Posted on 06/25/2014 8:47:40 PM PDT by fkabuckeyesrule
I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade -- or about the length of the average soccer game -- so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay.
(1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks.
In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms."
Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep.
(2) Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.
(3) No other "sport" ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: "2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0." Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: "1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0." If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he'd still be alive, although bored.
Even in football, by which I mean football, there are very few scoreless ties -- and it's a lot harder to score when a half-dozen 300-pound bruisers are trying to crush you.
(4) The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare. As Lady Thatcher reportedly said after Germany had beaten England in some major soccer game: Don't worry. After all, twice in this century we beat them at their national game.
Baseball and basketball present a constant threat of personal disgrace. In hockey, there are three or four fights a game -- and it's not a stroll on beach to be on ice with a puck flying around at 100 miles per hour. After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box.
(5) You can't use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here's a great idea: Let's create a game where you're not allowed to use them!
(6) I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating.
I note that we don't have to be endlessly told how exciting football is.
(7) It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.
(8) Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine.
Despite being subjected to Chinese-style brainwashing in the public schools to use centimeters and Celsius, ask any American for the temperature, and he'll say something like "70 degrees." Ask how far Boston is from New York City, he'll say it's about 200 miles.
Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more "rational" than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man's thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That's easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters?
(9) Soccer is not "catching on." Headlines this week proclaimed "Record U.S. ratings for World Cup," and we had to hear -- again -- about the "growing popularity of soccer in the United States."
The USA-Portugal game was the blockbuster match, garnering 18.2 million viewers on ESPN. This beat the second-most watched soccer game ever: The 1999 Women's World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC. (In soccer, the women's games are as thrilling as the men's.)
Run-of-the-mill, regular-season Sunday Night Football games average more than 20 million viewers; NFL playoff games get 30 to 40 million viewers; and this year's Super Bowl had 111.5 million viewers.
Remember when the media tried to foist British soccer star David Beckham and his permanently camera-ready wife on us a few years ago? Their arrival in America was heralded with 24-7 news coverage. That lasted about two days. Ratings tanked. No one cared.
If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.
Wow, you can’t even read. Too many Francisco Gallardo style “headers” in your past, eh?
no controvery at all for people that like soccer. But there is this big media push that says soccer will become “HUGE” in this country and it’s only a matter of time. They are clearly drinking the kool aid, and not dealing with a full deck. Americans like the superior product we already have. soccer may become half as popular as hockey.
Colin Cowherd of ESPN a few hours ago said conservative americans are mostly to blame for holding soccer popularity back because they fail to embrace anything new.... like immigration, technology. but soccer is not “new” to americans.
And who the heck is concerned about the "relative" popularity of sports? The sort of person who does not understand that one can be a fan of two or more sports at the same time?
Oh, and some airhead on ESPN ripped on conservatives. Welcome to ESPN. Watch it very often?
Say what?
Don't enjoy being justifiably mocked, eh?
I don't are who you are.
That there is funny!
I have only watched maybe half a dozen soccer games on TV all the way through. It’s probably not enough to start to understand the “finer points of the game,” although it doesn’t help that the announcers don’t make any effort to actually explain said finer points. This isn’t blistering-paced hockey; there is plenty of time to educate all those potential new soccer fans that might have happened across a match while channel surfing.
I constantly see this argument that Americans don’t like soccer simply because it’s low scoring, and, in my experience, the people that say that usually are thinly implying (or often flat out saying) that those people are simply dumb for not appreciating a game without the potential for big scores. I have a different take on it. Low scoring games place a huge weight on each goal, which I think leads to some major problems.
1) As seen in the Brazil-Croatia game, flopping/diving is insanely beneficial if you can get away with it. (How the world’s biggest event for a single sport can have clear camera footage of an obvious flop which gave the home team the winning goal and can do nothing about it is beyond me, but that’s another discussion.) Still, since a single goal is so incredibly valuable in soccer, it’s inevitable that players are going to seek that short circuit path to get a chance at scoring with a penalty kick that the keeper has almost no chance of defending if he doesn’t guess right. Flopping happens in basketball, too, of course, but the effect on the overall score is much smaller, so unless it’s done at the end of the game, there are opportunities to compensate for it.
