There are questions that have plagued philosophers since the dawn of civilization. I ponder them often.
Sometimes it's theological stuff like "Is there a god?" Sometimes it's existiential stuff like "What is the meaning of life?" Other times it's scientific theory, like the Fermi Paradox, which is a favorite of mine. The ELI5 version of that is there are hundreds of billions of stars like our sun in the galaxy, many of which will have Earth-like planets – those that we know are capable of hosting intelligent(ish) life – orbiting them, and many of those solar systems are much older than ours.
Thus: Possibility of intelligent life + time should = interstellar travel. Interstellar travel should = extraterrestrial contact. But that hasn't happened yet despite the timeline suggesting it should've.
Why?
Well, that's the paradox. And one of the hypotheses is that there's a "Great Filter," some Ozzie Alonso-like force that goes around the entire galaxy snuffing out life forms when they get too technologically advanced:
So at this point we're either the most technologically advanced society in the galaxy (unlikely, because we're not a particularly old world), we've already made it through the filter and don't know about it (unlikely, because of math), or we're about to hit the filter and get blinked out of existence.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this.
If those are the big three questions, the fourth – one that has plagued many of the world's greatest thinkers and Steve McClaren – is "How the hell can you get both Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard into the same midfield and make it work?"
The rest of the All-Star Fan XI revealed on Monday offers the typical questions: How should this team play without a defensive midfielder? Do you really want to go with three at the back against an actually functional team? How did Sebastian Giovinco not win the vote?
The Commissioner's picks dare us to contemplate the bigger question. Let's dive into what I'll happily call The Sven Paradox.
Like all paradoxes there's no real, acceptable answer. Lampard and Gerrard together produced good results against patsies, but against better competition always made England incredibly susceptible to counterattacks. Each has a propensity to chase the ball rather than close down space, which is a trait good passing teams love to exploit.
That was mitigated somewhat for the four minutes when Owen Hargreaves was healthy, but those days were nearly a decade ago and despite countless opportunities in the intervening years, the Lampard & Gerrard central midfield combo never put together a definitive performance against class opposition.
There have been more than a few column inches spilled on that topic. Consensus is it's because the players are too similar, both at heart No. 8s who want to spread the field and change the shape of the game with long diagonals and late runs into the box. Lampard eventually drifted deeper in his years at Chelsea, becoming something of a regista more than the attack-minded box-to-box midfielder he'd been in his prime, while Gerrard has logged time at literally every midfield position (including inverted on the left, which... no) between club and country.
For their national team, however, they were two ships passing in the night. Just not to each other.
In league play, they'll both be fine. The Galaxy will happily put Gerrard into his preferred No. 8 role, using Juninho to cover for his harrying, while Jason Kreis will somehow figure out the best way of doing the same with Lampard in the Bronx.
But the All-Star Game will force Pablo Mastroeni to ponder the bigger question: How does one get them both into that spot and make it work?
It's more philosophy than soccer, a paradox for the ages.
- RELATED: COMPLETE 2015 ALL-STAR ROSTER
