Finally a break.
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| The home ground. |
We’re essentially 1/3 of the way through the season and we
are about to take a well earned week off.
VPS has played 10 games thus far, and our 6-2-2 record is good for 20
points and the joint top spot in the league.
That said, we’re only 4-5 point above 8th place so it’s a bit
too soon to be putting our name on the trophy.
If I’m being honest, these first ten games really have not been the
greatest soccer that VPS has ever played.
We’ve only really dominated one game (RoPS) and the rest of our wins
have only come by one goal, some in borderline miraculous circumstances. I’ll take the points though, and if we manage
to continue at this rate then we’ll probably win the league. But then again that’s a really big IF and the
league still has a long, long time to go.
What’s for certain though is that we’re gonna have to get a lot better
in every aspect of our game.
The last two games have been fun. We won both and against Jaro we had a great
crowd. The Jaro game was especially nice
because the atmosphere was in stark contrast to a lot of the other games we’ve
played at home. The fans were behind us
from start to finish, and what do you know we got better and better as the
match went on. It’s almost as if our fan
support pushed the team to improve itself! ;) I took some video after the game, but I got just the ending of our two little celebrations. You get the point though. We were very happy to win.
I also got my first assist of the season so I was happy with
that. I’m a winger so my main job is to
create goals, so in my opinion getting assists is more important than even
scoring goals. I hope to get many more
as the year goes on.
The game against Mariehamn was memorable for only one
reason: we won despite playing terribly and without either of our first choice
center backs for 2/3 of the game.
Winning while playing bad soccer has kind of become a theme for our club
(or perhaps a motif, for those of you who enjoyed English class in high school…I
guess what I call English class would actually be Finnish class or Swedish
class for most people reading this, but you get the point). I would prefer that we played better, but I
can’t really complain with the results.
Clearly it’s working for us and it seems we don’t need to dominate games
to win, which is kind of good news.
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| Ball in the net against Mariehamn. Jyrki scored and me and Anthony are happy! |
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| If you're wondering what we were saying it went something like, "Keep walking this way so we can catch our breath." I'm not kidding that's what we were actually saying. |
I also got to see my good friend from Haka, Kris Bright. We both kind of suffered through some really tough times in Valkeakoski and really only had each other (along with Nana Attakora) to talk to during that time. It was great to see him starting and doing well. Things aren't going perfectly at Mariehamn, but he's definitely having more success there than either of us had at Haka. I also saw and spoke with a fellow Yank, my friend Monica Dolinsky. We both grew up in Indianapolis with similar stories. She was one of the top handful of soccer girls in the state and I was the same for boys. We never actually spoke though until after college when we ended up in the same circle of friends. Now our lives are mirroring each other again, at least in the geographical sense. She was in Sweden when I was and now she's been in Finland the whole time I've been here. I hope her next stop is southern France/Spain or something! She plays on the top women's team in Finland so that's awesome for her. She also gets to go home for six weeks this summer, so I'm a bit envious!
I don’t really have anything else to say. At least nothing relevant to my life
personally or to VPS. Instead, I’m gonna
go off on a bit of an off topic rant. If
you care to know what I have to say then by all means keep reading. If not, then I’ll be back next week after I
return from vacation in London.
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At one of our hotels, I watched a debate (from Australia, no
less) about performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs. Now before I go into my thoughts about it I
have to say that I have never used any PEDs (at least nothing that is
illegal. I would classify anything other
than food as a PED.) and that I don’t know anyone using PEDs. I don’t think I would even know the signs. The debate though kind of struck a cord with
me because it confirmed in my mind something that I’d already been thinking:
PEDs should be legalized.
When most people hear someone say this the first thing they
think is, “Oh no! PEDs are bad and
shouldn’t be in sports. They take away
the integrity of the game.” But think
about that…every professional athlete takes one thing or another to enhance
his/her performance. I make protein
shakes almost every day to help me recover and to increase the effectiveness of
my weight workouts. Protein is perfectly
legal and has no side effects that I’m aware of. Surely no one would say that I am cheating
the sport of soccer because of my protein shakes. So my question is, “why are steroids or HGH
or whatever else people are using illegal?”
