English football: My Plymouth Argyle moves back to League One.

In 2009 we made our first journey to the city of Plymouth. In 2013, we went again. At some point in between these two visits, I decided to honor the hometown of the mother-in-law I never had the pleasure of meeting by following the fortunes of Plymouth’s football club, Argyle, nicknamed the Pilgrims for what I trust is an obvious reason.

I know little about football (in the planetary sense; we say "soccer") but have always found it entertaining when traveling abroad. Being somewhere other than America puts me in the mood.

As with most other sports, I've long since ceased wasting vast blocks of time to watch actual games. I read about the results, view a highlight or two via Twitter and keep track of the schedule. These habits are conducive to observing the progress of a sporting entity like Argyle, so very far away.

You needn’t be bored with further details, just recall that in English football, there is an ebb and flow between the leagues. At the end of the season, a certain number of top-ranking finishers are promoted, or moved up to the league above them, while the bottom feeders are relegated -- moved down.

For much of the time I've been an Argyle supporter, the squad has competed in League Two, which actually is the fourth league in terms of rank, or in an imperfect analogy, “Single A” for those of you who know American baseball.

Premier League (Level 1 or "top-flight")
The Championship (Level 2)
League One (Level 3)
League Two (Level 4)
Non-league football (Level 5; all remaining teams)

Actually the bottom was falling out for Argyle around 2011 after a period of success in the early 2000s. The club finally won promotion to League One, but famously collapsed down the stretch in 2018-2019 and was relegated to League Two for the 2019-2020 campaign.

Argyle rallied convincingly and was looking strong in 3rd place -- a position for promotion -- when the coronavirus shutdown came in March.

What would be the outcome?

As we learned on Tuesday, there'll be no resumption of play, and so the standings hold. It's back to League One for 2020-2021.

Someone pour me a cask-conditioned ale!

Club Statement: Pilgrims Promoted

9 June 2020

Plymouth Argyle welcomes the decision made at Tuesday’s EFL meeting to end the 2019/20 Sky Bet League Two season.

While our first preference would always have been to finish our exciting season on the pitch and push to win the league, the safety of players, staff and supporters is of utmost priority.

The club is delighted to have achieved our pre-season objective of an immediate return to Sky Bet League One and would like to congratulate first-team manager Ryan Lowe and his staff on an outstanding achievement during their first year at Home Park.

Chief executive officer Andrew Parkinson said: “We are pleased that a solution for the end of the season has been reached after weeks of uncertainty, and, of course, delighted that it results in promotion for Argyle.

“That said, we are disappointed not to be able to celebrate this promotion on the pitch, with the Green Army cheering from the stands. Football has, quite rightly, had to take a back seat in order to ensure the safety of our community.

“Our supporters have been with us every step of the way this season, and I know I speak on behalf of everyone at the club when I say that you played an integral part in our eventual success.

“We thank you for your outstanding support and look forward the occasion that we can play games with our loyal fans in the stands once again.”

With the 2019/20 season now formally concluded, the club will issue guidance on outstanding ticketing queries in the coming days and will continue to update supporters as more information becomes available on the 20/21 Sky Bet League One campaign.

Thank you for your support.

On Leicester, football and city -- with a musical interlude to boot.

Prior to the start of the campaign, oddsmakers tabbed Leicester City at 5,000 - 1 to win the Premier League title.

The Premier League is an English professional league for men's association football clubs. At the top of the English football league system, it is the country's primary football competition. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the Football League. Welsh clubs that compete in the English football league system can also qualify.

But Leicester City did just that, and Kasabian's Serge Pizzorno is living his dream after the Premier League title win.

Let's pause for a number.

Serge is the thin, bearded guitar player.

Meanwhile, The Economist provides yet another urban renewal lesson for New Albany to ignore,in spite of the fact that our team won the title, too.

Leicester’s success: Foxes and tigers, at The Economist

... What people might find is that it is not just the football club, but the city (population: 340,000) that has plenty to share. Leicester was for good reason chosen as the first stop on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee tour of the country in 2012. In some ways it is the epitome of modern Britain. Locals argue that the footballing triumph is but the validation of Leicester’s re-emergence as a city; a mix of long-term ambition and unflashy, organic growth.

“Leicester clothes the world” was the slogan when the city was full of hosiers and bootmakers; in 1936 it was named as the second-richest city in Europe. But in the 1980s Leicester lost almost all this to cheap overseas competition. Rebuilding the devastated economy has been a painful task, but is now bearing fruit.

Coming in June, the NABC World Cup Trilogy for 2014: USA vs. Ghana, Portugal and Germany.

For devotees of "traditional" American team sports (baseball is the author's choice), every fourth year brings a reminder that most of the rest of the planet begs to differ. They call it football, we call it soccer, and the 2014 World Cup coming to critical mass as the 100th anniversary of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination (and the subsequent outbreak of World War I) strikes me as perfectly symmetrical.

More happily, it provides my brewery with a second opportunity to tailor small batches to the occasion, in the form of the World Cup Trilogy. There will be numerous venues for watching the action, but how many of them will be brewing three entirely new, small-batch beers to commemorate the USA squad's opening matches?

