Listless Blue Jays take meaning out of meaningful September baseball in blowout loss to Rangers | Canada News Media
Connect with us

Sports

Listless Blue Jays take meaning out of meaningful September baseball in blowout loss to Rangers

Published

 on

Meaningful September baseball?
Could have fooled a Blue Jays (80-66) team supposedly in the midst of it and an abandon-ship fan base that is staying away in droves as its team nose-dives its way through one of the most critical series of the season.Three games up against the suddenly surging again Texas Rangers (81-64), three games down.

This time it was a dispiriting 10-0 Blue Jays loss on Wednesday night at the Rogers Centre, a contest played out in front of yet anther small (by comparison) crowd, perhaps indicative of a restless fan base grown weary of the frustration.

With little to cheer about, many among the announced crowd of 25,495 jeered with increasing lust as the night spiralled out of control.

“I get it,” Jays closer and Markham native Jordan Romano said. “(The fans) want to see a good competitive game. It’s a big series and they didn’t get what they wanted.

“I’ve been a fan of this team growing up. I’ve been there. I don’t know if I’ve ever booed, but I understand it for sure.”As the losses pile up and the sky-is-falling feeling heightens, the Jays are heaping more onto the workload just to make it to the playoffs as a maddeningly inconsistent season continues.

The “we’ll get ’em next time” refrain that has been the anthem of the 2023 season is getting more off-key by the day, especially after losing by a total of 26-7 through the first three of a four-game series that concludes here on Thursday.

“Baseball is tough,” manager John Schneider said. “You just want guys to be who they are. I think there has been some ebbs and flows with individuals. There’s been ebbs and flows with the team.

“It seems to have happened, whether it’s pitching or offence at inopportune times. That’s been the story of where we are at this point.”

A big part of it, anyway, including chapters in which the team’s top hitter Bo Bichette is 0-for-12 in the series thus far and some wobbles from the previously rock-solid starting rotation.Case in point on Wednesday was Yusei Kikuchi getting rocked for two big home runs and a season-high six earned runs in his five innings of work.

“We all know this is a big series,” Kikuchi said. “We’re all disappointed. All we can do is flip the page. I knew how important this game was and really wanted to win.”

This was always going to be a big series for the Jays, a potential springboard into a run to take some of the stress out of the final two weeks of the season. Instead it’s been a dud so far, especially in the latest debacle, as a team masquerading as a playoff contender suffered it’s worst loss since an 11-0 drubbing at the hands of the Miami Marlins on June 19.A third consecutive defeat to an opponent they could have all but taken care of this week dumped the Jays to 1 1/2 games behind the Rangers for the second AL wild card spot and a game behind the Seattle Mariners, who hold down the third wild card position.

This still may be a playoff team, but right now it’s hard to buy in on the prospect. The Jays have three fewer wins than the 2022 team did through 146 games and are about to be in a fight for their post-season lives.

“(Is it) frustrating? No,” Schneider said. “We know the character and the talent that’s in the clubhouse. We trust that. As tough as the last couple of games have been, you really just have to focus on tomorrow.“It’s not concerning. If the season was going to be over tomorrow, it’s concerning. We’ve got two weeks ahead of us. It’s not the way we wanted the series to go so far.”
Texas Rangers’ Robbie Grossman celebrates his two-run home run against the Blue Jays during the fifth inning in Toronto on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. Photo by Nathan Denette /THE CANADIAN PRESS

On Wednesday, the savvy hitting of the Rangers took care of business the way good teams do: By seizing their opportunities. In this one, it was belting a pair of homers off Kikuchi — a three-run shot by Nathaniel Lowe in the third and a two-run blast by Robbie Grossman in the sixth.

As has been the case on far too many nights, the listless Jays offence had no answer, mustering just three hits through six innings when the game was as good as over.

And the uglier it became, the more irked the crowd became, raining down boos on George Springer, Bichette and Vlad Guerrero Jr. in that quick sixth, a flashpoint for what this team has been mustering offensively of late.No, the Jays aren’t done yet, though a blowout loss in the thick of a playoff race feels precisely like that to a fan base that seems more disgusted than it has been in several years.

Through three-quarters of a non-competitive series against a team they are now chasing, the Jays have done little to inspire their fans, a point punctuated by the few thousand who remained to see a ninth-inning homer from the Rangers’ Mitch Garver.

Nobody in the Jays clubhouse liked it, but add it to the lumps inflicted by the Rangers in the preceding two hours 27 minutes.

“I understand fans want to see exciting, winning baseball,” Schneider said. “Us as competitors, staff, players, you don’t like to hear it, but at the same time we appreciate when they are voicing their frustration when it is deserved.”

The immediate challenge? Change the tune on Thursday when Toronto ace Kevin Gausman is on the mound looking to help his team avoid a sweep.

Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

Published

 on

 

Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

Published

 on

 

The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

___

AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

___

AP soccer:

Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

Published

 on

 

TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

___

Follow @JClipperton_CP on X.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Exit mobile version