4 Sports Things You Missed to start July

Including a World Cup-winning catch-and-toss-and-catch, Texas Beef, and sneaky soccer.

Hey all! It’s July. THAT’S THE MONTH THE OLYMPICS ARE HAPPENING.

I’m debuting a series tomorrow that will take us through the start of the Olympics. It should have somewhere between 15 and 25 parts. Maybe you can guess what it is without me telling you!

I wanted to give a little bump to my story about going to Barbados to watch Team USA play cricket. American cricket is in a strange place: it’s simultaneously farther than the world—and most Americans—expected, with millions of fans and hundreds of thousands of players already in the United States. But it’s also not as far as it should be, because nobody is quite sure which direction to pull. Do we try to market to new fans? Do we build our player base? Do we simply try to milk as much money as we can from wealthy Indian-Americans? (They’re going with the third option most of the time.) Also, I had a lot of fun drinking on the beach and meeting internationally famous cricket stars. Not a bad week, all things considered.

Anyway, onto the Sports Things You Missed.

The Cricket Catch Of The Century

I bet you’re ready for me to shut up about cricket, so good news: The T20 World Cup is over. Bad news, though: I’m writing about it one more time, because India’s Suryakumar Yadav made one of the clutchest, most mind-boggling plays you’ll ever see in any sport to secure the championship for India. I’d compare it to Julian Edelman’s bobbling catch in the 28-3 Super Bowl, but there are are probably about five times more cricket fans in India alone than football fans in the whole world.

The World Cup final was between South Africa vs. India—the Gandhi Bowl, or the Teams That Beat Team USA But By Relatively Small Margins Bowl. (I got the sense my new cricket friends were starting to get fed up with me repeatedly bringing up Team USA in scenarios when nobody was thinking about Team USA.) Through 90 percent of the match, South Africa had the trophy all but locked up. The Proteas needed to score 30 runs off the final 30 balls. (If that sounds like gibberish, understand they’d scored 147 runs off the first 90 balls.) They’d already done the hard work, and now only needed to calmly cruise to victory. But South Africa has a famous history of collapsing in the most critical moments, and sure enough, it happened again.

The South Africans lost a few key batters and stopped scoring, eventually needing 15 runs off the final six balls. That’s when David Miller smashed a ball to the boundary, in the range of India’s Suryakumar Yadav—the guy who powered India to a win over the USA after superstar Virat Kohli and captain Rohit Sharma went out early—but enough about Team USA, yada yada yada. (Yadav Yadav Yadav?)

SKY sprinted and caught the ball, but realized his momentum was going to take him over the boundary. In baseball, the fence is a part of the playing field, but in cricket, a player touching the boundary with the ball is the same as the ball clearing the boundary outright, so his catch would’ve been pointless unless he could keep the ball from crossing over. He tossed the ball up in the air while sprinting, hopped over the boundary, hopped back into the field of play, and caught the ball. (South African fans feel his foot actually did touch the boundary while he was holding the ball, but there’s no conclusive evidence and I defer to the rule of cool.)

(Very strange to me watching the slow-mo reverse angle, which pans over the press box where I was working last week! Hi everybody! )

Not only did SKY’s catch turn a 6-run shot into zero runs when every run mattered, it retired Miller, the last true hitter in South Africa’s lineup. It left them needing 15 runs from five balls with just their bowlers—like needing to score two in the bottom of the ninth with just your pitching staff allowed to hit. They were dead in the water, and lost by seven runs. Better luck next time, South Africa—maybe start by hitting those racial diversity goals you’re supposed to hit!

Texas Two-Step

Today is Conference Realignment Day. Two years ago Texas and Oklahoma announced they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC on July 1st, 2024, the domino which kick-started a cascade of knock-on effects, from the destruction of conferences to Jacksonville State’s NCAA bowling championship.

