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PSYCHOcatholic

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Soccer has the potential to be a good game, but it really needs more scoring. It reminds me of a game my grandfather told me about that he used to play when he was a kid, called "kick the can" - a meaningless, endless, almost brain-numbing experience where one would kick a coffee can 20 feet, walk up to it and kick it again, kick it over to his buddy, the buddy would kick it 20 feet or so, walk up to it and kick it again, then kick it to another buddy, and so on, and so on, and so on....

:afro: :afro: :afro: :jester:

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Sure, just imagine...."Beckham races to the goal and readies his famous...Oh, what a hipcheck by Kolsky. Beckham goes flying out of bounds".

"...Kolsky picks Beckham up by the shirt, lifts him over his head, and administers the most devastating piledriver this announcer has seen since the Manchester/Brussels game of 1979...and we all know how that one turned out...a 0-0 tie, of course..."

:afro: :afro: :afro: :jester: :jester:

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I don't even know why I bother, but here goes:

Why Americans Hate Soccer

[smaller]June 17th, 2006[/smaller]

At first glance it’s incredible that soccer– the most popular youth sport in the United States, and a sport whose worldwide audience dwarfs every other sport including basketball and American football combined– receives so little coverage. Without careful attention to ESPN’s secondary channel (usually devoted to poker, bass fishing, and bowling) you would never know that the World Cup– the most popular sporting event in the world– was making its once-every-four-years appearance. But it only takes a few conversations (or a little time listening to pinhead’s like ESPN’s Colin Cowherd to figure out why:

1. Low Scoring. Americans will piss themselves when a pitcher manages a no-hitter and they’ll praise the low-scoring defensive games in American football as “good old fashioned teamwork†(and Canadians love their hockey), but the same thing happens on the soccer pitch and they are flummoxed. What would most football games look like if touchdowns were worth just one point apiece instead of 7? 2-1, 3-2, etc… are we just that bad at math?

2. Subtlety. I’m a fan of basketball and American football. They are much more complex than they look. Soccer is at least as complex as either, but it lacks the shallow level of obvious spectacle that veneers these quintessentially American sports. Clearly Americans are capable of understanding this (after all, baseball is very siilar in this respect, the athletes are just fatter and slower) but they choose not to for other reasons to come…

3. It’s Un-American. And I don’t mean this in the common, Imperialist/racist senses (though that plays a part sometimes), but in the sense that America has no claims to have significantly changed the nature of the sport… it hasn’t been embraced, extended, or adapted by America– we don’t own it, so we don’t like it.

4. America Just Isn’t Very Good at It. It’s highly unlikely that Team USA will advance out of the initial round of group play and this year’s team is more talented than the 2002 team which stunned everyone around the world by making it to the quarterfinals. We could be more competitive if there were any national desire to do so, just as we have become dominant in many other sports– we have the money and the population to do so– but it’s highly unlikely to happen given soccer’s relative subtlety.

I also have to note the ridiculousness of the constant claims that soccer fans are elitist. Some of them are, just as fans of every sport can be exclusionary. But the reality here isn’t elitism, but Ugly American attitudes towards the game. Why else would we insist on renaming a sport much older than any of our own? Why else do we balk at using the right terminology (it’s not a field, it’s a pitch; they aren’t cleats, they are boots) when referring to the game. When a soccer fan mentions these things they are branded elitist, while any American sports fan would immediately correct you if you tried to call a touchdown a try, or otherwise misapply terms. Who’s really the elitist here?

Link (interesting comments there)

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There is a lot of truth in that article, Farin. While I do not particularly care for any sport, I have no feelings of ill will, either. I do enjoy watching championship games of any sport, as well as Olympic contests, but I do not have the "fever." The only sports I will stop for if I pass by them on television are womens college soccer, basketball, volleyball, field hockey etc. But I will only watch for a little while. Woman's beach volleyball mayby a little longer....

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