Superbowl – onetruekev

Four Quarterbacks Is Never Enough

My review of the 49ers season

I still haven’t watched the game. I haven’t really had a chance to. I’ve only read bits and pieces about it. But I know the 49ers season came to an end in the NFC Championship game for the second season on the trot. I know how our starting quarterback on the night got an UCL elbow injury in the first quarter that effectively put him out of the game, and that our second string was knocked out of the game in the third quarter. We didn’t score after a Christian McCaffrey touchdown run in the first quarter to make it 7-7, and that the Eagles ran out easy winners. But none of that really tells the story of the 49ers season.

There were high hopes at the start of the season. We had kept the core of both a decent offense and a very good defence, and we were moving on at quarterback from Jimmy G to last year’s first round pick Trey Lance. It was a positive vibe.

And it was fine whilst it lasted. Right into game two when Trey Lance went down to a season ending injury. And so after all the pre-season kerfuffle, the quarterback leading the team was back to being Jimmy G, who hadn’t even practised with the rest of the squad.

Now we started to limp along, there were injuries to Kittle and Deebo, and by the end of October we were 3-4. Fortunately our division was a basket case and we only a game back from the surprising Seahawks, and with a victory over them already in the bag.

So, unusually for the 49ers, we went out and did a big trade midseason and brought in Christian McCaffrey from the Panthers. And with that we started winning. And we took over the lead in our division and were on a roll. Only for Jimmy G to go down to a season ending injury. We were now on to our third string quarterback for the season, this year’s draft’s Mr Irrelevant, the last man picked in the draft – Brock Purdy.

Doom and gloom were predicted. But it didn’t come. Purdy played well. Yes, there was the occasional misfire, and he got lucky with defensive penalties wiping out mistakes a few times in his first few games, but he linked up well with a seemingly fully fit and fully functioning Kittle, and we kept winning.

Only for him to get an oblique injury and for part of a game, fourth string quarterback, J Johnson, a long in the tooth replacement picked up off the waivers was in. And still we won. And Purdy remained the starter, even with the injury. And we kept winning. I did another of my rewritten lyrics songs in his praise, changing Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” to “We Love Brock Purdy” with “Throw another dime to George Kittle baby” in there. And not even that stopped the 49ers winning.

We won the last ten regular season games and finished with a 13-4 record and the NFC second seed. Up in the wildcard weekend were the Seahawks and we took our record to 3-0 against them for the season, despite the extra hard mastication on his gum by Pete Carroll. And in the divisional round it brought up the Cowboys. And it brought up another win, as it had the previous year, still a tight game but not so reliant on Cowboys mistakes. The defence doing a stellar job as they had all season.

Part of me wanted the Giants to beat the Eagles. A terrible thing for me to be wanting with my hatred of the Giants. But it would have been an easier game for us, and it would have given us the chance of knocking out the holy trinity of shit eating fuck face teams in the same playoffs (it could extend to four if the Raiders were to get to the Superbowl, but let’s be honest, that’s never going to happen). But it wasn’t to be.

And so nine months after flights had been booked I was flying from New York to Miami at the exact time the NFC Championship game was being played. The Delta flight couldn’t get their plane’s wi-fi system working, and so there was no Direct TV as had been promised, and so no way to watch the game.

I turned my phone back on once at Miami airport and the first inkling of how things had gone were a text message from a friend who had been a housemate back in my Manchester days. He lives in Philadelphia now, and the text was just a single emoji – an Eagle. A few minutes later data services kicked in and I found the full details.

It was disappointing, but how we were after week seven, if you had said NFC Championship game I would have snatched your arm (and probably a couple of other body parts as well) off you.

And so, we need to go again. Get our quarterback one and quarterback three fit and keep them that way for a whole season and make it third time lucky in next year’s NFC Championship game.

Postscript.

The above was written on the flight back to the UK ten days ago. I’ve only gotten around to typing it up today. And so, I watched the Superbowl last night. There were reasons to not want either side to win; the Eagles because their fans are morons who smashed their own city up on their only previous Superbowl win five years ago, and the Chiefs because of the racist connotations of their name (I’m sure they could change it and find a better name than the truly dreadful Commanders or Guardians).

It was a great game, the Eagles tactic of trying to cripple the opponent’s quarterback didn’t quite work this time, and the Chiefs (quite literally) limped to victory 38-35, overcoming a ten point deficit again as they had four years ago, though I’ve blocked out who that was against.

Did He Win Again?

Another year, another Superbowl. Superbowl LV and if I’ve counted correctly number thirty-seven that I’ve watched. And another one in which there was no danger of the 49ers being at after an injury ravaged disappointment of a season.

