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Unrelenting Wave

March 26, 2026 By Football No Comments

San Diego Wave 3 – 1 Portland Thorns

Whatever is happening on the San Diego training ground, it’s paying off. The Wave played a disciplined, relentless, smothering style against Portland all night, giving the visitors little time to think about what they were doing, while at the same time exploiting space and creating chance after chance. If it wasn’t for Messner in the Thorns goal, this score would have been far less flattering to Portland.

The Wave led through excellent team play and individual brilliance. They press high and hard and smothered the midfield, marking Jesse Fleming into near oblivion. This generated many turnovers, and the Thorns left huge amounts of space in which the sublime Dudinha could operate. Paired with Ludmila cutting in from the wing, the Brazillians created havoc for the Thorns backline throughout the first half. I Can’t imagine what will happen when Adriana Leon returns to this side after her foot heals.

Portland’s only goal came off a mistake in the first half. The Thorns threatened several times, notably through set pieces which were delivered with perfection by Olivia Moultrie but the story of the match was that they couldn’t finish their chances. Even a half time substitution which saw Sophia Wilson come into the game couldn’t spark much. The Wave simply didn’t afford them the space or time on the ball.

The last 15 minutes of the game opened up more, but it was Portland that paid the price, giving up a third goal that sealed the game. A terrific coaching battle, and although the Thorns held their own they gave up their first goals of the season after 180 minutes of clean sheets, and now the tactics board beckons.

Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness

March 25, 2026 By CoHo, Featured, First Nations No Comments

On the advice of several people I have been reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and I have reached the end of “The Most Important Chapter” which outlines the seven key tools that d’Oliveira invites the reader to use as they navigate the text. The seventh tool is an invitation to a kind of lectio divina (my framing) on a text called “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness.” I invite you to visit that link, read the text and follow the exercise there, which is different from the one in the book.

As I am working my way through each of the seven tools, I am reminded of the various lessons I have learned in my life especially working in a with Indigenous communities. These are lessons that throw my own position in the world into uncertainty and knock me off centre constantly. I can find how each of these seven tools has come into my life in different ways in the voices of different people who have schooled me, often publicly, in ways that were humbling. D’Oliveira says that this book is written for people in a situation of low intensity struggle, where we have choices about how to benefit from, respond to, and perpetrate the violence of modernity. That’s a useful perspective, and a better term than ‘privilege’ which implies that all is well in a person’s life. Low intensity struggle is a thing, but it’s useful to see it in context. The pedagogy of “learning this from a book” is itself firmly rooted in modernity.

The book is not a simple exercise. It is uncomfortable to read, and even through I wrestle with paradoxes and entanglements all the time, it still places me in a slightly uneasy position, an unsettled position, as it were. And it is remarkable in being able to hold me there, suspended in being unsettled, which I have always said is exactly the place where settlers need to be in order for a post-colonial world to ever have a chance at life.

For reference, the seven tools are:

  • Mastery AND depth education: about different ways of knowing and having wisdom and intelligence
  • Wording and worlding the world: about how we use stories
  • The bus within us: about the different voices we carry inside us
  • Low- and high-intensity struggle: understanding what choices we have, especially important for folks in lo-intensity struggle to understand.
  • Generative disillusionment AND excited capacities: yeah, it’s falling apart. So now what? (Dave Pollard’s writing has helped me to understand this from my perspective.)
  • Co-sensing with radical tenderness: see above.

I don’t know where this book is going. Parts of it don’t make sense to me. Some of it seems performative, some of it seems like the real wisdom is hidden from view, probably because I don’t have the eyes for it. I think this is the intention of the book. It does not bring comfort, it does not make sense. It is directed at me NOT as a teaching guidebook per se, but as a lesson in what I will never know as much as it is a set of invitations about what I can learn. It reminds me very much of the hula ceremonies we were in 16 years ago on Hawai’i as I was walking in an immensely tense interface between Americans and Hawaiians and we were confronting these very same questions about modernity and what it would take to work from a platform of reverence.

We didn’t get that quite right, either.

Sunk by the Fleet

March 24, 2026 By Sports No Comments

Vancouver Goldeneyes 0 – 2 Boston Fleet

The Boston Fleet have made a remarkable turnaround this season. From missing the playoffs last year, they had a chance to go to the top of the standings tonight if they could pick up three points against the Vancouver Goldeneyes. With Aerin Frankl in net, recording her sixth shutout of the season, they won and went to the top of the table.

Vancouver can’t beg for a win lately. They are on a dismal run of form right when they can’t afford to be losing games. They won last week but in their last seven games they are 1-6. Still, they sit only six points out of a playoff spot and in every game they keep looking like a team that is willing themselves to make it. Tonight they had a dominant third period, chasing a 1-0 deficit that was afforded by Kluge’s tipped puck in front of Campbell in the second period. The Goldeneyes were relentless in front of goal but Frankl is that good. In a small league like this, with the quality the PWHL has, you know the goalies are going to be the best eight players in their position in the world and goals are hard to come by. Of course it doesn’t help that Sarah Nurse takes a mugging on a regular basis and the refereeing was a little iffy. The third period penalties to Nurse and Thompson were marginal, and didn’t impact the score sheet, but they broke the momentum.

