Posted on 03/11/2009 8:56:05 AM PDT by AreaMan
I enjoy watching Rooney play and C Ronaldo's foot skills are like magic. Can't stand MLS, English Premier is about all I watch.
All the talk about soccer + socialism is hogwash. Conservatives ought to be happy these kids are getting healthy, learning sportsmanship, etc. Better than running drugs on the street.
That is NOT a tenet of Association Football, that is socialist concept imposed by American liberals.
Don't blame the game, blame the people using it as a vehicle to advance their agenda.
William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby.
Hence the name of the game.
ESPN360.com has today’s game at 12:30 PST. It’s do or die for Man United, so I suspect both Ronaldo and Rooney will be playing, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rooney start on the bench.
There’s only one NFL in the world. The champion of the NFL is the world champion. That’s not hype, that’s reality.
What chauvinistic gibberish. In a reputable journal to boot.
Sorry, make that PDT. Free Republic is still running on standard time.
Exactly.
Soccer is played in just about every country on the planet, they can't ALL be socialist, can they?
It is truly universal and transcends politics.
What America misses out on, because American Football is not a real international sport, is the camaraderie, patriotism, and national sense of unity in getting behind "Our Team" in major international competition.
Whole Countries close down all over the World while their team is playing a major World Cup game, and the national celebrations when they win are spectacular.
America never experiences that; they had the "Miracle on Ice" but that was a one off event.
I don't understand why the European continent hasn't embraced American football. It is ironic, considering the Europeans spent the better part of the last two centuries murdering each other in war after war.
Actually, carrying the ball was a commonplace in many of the regional variants of the sport played throughout England prior to the attempts of the public schools (private schools in U.S. parlance) to establish one set of national rules, which in reality failed and gave rise to the officially defined, separate sports of rugby football and association football.
Ellis gets credit only for doing at a public school in what was supposed to be an association game that which was done commonly elsewhere in England.
With Timeouts? I think not.
This is just ignorance. If you don’t think soccer is physical, you haven’t spent enough time watching it. I’ve played football, rugby, baseball, wrestling, rowing, golf, you name it.
I’m not saying soccer is as physical as football. On the other hand, football is sometimes not as physical as rugby. (only wimps wear pads) Baseball is not as physical as football. Golf is not as physical as baseball. None are as physical as boxing or kickboxing. Why is physicality the determining factor in whether a sport is good or bad? It’s not. It’s personal taste.
Soccer is truly ‘the beautiful game’.
However, it is interesting to hear folks berate soccer. They don’t berate other sports...just soccer. You don’t hear someone saying “I hate golf! It’s such a wimp sport”
BTW, who did Sports Illustrated name as the toughest athlete in the world last year?
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/extramustard/03/28/25.toughest.athletes/
Bingo! The World Cup is one of the last bastions of good old-fashioned jingoism left, in this age of globalism. I think it's exactly what we need now, just like we needed it in 1980.
But the World Cup would be much huger than even that. Like I said, if the US were ever in position, most people would get on board. I would even suspect the finals would get "Super Bowl" like ratings here in the US if the US made it. (Unless the game started at 4 AM in the morning)
This is also why American rules football, Australian rules football and (to a lesser extent) Canadian rules football all vary so widely: they were all outgrowths of what we might call the primitive football variants played throughout the British Isles, and either missed the attempts of the public schools standardisation entirely, or diverged at early enough stages from the association or rugby rules standardisation process that their common pedigree is no longer clear.
But, bottom line, there was no single game played today which can claim to be the original “authentic” football.
One thing they started doing during games is assessing how much running a player has done during a game. Some players can run up to 10 miles during a game.
No, with beer commercials.
What about Instant Replay? How ghey is that?
Karl-Heinze:
You should know better than that. Are you saying Germany lost to high-schoolers a few times over the last several years? Are you saying Torsten Frings' handball on the line in 2002 that saved you is the only thing that kept you from losing to some high-schoolers?
Anyone got an idea what the “most dangerous sport” for women is?
How about cheerleading?
http://www.livescience.com/health/080811-cheerleading-injuries.html
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