Their vanquishers from last year’s Superbowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, were returning to try and retain their title. They had the best regular season record of any team in the NFL, and a seemingly unbeatable quarterback in Patrick Mahomes, they were certainly the favourites to repeat for the first time since the New England Patriots in the early noughties.

Up against them were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the worst team of all time (of existing teams) based on their win/lose record, even if they did have a previous Superbowl win (from the year before the New England Patriots started on that last consecutive Superbowl wins).

But this Tampa Bay team had something different. The man with more Superbowl wins than any other player. The holder of every significant quarterback playoffs and Superbowl record – the appropriately alliterative fit for Tampa Bay – Tom Brady. In his first season away from the New England Patriots, where he had been the quarterback behind that last set of consecutive Superbowl wins.

He was back for his unprecedented tenth Superbowl appearance, so far ahead of other players it just looks unreal. And at forty-three years of age and away from the coaching of Bill Belichek, he was a man seemingly written off as having a season down in the sunny climes of Florida instead of the cold wastes of Massachusetts, supposedly as if a promise to his supermodel wife Giselle that she didn’t have to put up with any more of their dreary winters.

On top of that it was to be the strangest of seasons. Covid-19 was to turn everything on its head, and it was touch and go at one point as to whether the season would take place at all. There was no practise, and no pre season games. Games were hastily rearranged, and a season where games were played on every night of the week at some point or other during the season, even the unheard-of Tuesday and Wednesday night games.

And in the end, the fairy-tale came true. It ended up being a seventh Superbowl win for Brady – more than any single team has managed – and a second one for the supposed worst team in football. In addition, there was a fifth Superbowl MVP award for him, which although probably not deserved, was perfectly understandable.

And the so-called invincible Patrick Mahomes? Yes, he came into the game carrying injuries, but even without them he would still have been harried and bamboozled by a defensive masterclass from the Buccaneers. A display that should have won any of, if not all of, the Buccaneers defensive line the game’s MVP award.

Some will say that the Chiefs were hampered by the number of holding calls flagged against them during the game against an increasingly tired offensive line. Yet these were penalties that the shambles of an officiating crew at the previous Superbowl had failed to call in the Chiefs win. (Not that I’m a bitter 49ers fan with a long memory and a grudge, but it turns out that karma really is a b1tch.)

By the end of the game it wasn’t even a close contest. It ended up being a game of firsts for Mahomes. It was the first time as a starting quarterback that his team hadn’t scored a touchdown. The first time he had been kept to scoring less than ten points. And it was the first time he had lost a game by a margin in double digits. And even the 31-9 final score didn’t really do justice to just what a hammering the Buccaneers had doled out to the Chiefs.

And so, the season ended with the Buccaneers winning the Superbowl in their home stadium. The first time a team has played in the Superbowl in their home stadium. They had done so having played their three playoff games to get there away from home to earn to right to do so.

In addition, it looks as if Tom Brady has no intention of calling it a day. TB at TB will have season number two next year, and they will be knocking on the door again, and be looking at ending that drought of a repeating Superbowl winner with the man at the helm who had last done it. Something no one would write off now, even with him being forty-four by then.

Hopefully they will find the door barred by the 49ers, or perhaps they could lend us Brady for the season.

One Quarter Too Many

It’s a Sunday morning and that’s the alarm going off. Normally I would say there’s no need. But this Sunday is different. For a start the date is a palindrome, it’s 02/02/2020, something we haven’t had in over nine hundred years. It’s even a palindrome if we use the silly date formatting the damn yanks do. Then it is also Groundhog Day, the American version of St Swithun’s Day over here for randomly foretelling the weather. More famous as a film than the actual day now.

But neither of those are the reason I’m up at the same time I would be to go to work. No, today is the Superbowl. Another American import that a lot of Brits don’t like, or don’t understand. For me it has been a regular part of life for thirty-odd years (not thirty odd years). The late-night Sunday (UK time) game is followed by the traditional day off afterwards. It’s the first day I book off with a new year’s worth of annual leave entitlement. And as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my team – the San Francisco 49ers – are in the Superbowl this year. (Woo and Hoo!)

For the first time though, I’m not going to be sat at home watching it by myself after everyone else has gone to bed. The last time the 49ers were in it seven years ago, I watched us lose and the only comment from my other half at the time the next day was “why didn’t you record the half time show?” No, this year I’m off to Liverpool to meet up with a group of other 49ers fans to watch it in Shooters Sports Bar in the Bierkeller.

