Original Script
Eastfield Lodge are ten games World Cup 57 qualifiers and Eastfield Lodge, as usual, are languishing in mid table and going absolutely nowhere. There are six games left. They are eight points shy of the playoffs.
If a fightback is going to happen, it has to start now.
The Eastfielders move up to third, but they’re closer to second last than second place. Tretskivucia remain eight clear with five games left to play. Both teams have still to face Aguazul, who are thoroughly Aguazulling the group, and both teams have to face each other right now. It’s must win for Eastfield Lodge.
Awesome. Let’s see what Eastfield Lodge have to say about it….
...
Okay they’re probably happy but they’re not paying attention any more because that’s… that’s a lot of bodies. This is EFL’s last roleplay of the thread so the team are going to be flying blind from here on out but that’s okay. This comeback is still possible. Tretskivucia have a bye-day, so a win for Eastfield Lodge is sure to close the gap, but they’ll need to keep winning, and they need Tretskivucia to drop further points.
Three points clear with one game left to play. Eastfield Lodge have to travel to Aguazul. Aguazul are unbeaten. Aguazul have scored eighteen goals in their last three games. Aguazul will go on to win this World Cup and the two after that. This is an impossible task… right?
Right. EFL have played their last game. They must now wait on Matchday 18. Tretskivucia have to get a point in their final game, but that game... is against Aguazul. Aguazul are unbeaten. Aguazul have scored twenty-one goals in their last four games. This should be an impossible task.
Should. We’ve already seen that it’s not.
In Chapter 1 we said this match meant nothing, but that was only true for Aguazul, not for Tretskivucia, and not for the Eastfielder population slumped on the couch, watching the TV with increasing disbelief.
Aguazul were supposed to win. Aguazul always win. How could this happen? And when it comes to Eastfield Lodge, how could this happen over and over again?
Eastfield Lodge joined the football world in cycle 49, carrying with them arguably the worst flag in the history of the multiverse. They entered the same Baptism of Fire tournament that gave us Andrewboy, Osarius and an Oberour Ar Moro side that would beat the Eastfielders in the knockouts. The note at the top of this post probably didn’t seem quite so sarcastic back in 2009. Eastfield Lodge have generally not enjoyed further success in World Cup qualifying.
The yellow line here shows the Eastfielders’s goal difference throughout a qualifying campaign, including any friendly matches deemed ‘official’ by the World Cup Committee, but omitting playoffs or finals appearances.
We’ve chosen goal-difference because it gives us a base: This faint black line with positive goal differential above it and negative below.
Yellow zigzag above good, yellow zigzag below bad.
Here, we can see the Eastfielders’s slow start to the World Cup 57 qualifying campaign, with their goal differential in the negative. It drops further after their mid-qualifying exhibition game against Bears Armed, and rises again with a comprehensive friendly-match victory over Cyborg Holland. We see their late-campaign fightback as they charged back up the table, including their other destruction of Cyborg Holland - this one in the qualifiers - followed by defeat to Aguazul and three post-qualifying friendly matches. Two losses and a draw against Eura, Tamarindia and The Weegies.
Eastfield Lodge were one of those weird teams that wore blue on the Inverted Sosimo Lissón Chart. They’re in a modest position just outside the top two-hundred. Their worst trio of cycles apparently 73 to 75.
Cool let’s have a look at those cycles.
Okay. Not great but not terrible.
World Cup 73 qualifying, you don’t need me to tell you that’s a mid-table performance. Fourth in a group of seven, finishing with a goal difference of minus one. They may as well have not been there at all.
World Cup 75 is almost exactly the same story, but about World Cup 74? This doesn’t seem so bad so far…
Qualifying group 19, four matchdays to go, here’s the situation in this alternative version of the table. Looking at the group four years on, it doesn’t seem particularly strong save for top-seeds Cosumar in the playoff spot. The auto-qualification spot belongs to Eastfield Lodge.