And now we’ve reached July 1st, 2024. The Pac-12 really only has two schools in it, while the Big Ten has 18. At most places, this was just a matter of updating logos and sending out a tweet or two. Not in Texas, where all this nonsense began. The Longhorns hosted an SECelebration with Pitbull and have spent the last week locked in a baseball battle with their reunited rivals in College Station. Here’s a Tomfoolery Timeline of the basebrawl:

June 24th: Texas fires David Pierce after 8 seasons. He made the College World Series three times in eight seasons. But Texas has more money than god now, and wants to make a big splash as they move to the best baseball conferences.

Also June 24th: Texas A&M loses to Tennessee in the winner-take-all Game 3 of the College World Series championship. In a post-game press conference, head coach Jim Schlossnagle angrily pushes back on a reporter who asked about the Texas job. “You’re selfish to ask me that… I took the job at Texas A&M to never take another job again.” (Three years earlier, Schlossnagle did a similar, although less combative, denial about leaving TCU to go to A&M.)

June 25th: Texas hires Schlossnagle as their head baseball coach, just a day after the end of A&M’s season and his heated denial that he would take any job ever again.

June 26th: Schlossnagle officially debuts at Texas and issues an apology for ripping into the reporter. His assistants join him, with hitting coach Michael Earley telling the Houston Chronicle “the University of Texas speaks for itself.”

June 30th: Earley is hired back at A&M as the new head coach. In less than a week, he coached A&M in a title game, got hired at Texas, did a photoshoot in Longhorn orange, and got hired back to A&M.

Conference realignment is generally a destructive force, but at least we get these two back into the same league. Texas and Texas A&M have spent over a decade pretending their rivalry isn’t that important so they could live lives in different leagues. I’m glad that’s over. Embrace the messiest versions of yourselves, Longhorns and Aggies. Long live Texas beef.

The Soccer Sneak

The one thing I enjoy more than actual sports is when somebody is able to win via subterfuge and sneakiness rather than athletic prowess. That’s what we saw in MLS this weekend.

Basically every summer, MLS insists on traipsing through its standard schedule even during international tournament season. Right now, 48 MLS players are participating in either Copa America or the Euros. Toronto FC is without its regular keeper, Sean Johnson, the longtime backup to Matt Turner on the US national team. That puts 24-year old Canadian Luka Gavran in net until Johnson gets back. He did well enough to earn a draw against Atlanta United, and then literally threw it away. In the 97th minute, expecting the game to end any second, Gavran casually rolled the ball out in front of him… only to discover that Atlanta’s Jamal Thiaré was right behind him, waiting to steal the ball, and score the game-winning goal:

Thiaré isn’t the first person to score like this, but I think he might be the most artful. He follows Gavran like a puma prepped to pounce on unsuspecting prey—hunched shoulders, quiet feet, muscles flexed. Thiaré didn’t just steal the ball, the goal, and the win—he also took a cheeky sip out of Gavran’s water bottle while hiding behind the goalie’s back. (And yes, it’s soccer, so it’s “cheeky.”)

SWEET MOTHER OF JEEESUS

I’ve married into Gaelic football, as my wife’s dad’s family is from Kerry and my wife’s mom’s family is from Dublin, a rivalry good enough to have its own Wikipedia page. So I’m obligated to discuss the massive upset from this weekend’s all-Ireland quarterfinals, when Galway beat Dublin for the first time since 1934. I don’t have any highlights—just the radio call from Galway’s local radio station, featuring mixed Irish-English cursing and a plea to Taylor Swift fans crowding the capital for the Dublin leg of the Eras tour.

GAA sports are amateur, and you play for the county you’re from. Great system when it was invented, before the massive global population shift from rural lands to urban centers across the globe. Now Dublin has about 20 percent of the island’s total population, and about 10 times the population of many of the teams they’re playing against. On top of that, the knockout rounds of all-Ireland tournaments are held at Croke Park in Dublin, so they have permanent homefield advantage in the biggest games of the year. In the 2010s, Dublin concurrently ran off six straight men’s championships and four straight women’s championships, and they won both again last year. It’s what Texas football would look like if everybody from Texas was mandated to play for Texas. (Just a hypothetical to explain the scenario! You don’t need to start a debate about it in the comments!) (But hey, go for it if you must.)