"Two snaps and your backfield in motion."
Posted on 07/02/2014 9:55:48 AM PDT by PoloSec
I’m a sports fanatic. I love almost every sport.
I’ve tried to get interested in soccer. I just can’t.
Soccer is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
There’s almost no scoring in soccer. Too many games end 0-0 and 1-0.
Hours can go buy with barely a shot on goal – when no one even comes close to scoring.
I think there’s too much scoring in NBA basketball. But I’d rather have too much scoring than no scoring.
If this sport is ever to catch on in America, soccer needs to make adjustments to make the game more exciting to watch.
Adjustment #1: Dramatically shrink the size of the field.
Make the field about half the size it is now.
This will help increase the action in front of the goal.
Adjustment #2: Increase the size of the goal.
An increase in the width of six inches or so would probably be enough.
Adjustment #3: Put sideboards up around the field so the ball doesn’t go out of bounds so much.
Indoor soccer has this feature. Indoor soccer is much more fun to watch than outdoor soccer.
Passes that carom off the walls make the passing more complicated and interesting, like hockey.
Adjustment #4: Allow hitting in soccer, like in ice hockey and lacrosse.
Soccer need not make all these changes at once.
Try one or two changes at a time and see what happens.
People want to see goals. And people like to see hitting.
The National Football League is constantly tweaking the rules to make the game more exciting.
If the NFL never changed the rules, there would be no scoring because defense always catches up to the offense. Almost all the rule changes favor the offense.
Even the football itself has changed shape over the years to enhance the passing game.
Baseball created more home runs by bringing in the fences. Basketball created more scoring by adding a shot clock. Boxing created more action by making the ring smaller.
But boxing is being overtaken in popularity by martial arts caging fight because there’s a lot more action, a lot more actual fighting.
All other sports that I can think of constantly review and change the rules – to make their sports more exciting to watch.
Why can’t soccer make adjustments?
There is no sport that I can think of that is more boring than soccer.
Even golf is more exciting.
There are tense moments in golf, such as when Phil Mickelson is trying to sink a five-foot putt to win the Masters.
Baseball is slow. But it gets tense when the bases are loaded in a close playoff game if your team is involved. The tension in golf and baseball is created by the situation.
But there are few situations in soccer that create any tension because so much of the action takes place so far from the goal.
Is there strategy in soccer? I assume there is, but I can’t discern it.
It’s obvious there’s strategy in baseball and football. The fans can see it. The fans can question the strategy.
The fans can boo if the football coach decides not to go for it on fourth down.
Should they pass or should they run?
The fans can question whether it’s the right move for the baseball manager to take the pitcher out of the game.
Should the hitter bunt and try to move the runner over, or should he swing away?
Strategy is a big part of the appeal of football and baseball.
There’s a chess-match aspect to these sports.
There’s a lot of thinking involved. Should we do this? Or should we do that?
I’d Watch Soccer If It Were More Like Ice Hockey
I’m not sure there’s a lot of strategy in hockey either.
But hockey is exciting. Hockey is basically the same game as soccer. But it’s fast. It’s on skates. The rink is small compared to a soccer field.
Hockey is mayhem.
There are lots of shots on goal in hockey, lots of action in front of the net. There are fights. Many hockey players have missing teeth. They look cool. They look rugged. They are rugged. The puck is hard as a rock. It caroms off the boards. There is checking in hockey, where the player gets to slam the other player into the boards. You hear a loud thud when that happens.
Hockey is more like a gang fight on skates. The players are carrying a weapon – their hockey stick. Their skates are razor sharp.
Hockey is a truly dangerous game.
Hockey is much more of a man’s sport than soccer. In soccer, the players fall on the ground if they are barely touched. They then writhe around on the field screaming in hopes of drawing a penalty.
When the penalty comes or doesn’t come, that same player who was writhing around on the field crying suddenly jumps to his feet and resumes playing, perfectly healthy.
Hockey players don’t act like this. They would be laughed off their teams as sissies if they did.
In soccer, the clock keeps running during the alleged injury.
So if a team that’s winning by one goal just wants to run out the clock, that team can just fake all kinds of injuries — which often happens.
That sure makes for an exciting game.
And what’s up with the obsession with the hair of certain World Cup soccer stars?
