Football

Yesterday was Teresa’s surgery.  Long awaited, dreaded and sad.  It was an emotional minefield and a financial surprise attack…  So the day after it you’d expect my blog to talk about it right?  And you’d be wrong…

While we were in the waiting room a couple of the doctors popped their heads out and asked if we minded if they changed the channel to see the score of the World Cup game.  Of course we didn’t give a crap, CNN was boring the hell out of me with the “General v. Commander In Chief” battle.  The USA was playing Angola and the score was 0-0.  From across the room we could hear how excited these guys were about the game.  Eventually they were called away and left the game on.

I’m not a “sports guy”.  I don’t watch them on TV and I’ve stopped following teams for the most part.  I’ll play just about any sport I can if presented with the opportunity, but watching them on television is just boring to me.  Teresa, on the other hand, loves watching American Football if any of the teams she’s interested in happen to be playing but up to this point has had no interest in soccer.

But with the TV left on, our eyes were naturally drawn to it.  And with team USA playing, Teresa picked a side.  Ordinarily I’d pick the other team just to make it interesting but Angola?  I just don’t care enough about soccer to even be controversial…  So I find myself in the position of explaining what little I know about soccer to Teresa who has a sudden interest in watching the game.  We even moved over to another couch to get a better view.  We watched with mild amusement as USA scored the only goal in the game, one minute into overtime.  We were like, “…huh…okay, they won.  Cool…” but it seems that the rest of the world saw something different.  Some kind of “bottom of the ninth, two out, full count” kind of event.

There’s still a lot I don’t know but now that I’ve seen one game, more than I’ve ever watched before, there is a lot I don’t like about soccer.

• The internationality of it.  I’m no xenophobe but I’m not a world traveler either.  The language is all wrong to my American ears.  “Game” becomes “match”, when a team wins they are “through”…  Shit like that.  It’s not my natural vocabulary so I feel unnerved.  Soon they’ll be talking about lifts instead of elevators and fries will become chips while chips become crisps…  I’m not used to this language around sports, only in literature!  I normally think of “sports guys” as beer swilling ruffians and when I hear foreign culture-speak coming from the playing field, my brain gets the dumb…

• The clock counts up rather than down.  This is stupid.  Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I knew how long a game was.  When we started nearing the 88 minute mark the commentators were talking about how USA was desperate for a goal so I guessed that it was like a two minute warning and the game lasts 90 minutes.  Then we get to 90 minutes and they say we’ve been granted an additional four minutes.  WTF?!  How did they decide to grant extra time?  Why four minutes?   If this is normal, why the big deal?  Why not just announce “overtime”?  I don’t like the idea of some dick in a hat sitting by the sidelines deciding on whether or not to grant us additional time.  Bias.  Either we get time or we don’t.  You can’t make up the rules as we go along.  Although, I DO like the idea that the clock doesn’t stop.  Out of bounds?  Minor injury?  Keep that clock rolling!

• Vuvuzelas.  You learn to ignore them until someone in the room reminds you about them.

• The size of the field is way too big.  Too much room to run around in.  All that room and the ball still goes out of bounds WAY too often.  If running around a playground was a sport, they’d call it soccer.  I was not impressed with anything they did with the ball.  The kicking looked like something any kid off the street could do.  Running around for 90 minutes straight is pretty impressive; occasionally kicking a ball that ended up going to the wrong guy about half the fucking time is decidedly less impressive.  These fuckwits were just hoping to get the ball down the field, they didn’t look like they were aiming it toward anyone at all.  Boring!  At least in hockey they complete a pass from player to player a few times per push.  So shrink down that giant soccer field.  Make these guys learn to pass the ball to their own team mate instead of kicking it downfield and hoping for the best.

• The size of the goal is way too big, the accuracy of the “professionals” is way too low.  I understand that there is more to it than kicking the ball and hoping.  When they are down around the goal the game gets interesting (another reason for shrinking the field).  You can put all the spin you want on a ball but when you regularly kick it ten fucking feet over the bar, it will NEVER go in the goal!  Were these guys the special-ed team of soccer?  Is this the best that the world of soccer has to offer?  Pressure of the game, field coverage of the goal, goaltender ready to pounce, I get it, it’s not as easy as it looks.  But a ten-year-old kid could have kicked those balls over the goal.  I expected to see close shots, I expected to see some dramatic saves.  I saw grown men miss a target the size of the side of a house.  If you can’t kick a ball into a 8′ x 24′ hole, what the fuck are you doing on that field?  Missing by inches or even a foot or two would mean you aimed for the corner and missed, but these assholes were missing by six or eight feet!  Don’t they practice?

• Tie.  This is supposed to be like the Olympics or World Series or Superbowl or something right?  Go into overtime, go into a shootout.  You can’t end a playoff game in a draw.  No.

• Whining bitches trying to draw a foul.  In hockey we just hit back a little harder when someone hits us.  A couple body checks, put someone into the boards and we’ll call it even.  If it gets too bad we’ll drop our gloves and take a swing on you.  In baseball we get our pitcher to drill the next guy at bat when someone screws us over.  In soccer, they lie down on the field and cry because someone stepped on our precious pink shoes.  Every ten seconds some asshole is lying on the grass clutching their shin and when the referee ignores him, he pops back up and plays as if he was never hit…  Pansy bitch.

So I have come to appreciate soccer a bit more than before.  I probably won’t continue to watch it but only because I don’t watch any sports.  If I were the type to watch grown men run around and play with a football, I could see myself watching them do it with a soccerball.  The boredom of the sport is partly to blame but as with anything, bands, movies, people… anytime the fanbase gets too vocal or fanatical, I want nothing to do with it.  Everyone was painting their faces, everyone was chanting USA, USA, USA!  Facebook status’ declaring “WE WON!  USAUSAUSA!!!!!”  I just fucking hate these kinds of people.