Of course, with it being a weekend and being south of London, there are engineering works and it is a choice of a rail replacement service for part of the journey into London, or a circular route on a slow train. (Did I mention it was Groundhog Day?) Being lazy, plus the fact I am taking a two-foot-high stack of magazines up to Liverpool for one of the other fans, meant that I took the circular route without a change. It was odd to go from Three Bridges to London, but to go through Crawley (where it didn’t stop) and then Horsham, Dorking and Epsom up to Clapham Junction instead of through Gatwick.

Victoria now has step (and escalator) free access to all underground platforms, but what it doesn’t tell you is to use them down to the north bound Victoria line it involves three different lifts and a walk halfway to Pimlico. Coming off at Euston was a lot more straightforward.

The train from Euston to Liverpool Lime Street was run by Tinpot Railways (sorry, what? LNWR, if you say so) and despite the fact the train was stopping at anywhere that had a station (and some places that didn’t), it was only made up of four coaches. I’d booked a first-class ticket as it was pretty much the same price and I’d be guaranteed a seat. Well as long as I could find first class that was. It was hidden randomly in the middle of the second coach. It didn’t have any proper luggage racks, just overhead space, which just wasn’t big enough for a beast of a bag filled with magazines. So, it spent the journey sat in the aisle. When asked if I could move it, I refused to put it outside of first class next to the entrance doors where someone could just whip it away. I did say I could put it on a spare seat, but as there weren’t many of them that wasn’t going to be a goer either. It stayed in the aisle.

After one station, as I’m sat there in jeans and t-shirt, writing in my notepad in my cheap first-class seat, a snooty woman stops by my seat to speak to me.

“I assume anyone can sit here, it’s not just for those with first class tickets today is it?”

“Don’t know, but I’ve got a first-class ticket, so get off your snobby high horse and don’t make assumptions.”

She’s left first class. I can only think it was to go and find the guard to moan to him about the riff raff they sell first class tickets to. I didn’t see her again.

At Lime Street I met Marc and handed over all the magazines and headed to the hotel on Albert Docks. The hotel is good, but my room was quite a distance from reception, thankfully above ground, as if it had been on a lower level, I might have thought I’d walked to Birkenhead.

I watched the Tottenham game as I did some more writing. I didn’t want to get out too early, mainly because there is always the danger when a load of blokes meets up to watch sports that it will descend into a very messy night. With the game not kicking off until 11:30 and due to go on until after three am, there is pacing needed if I am going to remember the score the next morning.

I head to Shooters only to find no one else has got there yet, and find out they are at The Grapes, but about to be going to food. Google maps has The Grapes as only a couple of hundred yards away, so I head off, but as is usual with Google maps they aren’t accurate, and it takes ten minutes to find the place. To top it off, on the way some random scally sidles up to me and asked if I wanted to buy a very suspicious looking wrap of cocaine. After refusing, he told me he didn’t normally do this whole dealer thing, but he needed another three quid so he could get his bus home. I’d lay good odds that those wraps he had were full of flour.

A number of hungry looking 49ers fans were waiting for me outside The Grapes – Graeme, James, Dipak, Mike, Jimmy, Marc and Simon – and we headed off to get food. On the journey to Pizza Hut, another dodgy scally sidled up to Dipak to ask if he wanted some coke. There must be something about middle aged blokes wandering around in 49ers shirts that screams “they must want to buy drugs”. Weirdos.

Paul joined us in Pizza Hut, and then we headed en masse to Shooters. Others joined the party there, Martyn and his mate, Andy, plus a number of others I didn’t recognise or know, and there were other 49ers fans who weren’t there as part of the Empire GB group. It didn’t take long for the bravado of doing silly drinks started, Dipak insisted on a round of Irish car bombs, which seven others joined in with, but this potentially messy start to the evening gave way to a bout of photo taking with Empire flags, and the drinks calmed down.

Sat there before the game started, I felt I was slowly descending into a sense of dread, nothing to do with the game itself. More to do with there being lots of people there. I feel like I want to run away. Head back to the hotel and watch the game by myself. I suddenly feel out of place and just want to hide. And the game and the proper madness hasn’t started yet. I’m really not used to watching games with other people, and as the game would evolve so would my realisation that I hate watching games with other people.

Game time.

The 49ers win the toss and defer and kick off. The defence has come to play and hold the Chiefs to a three and out on the first drive of the game. Our first drive saw us get into field goal range and then stall, taking the three points and an early lead. 3-0

The Chiefs second drive is more successful, and they get all the way down to the endzone and take the lead. 3-7. Our next drive doesn’t go well, Jimmy G throws an interception, where it might have been so much better to just take the sack. We manage to stop the Chiefs fully capitalising, holding them to a field goal. 3-10.

