About half the crowd I run with are enamored of the world's favorite sport. The other half - not so, and to them I've compared the game of soccer to a complex, California Cabernet. American football on the other hand is more like cheap beer in an aluminum can, followed, if your lucky, by a shot of Wild Turkey. Some think soccer aficionados are snooty, loving the war on the pitch simply because it isn't American. That's not it though - most American soccer fans also love the world's other finest game, invented with ball and a peach basket in Springfield, Massachusetts, albeit by a Canadian. No, soccer and basketball are both an ever-changing dance of ball, physical grace and endurance. Both lovely to watch and thrilling to play. That said, when it comes to the 2010 World Cup, my soccer-hating friends were right.As with so many sports, the best way to kill it is to pay grown-ups to play it. The glorious passion and beauty of high school and college soccer is quickly transformed into mind-numbing boredom when it reaches the world stage. Ninety minutes of play reaching 0-0 ties, 1-0 victories on a PK in match after match, world class athletes at the mercy of bad calls that are not called back or even explained - this will never win Yankee hearts and minds. No, even though it seems that more US dollars are spent on gasoline shuffling kids to soccer practice than commuting to work, the current incarnation of professional soccer is dead on arrival here after World Cup 2010.
Some comments found while strolling the links:
"Soccer is like watching the "Blair Witch Project" for the sixth time, counting grains of sand on the beach, or trying to sing every verse of "37,000 bottles of beer on the wall". How all of these "soccer hooligans" can stay awake through an entire game, much less muster the energy to riot after wards, is beyond me."
"Go ahead, tell me how I don't understand and how I am an American
brute. Just don't fall down in fake, agonizing pain as you're complaining."
"Almost every sport you can imagine has more going on than soccer. Baseball, golf, cricket, WNBA basketball, slow pitch softball, ping pong, freeze tag, foosball, you name it, it's all a thrill-a-minute rocket ride down the side of Mt. Everest compared to foot."
"Soccer is just as boring as golf. Or is it golf is just as boring as soccer. Either way.....same conclusion..........boooooooooooooooooring."
"Could you imagine if they played a whole basketball game and no one was able to score and then based on one foul the other team got a free throw worth fifty points? That about sums up soccer."
It will never happen, but FIFA needs to follow the lead of American sports and change the rules when a sport becomes stultifying.
1) Make the field smaller, make the net bigger, weaken the defense, something to increase the scoring.
2) Add some officials. Kick players out of the game with shirt pulling and bear hugging. How can you possibly score in soccer when being pulled to the ground?
3) Use technology - its 2010! There's just too much politics in this game. Using replays can eliminate some of this nonsense.
4) Penalize the pansy players writhing on the ground to waste time. Give 'em an Oscar and the other team a PK.
5) Add some objectivity to the timing of the game.
6) Can the shoot outs. Pull a player off each team every two minutes. That'll make OT interesting!
Can't wait for the fall soccer season to start back here in town. World Cup? Naaaah.
