team USA from having to endure round after tedious round of Lee effing Greenwood on its return stateside.

I challenged the folks who follow my Twitter feed to come up with a proper sports analogy for Stan McChrystal. We were trying to think of a brilliant athlete who had a meltdown. @alexlobov won, by a country mile, with Eric Cantona. Cantona, the brilliant Frenchman who played for Manchester United, lost it in 1995, ran into the stands and -- I am not joking -- karate-kicked a fan in the face and was banned for nine months and lost the captaincy of the French national team. (Yeah, they have a history of craziness.) He then followed that up with the greatest press conference in the history of press conferences. Ron Artest had nothing on Le Roi.

Cantona went on to score some wonder goals and even beat the Devil, so perhaps there is hope for McChrystal after his humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Anyway, happy World Cup, everybody.

UPDATE: Uh... some of the folks in the comments section need to remember they are reading a blog with a Lego jihadi as its mascot. So while I do write serious commentary from time to time, and often on this blog, a sense of humor is recommended if not required for the readership.

"After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA." -- Albert Camus, Goalkeeper, Racing Universitaire Algerois

If two Arab countries can produce this much anger towards each other..

"Riot police in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, quelled a violent demonstration near the Algerian embassy in the early hours of Friday. Egyptian protesters reportedly hurled firebombs at police protecting the embassy and overturned a police van. Egypt's Interior Ministry said 35 people were injured"

..over a game of football

"The clashes stem from Egypt's defeat by Algeria in a World Cup qualifying match on Wednesday, securing Algeria the last African place for next year's finals."

..What would happen if Israel was playing?

OK, ok, so Londonstani knows there's bad blood between Egypt and Algeria... but hey, they've never fought a war - let alone three.

"The statement by Egypt's Football Federation added: "Egyptian fans, officials and players put their lives at risk before and after the game, under threat from weapons, knives, swords and flares".

"We should treat Algeria like any country that has declared war on us," university student Amr Higazi told Agence France Presse."

I mean seriously, this sounds like its turning to a mid sized diplomatic incident between Algeria, Egypt and then Sudan, when all they did was host!?

Did any of you see this? FIFA needed both France and Portugal in this summer's World Cup, and both were facing playoff games after failing to qualify in the group stages. It would be a commercial disaster if either the former or the latter (which features the best player in the world at the moment) did not qualify. FIFA even seeded the playoffs based on world rankings rather than what happened in the group stages. What happened in Paris, then, last night? Let's just say that if I were Irish, I would be livid. Watch Thierry Henry's left hand.

Update: Judah was surprised I did not mention that the president of UEFA is Michel Platini. Scandal aside, Platini ... what a genius. Probably this blog's second-favorite French footballer. You already know this blog's all-time favorite. And watch this pass to Denis Irwin as a reminder of better days in Franco-Irish relations.

I saw this video while following the Guardian's minute-by-minute report on Manchester United and Chelsea. However many troops the president authorizes for Afghanistan, I want to make sure this center half is among them. If the U.S. Army doesn't sign her, Millwall surely will.

There are so very few great moments of Scottish athleticism that I had to share this one.

Hookers 5-0 Egypt:

JOHANNESBURG — In news that, if true, will bring relief to World Cup organizers and embarrassment to the Egyptian soccer team, three South African newspapers reported Sunday that Egypt’s players apparently did not lose their money to robbers but to prostitutes after an historic 1-0 victory over Italy at the Confederations Cup. The accusations were quickly denied by the head of the Egyptian soccer federation. “I think that they said that to divert attention from the main issue, which is security, by creating a scandal for the Egyptian team,” Samir Zahir, the chairman of the Egyptian federation, told The Sunday Independent newspaper. Security has been the hot-button top in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. The South African police said Friday that Egypt had reported that five team members had their wallets lifted. The amount reportedly was $2,400. The burglary was said to have been discovered after the Egyptian players returned to their hotel rooms following Thursday’s victory over Italy.