These are also performance enhancers that when administered by a
professional have little to no side effects.
Steroids can give you man-boobs?
Well I see man-boobs every single day so it must not be that awful. I haven’t done a ton of research, but as far
as I know, steroids and HGH have no devastating effects when taken
properly. If you don’t believe that,
then explain to me why we give steroids to little kids who have asthma? Or why steroids are in every hospital in the
advanced world? Every professional
athlete would have equal access to these drugs, and if given by doctors then
the risk would be minimal.
Speaking of risk to athletes, I don’t understand what
argument can be made against PEDs that can’t be countered by an argument of
things that athletes ARE allowed to do.
For instance if I break my leg tomorrow, I can go to the hospital and
get a cocktail of drugs, use state-of-the-art technology and have surgery. I’ll be back on the field in 5-6 weeks. Is this natural? Are the things that doctors would do to heal
me not performance enhancing in a way that the body could never possibly
do? Then why isn’t leg surgery
illegal? I would guess there’s a better
likelihood of me dying from complications from a leg surgery than from taking
FDA-approved steroids on a monitored schedule.
The last argument against PEDs and the one that it’s
opponents always fall back on because of its emotional appeal is the idea that
PEDs ruin the essence of fair competition.
That sport exists to push the body to the limit and reward
excellence. For me, this is the worst
argument of all. Lance Armstrong used
PEDs, but he still got his ass on that bike after having cancer and rode it
across an entire country uphill. I would
bet that no one reading this blog could match what Armstrong did no matter what
kind of steroids they had access to.
Armstrong is still a dick and a bad guy all-around it seems, but in my
opinion that has nothing to do with the drugs.
That has to do with his over-the-top competitiveness and pressure to
succeed. The same applies to Barry
Bonds, a former American baseball player who never tested positive for PEDs,
but surely used them. Steroids might
have helped him gain strength, but there were plenty of guys in MLB that were
stronger than Bonds and never hit half as many home runs. There was clearly hard work and skill
involved. These athletes may have
cheated, but only because the rules are stupid.
Armstrong and Bonds were both super athletes before they took PEDs, and
both are healthy adults now after taking them.
So why are they so bad? And
before you answer that, consider that Lionel Messi took Human Growth Hormone
(HGH) from the time he moved to Barcelona at age 12 until some time recently. HGH is a banned substance, but since it’s a
drug that mimics naturally occurring hormones there is no way to test for
it. Plus I’m sure he stopped taking them
before he became a member of the FC Barcelona first team. Messi is (rightfully) celebrated as a hero,
even though he did effectively the exact same thing as Barry Bonds, who is a
villain. There’s a reason why Lionel
Messi, who is 5’ 5” tall, has legs like a freaking elephant. And it’s his inhumanly strong legs which give
him his inhuman acceleration and agility.
I would argue that Messi’s athleticism is due in large part to HGH. He was a great athlete who became the best
soccer player in the world thanks in part to PEDs. No one though would argue that Messi has
cheated or that he has become the world’s best player because of PEDs
alone. So doesn’t that kill the argument
that taking PEDs ruins the essence of sport?
Did Lionel Messi not work incredibly hard to get where he is? And has he ruined the game? Of course not. But how much more fun would soccer be to
watch if there were 25 other Lionel Messis?
How great could Michael Owen have been if he was able to use steroids to
recover from all those injuries and HGH to prevent more from happening? How much better would it be for fans if the
greatest players could all play until 40?
These are not just hypothetical questions; they are the reality if we
just removed the taboo of PEDs. Science
is at a point where taking things to improve performance are as common as
lifting weights or running sprints. You
don’t like PEDs? Well then stop taking
your daily multivitamin or cough medicine when you get sick. And don’t even think about taking Burana when
you sprain your ankle. That’s cheating!
The meme:
