Welcome to the bench

Grab a seat. Slide on over. It's moderately comfortable here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by strategy in sports. You want football plays scribbled in an old binder? I’ve got pages and pages of those stashed in a closet somewhere. You want basketball offenses that never saw the court? Those are loaded on an old phone of mine. You want way too many theoretical lineups detailing my preferred high school soccer starting eleven for every possible in-game situation? Those, well, those all probably ended up in the recycling bin. But I made them. And that’s the point.

I spent large portions of my childhood daydreaming, not about scoring the winning something-or-other, but about crafting the perfect strategy from the sideline. I, uh, wasn’t a normal child. Don’t get me wrong, I liked playing. I still do. But thinking about the game was my jam, which made the games that I spent on the bench near the end of my high school sports career bearable.

You can think on the bench.

Years later, I’m still on the bench. Except the bench is my couch. Or a chair. Or really any seat that has a soccer game on directly in front of it. With Benched, I want to take you inside my head. Well, okay, maybe that’s a little too intimate. Let’s try that again. With Benched, I want to usher you to a seat next to me on the bench. (That’s much better. I’m more comfortable with that.) I want to usher you to a seat next to me on the bench so that we can talk all about strategy and tactics and styles and the ins and outs of a specific player’s game.

If any of those things sound remotely interesting to you, I think you’re going to like Benched. Once a week, I’m going to have one piece of analysis that digs into a soccer game from somewhere in the world. It’ll be fun.

The bench, as I’ve learned, isn’t so bad.