The Daily Dirt February 5, 2018: Bye, Bye, Bye

How was there no NSYNC reunion at the Super Bowl? HOW?

Ahh yes, the Super Bowl. Football, the national pastime, the beautiful game, whatever you call it, it was a typical hour long game that takes three hours to play - a game so intuitive that nobody watching or playing it can explain what a catch is even with video replay. A simple game where 106 men pummel each other for 60 minutes and then the Patriots win - EXCEPT NOT THIS TIME. Overall the game was pretty fun, it was high scoring, VAR only nearly ruined a touchdown, and Nick Foles became a giant killer. Tom Brady will probably rededicate himself to not eating tomatoes and eggplant and win the next 10 Super Bowls, so I hope you enjoyed that.

Here’s what we learned:

• Duane Johnson is starring in Die Hard 6
• Tom Cruise made another Mission Impossible movie, it’s about a terrorist attack on his retirement home or something
• Star Wars is adding another chapter to the unoriginal faux nostalgia that won’t live up to expectations series with a Han Solo movie
• The Cloverfield trilogy that you never wanted to exist is being made complete,
• Tide has a new product you can drink
• Justin Timberlake, his fringe biker jacket, and lip syncing will be haunted by Prince for all of eternity. Prince had the best halftime show of all time - in the rain - that was decidedly... not, though it seemed befitting the city of Minneapolis.
• T-Mobile used a Nirvana song in an ad, commodifying a bleak song about sexism
• Dodge commodified a Martin Luther King Jr. speech equating their trucks with civil right for some reason

The Eagles killed the Falcons so they could beat the Patriots. Dilly Dilly!

Anyway, onto The Dirt.

Domestic

IT’S GAME WEEK. The Nashville Golden Goal blog has this preview of the match.

The completely wonderful Robert Andrew Powell, author of This Love is not for Cowards, has this analysis of the David Beckham Miami MLS announcement. From the announcement, which seemed a lot alike the last time that a MLS team was announced to be coming to Miami, to the links to terrorism that his co-owners family had.

The husband of Chicago Red Stars and USNWT star Julie Ertz scored the game winner in the Super Bowl.

MLS teams played several friendlies over the weekend, and bless your heart if you watched any of them.

International

Arsenal fans seem to be taking the Alexis Sanchez move in stride.

Liverpool and Tottenham played in a game that made me think the MLS season had already started, complete with officiating that Baldomero Toledo would be proud of. Somehow, Dele Ali getting booked for diving wasn’t the most embarrassing thing to happen to the youngster over the weekend.

Here is every other result from the top 5 leagues over the weekend. LigaMX also had some exciting games as Monterrey and America piled on the goals.

Finally, Sergio Ramos discussed the abnormal soccer that Real Madrid is playing.

The best account on Twitter

Soccer twitter was aflutter last week over the NavixNews accounts that began flooding the web with transfer roomers. It turns out all anyone needed to do to get to the bottom of what was going on was create a twitter account with NavixNews affixed to the end of it. A person posing as a dog named Randy did this and was invited to their group chat where he found out the whole thing was a rudimentary prank pulled off by 4Chan enthusiasts. This would be sort of clever, except that most of what comes out of transfer news is fake, conjecture, or reported by @MLSTransfers.

Goal(s) of the century

We were truly spoiled this weekend with some amazing goals:

This one is nuts

Still good, but not as impressive (it’s a lot more impressive)

“Nagrig Neymar” Mo Salah weaving through the Tottenham defense put Liverpool ahead in a decidedly MLSy match

Bonus: this is better than every commerical from the Super Bowl

You should listen to

Two on Tri is a new podcast with “el hijo de Zeus” Herculez Gomez (get it?) and Sebastian Salazar that is going to cover the Mexico National Team from now until the end of the World Cup. This is a really smart move by ESPN, a smarter move would be broadcasting LigaMX games.