It was at this point that the commentary team on Sky were piercing my consciousness. They had Josh Norman as part of their team. The more I saw and heard him, then the more I came to the conclusion that he dressed like, looked like and was channelling the spirit of Wu-Tang’s sadly departed ODB. All that was going through my head for the rest of the game every time he spoke was “Hey, Dirtee, baby I got your money.”

Back to the game and our next drive saw the 49ers score their first touchdown of the game, as Kyle Juszczyk caught a pass and did a diving superman impression into the end zone. 10-10. We forced the Chiefs to punt on their next drive, but there was some odd clock management from the 49ers, and they ran out of time to be able to score at the end of the half. It had looked like we were in scoring range as Kittle caught a bomb, only for it to be called for offensive pass interference. Probably the correct call, but if it hadn’t been called, it would have been unlikely to have been challenged or overturned.

Having a look around the assembled 49ers fans at the half, I was making a note of the Jerseys worn. There were a couple of Garoppolo and Bosa jerseys from the current team; a throwback to our last Superbowl appearance with a Kaepernick jersey, but there was more of an eighties throwback theme going on. Montana, Rice, Rathman and me wearing Craig – about who it is a disgrace that he isn’t in the hall of fame. Something for me to have a diatribe about in a future blog post.

The half time show started with Shakira and a troop of dancers in red body suits, all with the left leg missing. Now, I’m all for making sports / leisurewear for the less able, but really, is every single leg amputee missing their left leg? I wasn’t really following what was going on, but I glanced up and tin foil man was on the screen, doing a bit of mumble rap before popping himself back in the oven. Then a miniature Empire State Building appeared with King Kong hanging off it. Whoops, no, that’s J-Lo. King Kong might have been better. To be fair so would Donkey Kong as well.

As this was going on, Mike had a sudden panic as his phone which he thought had been on the table in front of us had disappeared. It didn’t last long before he remember he’d plugged it in on the stage. Meanwhile on stage in Miami there were a load of kids, one of whom seemed to be being forced to sing whilst in a large bird cage. As for WTF happened after that was anyone’s guess. It did seem as if it had turned into a really shit episode of Strictly Come Dancing.

What a relief, it’s game time again.

We had the ball first in the second half, and as our first drive of the first half had it stalled near the red zone and we settled for the field goal and a three-point lead. 13-10. On the next drive Fred Warner intercepted a Mahomes pass, his first post season interception, and we had the ball back in great field position. We drove down the field steadily and Mostert crashed over for a touchdown. 20-10. The spirits of the 49ers fans kept on rising through the third quarter, and when Moore intercepted Mahomes again at the beginning of the fourth quarter it felt like BOOM!! And as the Chiefs had been looking dangerous on that drive it settled the nerves that had been coming to the surface.

Our next drive never really got going and we ended up punting, but there was an undercurrent of frustration with the officials over some perceived missed calls. There did look like there was a blatant offside ignored on third and fourteen. On the next play there was a debateable helmet to helmet hit on Garoppolo. On the next drive the touchdown was called for the Chiefs. The replay was inconclusive, so they said there wasn’t enough to overturn the call on the field of a touchdown. But if the call had been called short, it wouldn’t have been overturned either. 20-17.

The next drive didn’t start at all and a quick three and out gave the ball back to the Chiefs. There appeared to be another call missed on a hold on Bosa on a Chiefs third and fifteen, and the play was completed, and the Chiefs drove all the way down for another touchdown. 20-24.

Heads were dropping all around me, and it got worse as we ended up going four and out on our next drive. The Chiefs marched down the field again for another touchdown. 20-31. The bar was a sea of despondency, heads in hands, heads on the table, and suddenly there was a great deal of noise from around the outside of us of Chiefs fans who had been anonymously quiet prior to the last eight minutes of the game. The Chiefs had overcome a ten-point deficit to end up winning by ten points or more in a playoff game for the third time on the trot in these playoffs. (Did I mention it was Groundhog Day?)

The fat lady was warming up to sing, and when Garoppolo threw his second interception of the night the game was up. The Chiefs did three kneel downs and a hail Mary out of bounds to bring the clock down to all zeroes.

The season appears to have been one quarter too long for us, well eight minutes really. They are a young team, and there is a lot of promise that we can come back stronger next year, but there is a recent history of losing teams in the Superbowl suffering a hangover the following season. I just hope that isn’t the case, but it might be difficult to surprise teams the way we have this season.