The game was in Lowell, Mass., but you knew it was pure Boston every time the crowd chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A” when Nurse and Thompson were sent to the box.

The Vancouver hockey media, who only ever know what it’s like to lose, are starting to write about whether the Goldeneyes should start tanking to improve their chances at a good draft pick (I’m looking at you Steve Ewen, you absolute muppet). This is what passes for punditry in some North American cities, where fans who advocate this line of thinking start to accurately express what the league incentivizes. The idea that professional athletes would ever tank a season to get a better draft pick is bizarre. The idea that women playing pro hockey in a league they have only ever dreamed about would take their foot off the gas for a second is an insult to all of them. Fans calling for their teams to lose every game at the end of the season are generally unpleasant to be around and shouldn’t be trusted.

The PWHL is a great league. It is intense, condensed, and hosts the best players in the world. These are athletes at the top of their game, seizing the brass ring, and testing themselves against the best competition in the world. It’s a great thing to watch and I’ve finally been bitten by it. Sarah Nurse and Sophie Jaques have stolen my heart for this team. I went along to my first game two weeks ago and it was brilliant.

It’s amazing to watch how quickly women’s professional sports have become normalized. Where before it seemed like there was a glass ceiling to overcome, the rapid establishment of the PWHL and the NSL here in Canada has shown that it was just gas lighting all along. There never was a ceiling, just a group of millions of people looking for women’s pro teams to get behind. Build it, treat it properly, and all of a sudden, we just have a normal world where people pay good money to watch women compete as professionals.

Leaky times

March 24, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

Lots going on around here. Spring has sprung, we’ve prepared our beds for veggies and flowers. Bird song is changing in the morning, with creepers wheezing out their little songs and the first yellow-rumped warblers calling out to each other. (Birders sometimes refer to these birds as butter-butts!).

I have a plumbing crew tearing apart one of my bathrooms because the old plumbing in this house fails from time to time and a leak has been discovered. It’s not the first and given the original materials used on this house, it won’t be the last, but we’re talking this opportunity to do a retrofit of most of the joints and water line in the plumbing stack. It’s going to cost a small fortune, but you can’t mess around with water in the house.

It’s somehow a bit indicative of the state of the world at the moment. I’m reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliviera’s book “Hospicing Modernity” and I think I’m just resonating with inevitable decline of essential systems and how every time we convince ourselves we’ve repaired something, we know it’s just delaying the inevitable.

Staring over the edge

March 22, 2026 By Football No Comments

The cliffs at the end of the world, near Sagres, Portugal.

Tottenham 0 – 3 Nottingham Forest

I moved to Cheshunt, Herts, in England in 1978, just six weeks after the English football season ended. Under the guidance of Brian Clough, Nottingham Forest won the First Division that season, setting them up for an epic couple of years in which they were the dominant force in European football. Tottenham on the other hand had been dire. They were relegated to the second division in 1976-77, and won promotion the following year on the strength of goal difference alone. When I arrived on the scene, Tottenham was back, a top flight local team stacked with fresh talent like Glen Hoddle and World Cup winners Ricardo Villa and Ozzie Ardilles. That team grew in stature and swagger, winning the FA Cup in 1981 and 1982 and then the UEFA Cup in 1984.

So I never knew the pain of relegation for Spurs, nor could have I ever imagined that Nottingham Forest would not be the best team in the world. And yet here we are, Tottenham coming off our first European trophy since that UEFA Cup, and Forest FINALLY pulling themselves clear of 23 years outside of the top flight.

This morning, a six point game beckoned. Forest, who have struggled this season travelled to north London to play Tottenham. Six points were on the line here. It was Nottingham’s chance to leap frog Spurs towards 16th place and some modicum of safety. Tottenham, West Ham and Forest are trying hard to NOT finish in 18th place. We had to win.

And we didn’t. We outplayed Forest for much of the game, sending corner after corner harmlessly into the box. We hit a couple of posts and crossbars and exacted a couple of key saves. But in the end? It was dire, terrible, uninspired, without shape or identity or any kind of idea. Forest found three goals from think chances, and on a normal day you might say that the scoreline flattered them but not today. Today our undoing was the collective shrug we played with. Archie Grey, the 20 year old midfielder was the only one who see to show any kind of creativity. Mattias Tel, cutting in from the left wing provided a handful to deal with, but there isn’t much point winning corners if they serve no further purpose.

I can’t help think that we are going down. Two home wins in the premier league all season. No wins in 2026, and it’s almost April. The only good news today was Arsenal bottling the League Cup Final, but even a lost trophy to our biggest rivals is no salve for the wounds. Spurs are bleeding.