2) Low scores reward random events. I know there’s skill in getting to the opponent’s goal and defending your own, and I’ve actually seen a higher number of impressive assists and goals in these WC games than I’ve ever seen before. However, I’ve seen a ton of goals in soccer where the ball simply bounces in the right place for an attacker who is there in a lucky position to pop it in before the defense and keeper can react. I just watched the U.S. lose to Germany based on a great save by our keeper that just happened to bounce straight to one of the Germans hanging out around the net with no one in front of him. It was a good ricochet for Germany, and it decided the entire game. Now hockey has this same issue, but hockey also many more scoring opportunities for the offense to even it up, while maintaining a much smaller net, so a goalie actually has a chance in hell of fending off multiple attacks in a row. The goaltending in the Stanley Cup finals was breathtaking in this respect. And yet several of the winning goals for the Kings seemed to just come from bad ricochets that the goalie would have had otherwise. I also hate sudden death in sports for reasons like this. Randomness should be minimized as much as possible in sports, so that the athletes and coaches can truly show that their skills are the reasons for winning or losing.
I think this is really the non-articulated core of the American dislike for soccer. It might be considered a matter of fairness in a way. The low scoring really allows for many unearned wins and upsets, and the size of the field and the pace of the game make it difficult to throw a lot of shots on goal to at least try to even things out, such as in hockey. The Big 3 American sports all have legitimate comeback potential at any time and the higher score potential mitigates the devastation of terrible officiating somewhat. I suspect that American fans who care even a little about the sport they’re watching don’t mind seeing a 0-0 pitcher’s duel or low-scoring basketball or football game if the reason for the low scoring is defensive excellence. (If it’s just utter incompetence by both teams, then it IS legitimately terrible.) The reason one can appreciate low scoring in those games is that we all know that it’s very possible to have medium-to-high scores in those games. Randomness and bad calls can only account for so many points/runs in football, basketball, and baseball; there’s always still that chance of overcoming even unfair obstacles through skill and determination. In soccer, one goal against you is basically a knife to your throat and two would probably be a flat out decapitation.
So, my position is that the sport needs higher scoring potential not to make it more exciting, but to make it more fair and less random. If all that American sports fans cared about was the endorphin rush of seeing someone score as soccer evangelists often claim is the case, we wouldn’t give two craps about PEDs, steroids, or anything else along those lines. The real reason, I think, is that it just doesn’t seem truly competitive enough the way it’s currently played.
Every four years, someone writes this same article to establish their “conservative” street cred. Funny that it was Coulter, this time around.
...was it absolutely necessary to post that disgusting photo, just to try and make a point...?
...now I’ve lost my appetite...and dinner’s on the table...
Who,like Beckel,knows zero about the sport
...feel free to ‘enlighten’ us Neanderthals and tell us what we don’t know about soccer...
Every four years, someone writes this same article to establish their “conservative” street cred
...ok, I guess...if you say so...
Yes, I say so. I believe four years ago it was Goldberg (or maybe it was eight years ago, I don’t remember—same article, time after time). Welcome to the internet.
“If all that American sports fans cared about was the endorphin rush of seeing someone score as soccer evangelists often claim is the case, we wouldn’t give two craps about PEDs, steroids, or anything else along those lines.”
The only sport where the fans care about PEDS is baseball. Football and basketball are riddled with HGH and no one cares or even tests for it, there is no outrage. Notice these are the sports that get the most coverage in the media and are the higher scoring, look at all the complaints about how ‘boring’ baseball is.
Freegards
Wow this might be an all time record for me over 150 responses. I geuss Coulter is getting a lot of flak from the lefties over this column. One thing I cant stand about soccer is the obvious faking of injury to draw a flag. There was that one incident in the womens world cup in 2012 when someone pretended to be hurt and they carried her off on a stretcher and then as soon as she is carted of the field she gets up and runs back to her team. Pathetic.
It’s like watching NASCAR: “Lookie, they’re making a left turn!” “Lookie, they’re making another left turn!” One thing soccer and NASCAR have in common is that you can go to the kitchen and eat a 4-course meal and not have missed a thing when you go back to the TV! To make NASCAR really interesting, they should have someone in a Smart car travelling in the opposite direction of the race cars.
“There you go again.” —Ronald Reagan
Pingy
It was all Google Doodles and “I’ve always loved soccer!” and “USA! USA!” up to the moment Belgium downed us 2-1.
Now it’s back to vanilla Googles, baseball (”Remember me?”), and “Soccer sucks.”
But to Coulter’s point, Tim Howard’s goal-tending kept the score to 2-1 instead of 5 or 6-1. He kept the score from being an out-and-out beat-down.
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