Posted on 06/24/2010 1:22:08 AM PDT by Chet 99
By John Houder Columnist
Published: Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 2:12 p.m.
The United States is a nation of differences. We all live together under one flag, but we're divided by geography, religion and socio-economic class. We disagree on trivial subjects like politics and important ones like whether or not the series finale of “Lost” was a complete disappointment. (It was.)
The only thing that transcends those boundaries and ties us together as a country is our mutual understanding that soccer is a pretty stupid game.
Everyone, from the richest Wall Street CEO to the poorest, bus-station hobo, will agree that soccer is an intensely boring sport where players are more likely to get hurt writhing around on the “pitch” in fake agony than they are while actually playing the game.
Where is the excitement in a 90-minute match that ends in a score of 1-0 or, often enough, 0-0? How many games can you watch before you lose all hope that something interesting will ever happen? Why don't they just pick up the ball or punch each other like in a real sport?
If we don't hate soccer, we certainly approach it with the same detached ambivalence as we do the metric system or photographs of other people's vacations. We understand that it's important or interesting to someone else, but we just don't have the time or energy to care about it ourselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at gainesville.com ...
ping.
Bump :)
Screw all of this... bring back Gladiators.
LLS
I love soccer. And I adore the U.S. team. Finishing as a group winner where England gets to the second spot only is a major achievement.
I predict more for America in SA. There’s daredevil zest and lots of ideas. And an unquenchable energy. Great stuff.
Welcome to the Free Republic.
Soccer is for little boys to small and weak to play football.
Interesting 11 minutes. No names attributed of course. You cannot begin to compare the action and the excitement between the two sports. One is a sport, the other is an ingrained relic dictated on the world by colonial aggression. I would love for the USA team to win, but rioting just for the heck of it is blatantly pathetic.
Go back to whatever 3rd world sewer you came from and take your socker with you.
You try to link me to that homoerotic fantasy of yours. Time says it’s so and you believe it. Fascinating.
Why the animosity? I am Dutch. Certainly not 3rd world. And hey, soccer beats football anytime, did you know that?
Hi Chet -
thanks for welcoming me. Well, I’m hear for quite some time already, but your courtesy is much appreciated over here (Holland).
This article is a Leftist swipe at soccer in a way presumed to get conservatives nodding heads. Fact is though, it's utterly disconnected from reality. Soccer is massively popular in the United States amongst teenagers and college students - and yes, older conservative adults too.
That said, it does raise the question - who would benefit politically by trying to widen the gap between conservatives and college students? Hmmm... lemme think...
Maybe the same people who also want you to believe that women's social restrictions are the same as the 1950's? That zero social support has been provided for still-oppressed blacks? You know, that white make football-loving conservatives are wreaking havoc while tender soccer-playing yutes are all cross-culturalling and stuff.
I smell a Clinton starting up... and the stench is only going to grow...
Also, a team in football that is down by 7-10 points in the final two minutes of the game has a realistic chance of catching up whereas once a team goes up 2-0 in soccer, the game is pretty much over at that point.
I've tried watching World Cup soccer but never could get much into the game. I would rather watch the Word Series of Backgammon or the World Series of Solitaire.
In boredom only. Ever hear of a 3-0 football game? Of course not - football has way more action, precision, and strategy than soccer!
A chess game generates a score 1:0 or 0:0, and it can be a most exciting match, one just has to make the effort to understand the subtleties. And comparing scores where in one sport a “goal” is 6 points, or say 15, as in tennis, to another where a goal is as it should be one point is absurd and dishonest.
One must judge the intensity of the action along with the duration. Two American football plays contain the intensity of a typical half in soccer, including injury time.
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