It was a disappointing night, but in retrospect we did a hell of a lot better than we would have expected at the start of the season.

When I woke up the following morning, I hoped it was all a bad dream, but opening the curtains showed I was in a hotel room overlooking the Albert Dock and the 49ers had indeed lost. The season was an overall success, and if there had been one quarter less of football in the season, we would have won the lot.

Don’t Pinch Me

NFC Champions.

Not something I, or many other 49ers fans (if they are honest) would have thought possible before the season started. Breaking even at 8-8 would have constituted a success after the car wreck of the last six seasons of dross. But the team managed to go out and win the first eight games of the season, and expectations across the fan base have been raised, and I’ve been destroying my fingernails ever since.

We ended up losing three regular season games, and all of them were on the last play of the game, and they were all games we could have won. By the same token we won three of our remaining eight games on the last play of the game as well. Our record could have easily been 16-0 or 10-6, but it ended up at 13-3 and made us the number one seed in the NFC for the playoffs.

We made the number one seed by four inches. Four inches further and the hated Seahawks would have been in the end zone for a touchdown and the win. And instead of being the number one seed, with home field advantage and a rest week in the playoffs, we would have been playing away from home six days later on the wild card weekend as the number five seed. The margins have been that fine this season.

The more the season has gone on, the more nervous and withdrawn I have become. Apart from the pick six I’ve withdrawn from the GB Empire Facebook group more and more. I haven’t been involved in the game day threads. The group has seen such a surge in positivity, something that hasn’t really been seen since that group was set up over five years ago as the Frequency 49ers group.

I’ve retreated in to a shell to try and not tempt fate. To try and not raise my hopes too high for fear that if I come out and cheer “we’re going to win”, then it will have the opposite effect and jinx the team instead. I’ve done it enough times in the past with all sports teams I support.

So when we kicked off last weekend in the divisional round of the playoffs against the Vikings, I was pretty much watching through my fingers. Yet last week’s game was a masterclass of smash-em football. After an early touchdown drive for the Vikings we just steam-rollered them. Rush, rush and rush some more, eating up the clock and grinding them down, and on the other side of the wall having a brick wall defence, just repelling all attacks.

There has been a clamour since that performance around the team, about us being able to easily beat the Packers. I’ve heard them called the worst 13-3 team in history, the poorest number two seed ever; I’ve seen the fact that we gave them a good thrashing in the regular season raised as a pointer to us doing the same this time around.

But I was still worried, the Packers had managed to find a way to win thirteen regular season games, and they hadn’t lost since we had given them that beating. They had held off the Seahawks in the divisional round, a team we had struggled with twice in splitting the season’s series this year. Being somewhat downbeat I was worried that the season would come to an unremarkable end, I couldn’t bring myself to say we would win for the fear that I would cause us to lose.

So I was overjoyed that the season hasn’t ended yet, apart from a few minutes in the fourth quarter, it was another dominant performance, another rush heavy and solid defence outing, the second in successive weeks as far removed from the famed West Coast offence that the 49ers brought to the fore in the eighties as it was possible to be.

The 49ers have made the Superbowl for the first time since 2013, our only loss in the big game. And we are playing the Chiefs, who have looked pretty damn good in their two playoff games, coming from double digit deficits in both to win by double digits in both. Patrick Mahomes has been making some pretty unbelievable plays, and the early markets have the Chiefs as Superbowl favourites.

Something that suits my nature, keep it low key as I spend the next two weeks not daring to say out loud that we could win and worrying myself about what might happen.

The GB Empire group had already been making arrangements to meet up in Liverpool to watch the Superbowl, even before the NFC Championship game, and only now that we have made the Superbowl have I booked to join them. I had delayed thinking that it would be inevitable that the 49ers would lose if I had pre booked tickets before we had got there. That and the fact that I didn’t want to shell out a load of money on travel and accommodation to sit there in 49ers gear watching the damn Packers’ fans cheering on their team in the Superbowl.

Talking about 49ers gear, that is another worry to me. Unlike previous seasons where I’ve been festooned in jerseys, caps, coats, trainers, jewellery etc., I haven’t been wearing any gear at all during games this season. Should I therefore keep this incognito support up, or change the routine and go in full regalia for the Superbowl, and potentially put the mockers on. Not that I’m in the slightest bit superstitious of course.

That’s the lack of faith I’ve had, that the wheels would fall off at some point, especially at the “semi-final” stage. I suppose that’s what you get for years of being a Spurs fan.