No idea what a gridiron is, but I always though American football a bit of a nancy game, mincing around in pretty outfits patting each others butts and doing silly dances, give me British footy any day.
Cheers Tony
'No idea what a gridiron is, but I always though American football a bit of a nancy game, mincing around in pretty outfits patting each others butts and doing silly dances, give me British footy any day.'
A bit nancy? Crash helmets, padded bras and eye liner to play Rugby? They seem to enjoy dressing up like the sixth member of The Village People and once or twice a game they run 10 yards on a tiny pitch! Must be the gayest sport of all time. Hard to believe it was originally proper Rugby until the sponsors took over and re-wrote the rules to make it more 'commercial'.
In it's favour it is not quite as boring as Nascar - dozens of ultra low-tech redneck-mobiles lumbering round a gentle oval and pretending to race! Like watching a freeway webcam. . . . . :D
A gridiron is a football field. It is so called because there are lines drawn from sideline to sideline every 10 yards (no meters/metres for us), giving it the appearance from the air of a grille, which used to be called a gridiron back when football was invented. It's 120 yards long (the two end 10 yard spaces are the scoring zones, called "end zones") and 53 yards wide.
I'll grant you your point on the silly dances; I'd love to outlaw those. Back before the NFL got too corporate, anyone who had dared to do anything like that after they had scored would have ended up being carried off of the field on a stretcher the next time they entered play. But times have changed.
However, in the few soccer games I've watched what I see when someone scores a goal is a) the goal scorer runs around like a madman, b) sinks to his knees like he's seen God, and then c) his teammates hug and kiss and just about dry hump him. So don't talk too much about the butt patting and all.
The big problem I've got with soccer is all the acting going on. In American sports, if you leave the field on a stretcher, you're not going back out on the field for that game. Depending on the sport and the injury, you're going to be out for a couple of days to the rest of the season. In soccer, when someone's carried off you don't know whether to give them a bandage or an Oscar. If you've noticed, some of this stuff has materially affected the progress of this World Cup; just ask the Australians. In American sports, trying to draw a penalty by "taking a dive" gets YOU the penalty, as does laying around acting injured to the point that you're carried off the field when you're actually well enough to re-enter the game.
Here's a question for you, then. In soccer, at the end of each half the referee adds "injury time", which if I understand it correctly is his estimate of how much time was taken up by delays due to play stoppage due to injury. This seems at the least imprecise to me. When there is an injury or other reason to stop play, why doesn't the referee blow his whistle, stop the clock, and then restart it when play is to resume? I bet that would time the half a lot closer to the regulation 45 minutes than having the referee say, "Oh, that was about 2 minutes".