The star player from Portugal (I forget his name) has a completely different hairdo and hair color every game. How much time is this guy spending in the hair salon?
Shouldn’t he be spending that time watching film or practicing?
Something else I’ve noticed.
Recent immigrants to America learn to love NFL football.
There’s a Mexican restaurant that I go to a lot in Chicago that doubles as a sports bar.
Mexico is known for soccer. It’s their national sport.
But at this Chicago Mexican sports bar I go to, the preferred sport there is NFL football.
Mexicans who move to America quickly become NFL football fanatics. So do Asians and Africans who move here.
These recent Mexican immigrants admit to me that American football is a whole lot more fun to watch than soccer.
They also love boxing and caging fighting.
Something else that bugs me about soccer is that it’s a sport that I feel is being forced on me by liberals who hate American football, who hate violent, dangerous sports.
Liberals are doing everything they can to feminize the NFL. There’s Breast Cancer Awareness month when all the NFL players are expected to wear pink. Kick-off returns are being phased out because they are so dangerous. Defensive players can no longer hit the quarterback, for some reason.
Former NFL great Terry Bradshaw suggests putting a skirt on the quarterback so the defensive player understands more clearly who he can’t hit.
During Super Bowl Week, there’s always the obligatory article in The New York Times on how violence against women (husbands beating their wives) rises during Super Bowl week.
Turns out this is a myth – a complete canard.
Violence against women actually seems to decline during Super Bowl week – probably because husbands are wrapped up in the game. The wife beating seems to resume after the Super Bowl is over.
There’s now the obsession with concussions in the NFL – as if concussions never occurred before now.
So now the NFL has banned leading with your head.
If we want to reduce concussions, maybe football should be played without a helmet, like in the old days. That would discourage players from engaging in head-on collisions with each other.
Some liberal writers have proposed banning football, banning boxing, banning caging fighting, banning car racing, banning all these dangerous sports.
But liberals love soccer.
Soccer’s not the least bit dangerous. About the worst injury you see in soccer is a pulled hamstring.
Well there is that guy in the World Cup from Uruguay who keeps biting the opposing players.
What’s up with that guy? And why doesn’t someone break his nose?
Do you remember when liberals tried to force the metric system on Americans?
I feel they are trying to do this to us with soccer.
Liberals told us we needed to adopt the metric system because that’s what the rest of the world uses.
They told us the metric system makes more sense and is easier to understand.
Not sure that’s true.
A foot is about the length of my foot.
Seems pretty straight forward and simple to me.
I have no idea what 2.34 centimeters is.
Is that like a centipede?
I think America’s measuring system is a lot easier.
But liberals continue to try to push the metric system on us, just like they are desperate to get America to love soccer – so we can be just like the rest of the world.
I don’t want to be like the rest of the world.
Frankly, I was also turned off by the big celebration in the media over USA’s soccer victory over Ghana.
Where the heck is Ghana?
I had to look it up on a map. What’s their population? Do they even have enough people in Ghana to field a soccer team?
Apparently they do.
If America is this excited about its World Cup victory over a dinky little country like Ghana, that’s pathetic.
We’re a nation of 320,000,000 people.
Yet we barely beat Ghana — 2-1.
If Wisconsin played Ghana, that would seem to be a more fair contest.
Then we went on to tie Portugal — another dinky country. This was also hailed by the media as great news for the USA.
If this is great news, America really is in decline.
Then Germany defeats USA, you guessed it . . . 1-0.
Zzzzzzzzzzz.
Here’s something else that’s off-putting.
USA keeps advancing in this World Cup tournament without winning.
We beat Ghana, and that’s it. We then tied Portugal and lost to Germany.
Yet we continue to advance in the tourney.
Why aren’t we eliminated?
Maybe that’s another reason liberals love soccer so much.
Nothing is at stake in these games. Your actual performance in the game makes little difference.
Everyone’s a winner. It’s almost impossible to lose at this game.
So no one feels bad.
UPDATE: Belgium defeats Team USA 2-1 to eliminate the US from World Cup competition.
Link?
And if players accumulate yellow cards over a series of games, they are suspended for a game, so there are indeed immediate consequences to getting a yellow card.
Hey, I expect the quality of the NFL self-congratulatory prancing and chest pounding to only improve. I mean the rest of the players will have to step it up now that fans can look at a player breaking out the fruity moves and know for sure he is actually gay. They have to compete with the real McCoy now.
Freegards
If there was more biting ears off and other body parts, that would make it more interesting. It would give the players a reason to go to the ground writhing in pain. Instead of a fake injury, they’d have a real injury.
Put them on skates, on ice, penalize divers, smaller goals, lots of padding, allow most fights, use a puck.
Hockey is the greatest game you can ever name.
"Two snaps and your backfield in motion."
My take with soccer is it’s not American. Pussy liberals like it but they aren’t American either. I grew up playing football. I never even knew soccer existed until years later after I graduated from high school. We have football so why in hell would we need soccer, a lesser sport?
You like soccer.
Fine. It’s a free country (until soccer becomes the number one sport).
But this:
“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps USMNT matches are one of the few bastions left where people can proudly wave the Red, White and Blue?”
That’s a poor attempt at demagoguery.
And the best game you can name is the good old hockey game.
I guess you could call me a soccer curmudgeon, and I’m not likely to watch another match until the next World Cup, but I did like the excitement and tension generated because of how precious goals are, given the lack of them. Also, I liked the relative lack of rules (relative to the control freak NFL), and lack of commercials (again, relative to the control freak NFL).
Absolute worst song. Best game. Lol!
I’m partial to it, because everyday back in 1999 when the Dallas Stars were on their run to winning the Stanley Cup, they would play that song.
Not even close to as poor as the following:
The World Cup and pro soccer in general is not something to be admired or interested in.
It does serve as a marker of sorts. The more interest there is in it here in the US, the closer we go to a European Style socialist state.
Stopped reading here:
“Soccer is about as exciting as watching paint dry. “
He apparently didn’t watch yesterday’s game. Or Brazil-Chile. Or USA-Portugal. That’s just lazy.
Outside of the Anglosphere, people have trouble inventing sports. Look at all the variant "footballs" in English-speaking countries -- soccer, rugby union, rugby league, American football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, Australian football. The rest of the world just has soccer (though parts of France and now Italy are playing rugby now).
Maybe it's indicative of larger factors. European countries were always insecure and worried about the designs of their neighbors. Historically there were more limits to how much freedom and innovation were allowed than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. They were always afraid that if the country misstepped the French or German army might step in.
So now, Belgium is always worried about competing with the Netherlands or Cameroon with Nigeria in soccer, instead of evolving new rules or new games. Plus, there are so many leagues in so many different countries that it would be hard to get agreement among them all.
I enjoyed pl;ayig very much in my youth - young adulthood. Get bored very quickly watching it. I understand why my parents didn’t make it to many games, or many fans didn’t make it at all. Kind of like track meets. My folks made it to every single basketball game however...
Of course you’re correct that 5-on-4 is significantly greater an advantage than 11-on-10, but how much more significant is tough to say given the differences in the nature and the speed of the two games. But in any case, since soccer at the World Cup level has such closely matched teams and typically such low scores, the effect of any tangible advantage would worth exploring.
And the time period of a penalty box stay could be tweaked to give whatever results FIFA or some other governing body seeks - if the man-short team can play keep-away for two minutes, make the minor penalty four or five.
With regard to your other point, it all depends on what one considers “immediate”. In principle, you could be down to the last two minutes of the final game of the Cup, say up a goal, and commit a minor foul on your opponent with impunity - so you get a yellow card, so what? To a lesser extent, any player could have the same attitude in any game - you get one free foul, at least if it’s at the yellow card level, and if you’re worried about another one, you just back off a little, or your coach replaces you with someone at a comparable level, or whatever. I just think if a person commits an actual foul, there should be consequences then and there, not (maybe, or maybe not) later on or a game down the road
A 2-1 soccer score is the same as a 14-7 football score. A 14-7 football score is not that rare. A 3-0 soccer is the same as a 21-0 football and that definitely is not rare.
Don’t mention extra points in football to me. They are the closest thing to life to automatic, right next to taxes and death.
“The Colombians do it right.”
Very entertaining - but have you ever seen the Kiwi’s do their haka?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOTyoQjQXRs
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