They have a game in hand, they have seven wins from eight games. They’re flying.
Defeat away to Cosumar is nothing to be ashamed about. Five points ahead of Szavoda with only three games to play, all they need is four points from their three remaining fixtures in order to progress, and the first of them is a six-pointer against Szavoda. Victory here would put them into the playoffs at least. A draw would do just fine.
Okay. Not ideal. Two ahead with two to play, but the first of those two games is against Vaugania, who haven’t moved from zero points the entire campaign. 3-0. One game to go, two points the gap, and unlike the Tretskivucia situation, Eastfield Lodge’s fate is in their hands. A win here would seal that playoff spot. A draw would be fine as long as Szavoda don’t win.
---
Eastfield Lodge are a master of the dark art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I mean look at this. This has to be a successful qualification run, right? I mean if it isn’t then this has to be one weird qualifying tournament…
World Cup 54 qualifying. The format: 17 groups of six… plus 13 groups of 5. Double round robin - so 10 games or 8 depending on your group. Top two progress to a secondary single round robin with ten groups of six, where the top three qualify for the World Cup.
Not a typical qualifying format. It was a doomed one-off experiment and the only upside was that it provided Eastfield Lodge with the opportunity to fail in a new and exciting way.
The side strolled into first place in their group in stage one, went onto stage two, won their first two games, and just had to get through their final three matches without dropping too many points. A couple of draws or a single win should be enough here, and they’ve got three matches to do it in. You ready?
One.
Two.
Three.
We’ve seen Eastfield Lodge capitulate spectacularly from a position of power. We’ve seen them fight back into contention and get slapped back down by Margaret. Is this how Eastfield Lodge live their life? A succession of glorious, romantic failures at the final hurdle?
If only their existence was so exciting. Throughout their eleven-year history, spectacular failures are few and far between. Eastfield Lodge lead a purgatorial existence. We may associate them with losing, but losing accounts for only 30% of what they do. They’re not a football team that loses. I mean, life would be simpler if they were. There’s a stark, palpable certainty in a string of 4-0 defeats. Teams that finish bottom of the group know their place in the world. The Eastfielders’ meagre diet consists of 6-3-5 records and fourth place finishes, and it has been so since their inception.
Eastfield Lodge are not losers like DJ8989, losing meaninglessly, to the utter indifference of the entire country.
They are not losers like The Babbage Islands, capitulating heartachingly on the grandest scale.
Eastfield Lodge are losers in the worst possible sense. They trudge endlessly through a grey fog, seeing nothing, touching nothing, signifying nothing. A paradox. Bewilderingly inconsistent, but crushingly, thuddingly predictable.
They are connoisseurs of capitulation. They practice losing in its grandest and its most terrible form.
But surely that can’t be all there is? Somewhere in that long history their fans must have had something - anything - to cheer about...
Notes/Trivia
- Working Title: “The Eastfield Logic”
- The script was largely finished by mid October. The video was mostly finished by early November.
- The first twenty seconds are among my favourite opening 20 seconds of all TIP videos. Entirely for the song.
- This EFL bit is very clearly influenced by Jon Bois’s series on the Seattle Mariners, which you should definitely watch. That runs to about 3 and a half hours. The Eastfield Lodge section here ends up at only 40 minutes.
- The final scene is pretty much stolen from the fourth video of that series. The bit that introduces Ichiro Suzuki.
- I have a list of about half a dozen NS Sporters who have told me they’d like to narrate a video and who I haven’t asked yet. I was going to choose one of them for this one, but after Nethers knocked E5C1 out of the park I was having trouble reading the script in anything but his voice, so eventually I asked him to do it.
- I had a chat with Nethers about his pronunciation of ‘bewilderingly’ and he decided he wanted that to be the IC pronunciation of the word according to Nethertopians. I like this.
- Whatever the previous record for 'amount of individual images used in a TIP video', this video broke it. By a lot.