The details can be found at NABC's web site, and there'll be more as we get closer. First, there's this little Houndmouth show in May to cater.

NABC World Cup Trilogy for 2014: USA vs. Ghana, Portugal and Germany

Has it really been four years since NABC’s first World Cup Trilogy beer series, as minted by former NABC brewer Jared Williamson (now brewing with Schlafly in St. Louis)?

Yes, it has, which means that NABC will repeat the Trilogy in 2014, with three fresh new beers – each meant to honor the three national football squads facing the USA in Group G of the opening round: Ghana, Portugal and Germany.

Beginning on June 16, 2014, the beers will debut as the American squad’s opening matches are played.

Attack of the killer elitist soccer snobs -- quick, find us a journalist ... now!

(See also a fine letter to the editor on the same topic: Hutsell should kick it. It was published on July 21, as the finishing touches were being put on this essay.)

As noted many times in this space, the New Albany Tribune has made steady and quantifiable progress overall during the past two years. Might it now be time for the spirit of reform and renovation to be extended to that last, enduringly unreconstructed bastion of overt anti-intellectualism, the sports page?

Don’t count on it.

Nowhere else in the newspaper does the underachieving editorial "balls and bats in the belfry" legacy of the long-departed Eddie LaDuke remain more firmly ensconced than in sports, LaDuke’s former realm.

The most recent example of this lamentably bovine sensibility found the newspaper’s sports editor, Mike Hutsell, carefully constructing a massive straw man from the notion of David Beckham as heavenly deliverance for American soccer, and gleefully bashing it to bits with all the sparkle of a ‘roid enraged offensive lineman at a suburban Atlanta pit bull fight.

HUTSELL: Beckham will make it OK, right?

Hey, did you hear? We finally have our next great savior for the sport of soccer in the United States. No really, it’s happened this time.

As Hutsell takes his rhetorical Louisville Slugger to a handily contrived proposition, one holding that a much-hyped English professional player can single-handedly transform native sporting customs in the obtuse Colonies, it is acutely revealing that the real target of the editor's jibes – those who are in the habit of making exaggerated claims about Beckham's potential influence – are none other than Hutsell’s fellow sports scribes nationwide, for whom facts are just as inconvenient as they are for our local kiddie game assessors, personal prejudices just as likely to be substituted for logic, and straw men by far the favored sparring partner on a daily basis.

Tellingly, the idea of “Beckham as savior” currently is being expounded far less often by those millions of Americans for whom soccer has personal value than it is by media pundits in search of a mechanical rabbit to inspire addled greyhounds to adrenalize.

After all, those millions who enjoy the sport are busy pursuing their passion in the open air and have little inclination to play semantic games with frustrated ex-jocks on the sports page. Just as delightfully, by refusing to adopt the customary American sporting paradigm, they effectively render Hutsell’s tragic-comic foray into sociology (American soccer as an “elitist mindset” of the “upper-middle class of society”) into the utter absurdity that by all accounts it is.

Assuming he speaks Spanish, Hutsell might consider explaining this "upper-middle class" bias to New Albany’s Hispanic population, many of whom seem quite content to kick the ball around area parks and fields without official editorial sanction.

Seems almost disrespectful, doesn't it?

It all goes to show that while the local newspaper’s sports writers perform adequately when bound to the task of recounting baskets drained or balls roped by members of area high school teams, providing them with a soap box for commentary is a recipe for submerging the level of discourse to that of sports talk radio. Given low attention spans and the current state of sporting “civilization” on the airwaves, I imagine this occurrence isn’t entirely a coincidence.

Personally, I cherish the truly special times when the Tribune’s sports columnists surgically remove the discussion at hand from all necessary contexts, and with the speed of a Formula One race car, descend at full boor into inanity, trivialization or both.

Prior to Hutsell’s unintentionally hilarious sociological consideration of American soccer, there was Matthew Cress’s lamentation at the murder-suicide case of professional thespo-wrestler Chris Benoit. With a solemnity more in keeping for departed statesmen, tyrants or church fathers, Cress wrote that in spite of the senselessness of the tragedy, he’d been such a fan of Benoit that he couldn’t bring himself to “hate” him.

That's an interesting angle. Naturally, a far more edifying approach would have been to question the very nature of the megabuck wrestling farce, and if that is deemed off limits owing to the profit imperative, perhaps examine the many premature deaths and crippling injuries suffered by these muscle-bound “sporting” entertainers, but far be it from me to rain on the parade of deltoid worship.

No, not I. After all, I’m a baseball fan, and accustomed to looking the other way so long as the ball travels 500 feet or more on a checked swing. Do you think Bud Selig ever noticed?

Ironically, as sports editor Hutsell follows suit with the AM radio masses in lobbing dying quails at sporting pursuits that fall outside the mainstream of Larry the Cable Guy’s viewing range, the best sports columnist on the Tribune's staff, Aidan Kelly, writes about ... yes, soccer, and does so with erudition and flair.

Whassat? Soccer? That sissy game that a billion people in the world play in spite of the objections of the greatest country in the history of the world? Damn, that sounds Un-Uhmerican, dudintit? Hey, pass the cheetohs, would ya? There’s a rasslin’ match showing. Anyone got a Natty Light?