England Defeat Australia 3-1

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Luke Ford

I got up at 3 am Wednesday to watch England defeat Australia 3-1 in the semi-finals of the women’s World Cup of soccer.

What I found most galling about Australia’s loss was the lack of response to England’s cynical battering of our leading player Samantha Kerr. Australia never retaliated, and was out-fouled 11-3.

SMH.com.au noted: “An unexpected feature of the English approach was uncompromising physicality. Most of it was reserved for Kerr, who was the target of three strong challenges inside the first 25 minutes, including a particularly cynical scythe by Alex Greenwood to chop her down just as she threatened to set up a counter-attack. It rightly earned her a yellow card.”

When you allow the other team to repeatedly trash your quarterback without retaliation, you are training people to abuse you. Australia let them get away with it.

If somebody tries to interrogate you, you must insist they observe the laws of civil procedure and provide sufficient notice for a deposition. If someone abuses you in a deposition, your counsel must step in to object.

If somebody wants to use you as a punching bag, you might suggest they purchase one on Amazon.com instead as you are not available to provide that service.

If you try to do someone a favor and they abuse you for it, you adjust your ways.

If you confide in someone and they violate your confidence, you don’t confide in them again.

If someone repeatedly humiliates you publicly, and that will always be a person under the age of 40, you must adjust your approach to incentivize different behavior from your abusers. We don’t always have to cut people out of our lives, we can just dial down the length, proximity, frequency, and intensity of our interactions with them.

Fox News published Oct. 26, 2020:

Lack of response after Andy Dalton hit disappointing, Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy says

McCarthy expected different response from his team after Dalton left game late in 3rd quarter

A turbulent season for the Dallas Cowboys seems to be getting worse.

Head coach Mike McCarthy shared his disappointment in the team on Sunday for their lack of retaliation to a dirty hit on quarterback Andy Dalton late in the third quarter which would see him miss the rest of the game.

“We speak all the time about playing for one another, respecting one another,” McCarthy told reporters following Dallas’ blowout loss against the Washington Football Team. “That was definitely probably not the response you would expect.”

Washington linebacker Jon Bostic was ejected after he dropped his shoulder for a late hit on Dalton, who was mid-slide. The tackle resulted in Dalton’s helmet coming off — he was eventually escorted off the field and would not return.

But not a single skirmish broke out on the field. The Cowboys remained quiet as Ben DiNucci, a rookie from James Madison, came on to replace Dalton.

Cowboys’ running back Ezekial Elliot attempted to defend his team against the criticism, telling ProFootballTalk after the game that while it’s a “fair” assessment to make, “you’ve got to be careful. … We’ve got to find a way to not cross that line, but we’ve still got to protect our guys.”

The idea was that after losing star quarterback Dak Prescott for the rest of the season following a serious leg injury in Week 5, the Cowboys would be outraged by the possibility of losing Dalton too but reports have indicated a strong disconnect within the team, beginning with the coaching staff.

Reports surfaced after a blowout loss against the Arizona Cardinals last week that players felt the coaches were “totally unprepared” and “just aren’t good at their jobs.”

You can’t allow the opposition to take cheap shots at your quarterback. You should lead a life that discourages people from taking cheap shots at you. It might mean that you start a blog.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

It was a difficult match to watch, with England’s tedious but effective tactics the Matildas’ undoing. Australia’s pressure on the ball was lacklustre at times, individual defensive errors proved costly, and we didn’t create enough clear-cut chances to convincingly say we should have won the match. Instead, we were left feeling like we could have won with a performance comparable to the Matildas’ previous encounters.

Against Canada, Denmark and France, Australia were more dynamic because the opponents’ approaches suited our counter-attacking prowess and strengths in transition. The Lionesses, however, posed an entirely different proposition and the Matildas’ coaching staff didn’t have a solution.

Tactically, Tony Gustavsson made the decision to sit off and let England have the ball in the back third, allowing for a slow and patient build-up. When they encroached into the middle-third, it resulted in long balls for our backline to try to manage.

The glimmer of hope came from golden girl Sam Kerr, with her stunning strike gifting us one of the best moments in Australian sporting history. On a different day, she would have buried the two opportunities in latter stages of the second half. But when Ellie Carpenter failed to deal with yet another haphazard long ball from England, our fate was sealed.

From the 2006 book, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany:

* In modern warfare there are two main types of aerial bombing—strategic and tactical. “Strategic bombing,” as defined by the Air Force, “strikes at the economy of the enemy; it attempts to cripple its war potential by blows at industrial production, civilian morale, and communications. Tactical bombardment is immediate air support of movements of air, land, or sea forces.” The Eighth Air Force would conduct both kinds of bombing, but at the start of the war its leaders hoped to commit it almost exclusively to strategic bombing.

* …Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the Royal Air Force’s founding father and first commander… was a deep believer in bomber warfare, which he perceived as the future. When the Germans bombed London first with dirigibles (Zeppelins), then, in 1917, with twin-engine Gotha bombers, killing almost 1,400 people, Trenchard sent four-engine Handley Page bombers to attack Rhineland cities.

* They proposed to shorten war by returning the advantage to the offensive. Advances in the technology of killing—the machine gun, poison gas, and rifled artillery—had made infantry attacks on dug-in positions suicidal. The solution they arrived at independently was airpower—Winged Victory. Just as technology had swung the advantage to the defense, now it would favor the offense. The airplane, the greatest offensive weapon yet developed, would break the hegemony of the defense. At a time when German strategists, in reaction to the static war they had just lost, were secretly developing a new form of warfare based on quick-striking tanks and armored vehicles, Mitchell and Douhet were advancing ideas for blitzkrieg warfare from the skies.

Douhet insisted that future wars would be short, total, and “violent to a superlative degree.” They would be won from the skies with vast fleets of long-range bombers, with the winning side the one that attacked first and without cease, gaining command of the air, not primarily by destroying the enemy’s air force in combat but by destroying its airbases, communications, and centers of production. In Douhet’s words, “It is not enough to shoot down all birds in flight if you want to wipe out the species; there remain the eggs and the nests.” Destroying the eggs and the nests was strategic bombing, the only type of bombing Douhet favored.

Once command of the air was achieved by marauding bombers, not fighter planes, which, in Douhet’s view would be annihilated by new-age bombers, the main targets would be the enemy’s key industrial cities, not its armies in the field. Attacks on these vital centers would shatter civilian morale, destroy the enemy’s war-making capability, and produce a mercifully quick capitulation, without the need for either armies or navies. In the new warfare “the entire nation is or may be considered a combatant force,” Mitchell echoed Douhet. “War,” Douhet wrote, “is no longer a clash between armies, but is a clash between nations, between whole populations. Any distinction between belligerents and non-belligerents is no longer admissible . . . because when nations are at war, everyone takes a part in it: the soldier carrying his gun, the woman loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing wheat, the scientist in his laboratory.”

Douhet, a passionate fascist, put the case for total warfare in more implacable terms than Mitchell ever would. There was no place for morality in the new warfare; it would be swift slaughter without mercy or sentimentality. “The limitations applied to the so-called inhuman and atrocious means of war are nothing but international demagogic hypocrisies. . . . War,” he wrote, “has to be regarded unemotionally as a science, regardless of how terrible a science.” As a modern historian has written, “One senses [in Douhet’s work], the final and frightening abandonment by the soldier of any sense of responsibility for the political and social consequences of his military acts.”

For the first time in the history of modern armed conflict, civilians were singled out as deliberate military targets, not only because they were valuable producers, but also because they were easy to intimidate. Both Douhet and Mitchell were convinced that civilians lacked the fortitude to stand up to vertical warfare waged with high explosives, incendiaries, and poisonous gases, that generation’s equivalent, in terror-generating capacity, of atomic warfare. The evidence they had before them was the mass panic and terror in London and Cologne caused by World War I bombing attacks, air strikes far smaller than either of them envisioned in future wars. The new wars will be decided swiftly, Douhet argued, precisely because “the decisive blows will be directed at civilians, that element of the countries at war least able to sustain them.”

In one of Mitchell’s hair-raising scenarios—the bombing of New York City—deadly gases released by bombs fill the air and seep into the subways, triggering a massive evacuation of the city. When the refugees of New York and other large American cities that have been bombed are unable to obtain the essentials of life, the government is forced to capitulate.

To Douhet and Mitchell, quick wars meant reduced casualties. In becoming more terrible, warfare would actually become more humane. Better to decide a war by terrorizing the population with “a few gas bombs,” Mitchell wrote, than “the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projectiles or butchering them with bayonets.” Mitchell even suggested that future wars might be fought, not by large armies, but an elite cadre of aerial warriors, the modern equivalent of “the armored knights in the Middle Ages.” This, too, would save lives. And the very threat of total annihilation, he argued in anticipation of the Cold War proponents of nuclear deterrence, would prevent war from breaking out. “Air power has brought with it a new doctrine of war . . . and a new doctrine of peace.”

* England was fully mobilized, almost a garrison state. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of eighteen and sixty were required to perform national service of some kind. Childless women between the ages of twenty and thirty were conscripted for home-front military service or jobs in munitions industries, the first time this had been done in any Western nation. In no combatant country except Russia were civilians subjected to a greater degree of government regulation and compulsory mobilization. Women operated antiaircraft batteries in London, and factories all over the country worked around the clock, seven days a week, with workers putting in ten-to-twelve-hour shifts.

England had the look of a country fighting for survival. Hundreds of thousands of working-class families, 60 percent of them in London, had had their places of residence damaged or destroyed by Nazi warplanes and countless thousands of them were still mourning the loss of family and friends. German air raids had already killed nearly 43,000 British civilians. Not until the fourth year of the war would the Germans kill more British soldiers than British women and children. “This is a war of the unknown warriors,” Churchill declared. “The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children.”

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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