Posted on 05/31/2002 9:28:33 AM PDT by xsysmgr
How, yawn, clever.....don't football players play in tights?
I love soccer. I've played the game, coached it, and now, my children play it. (BTW: they love the game too.)
Is it boring? I don't think so. There is grace, teamwork, flashes of individual brilliance -- and more -- in every match at every level. You just gotta know what to look for.
What I don't understand is why some people (including those in this forum, apparently) think it has to be a competition about which sport is best. Do I think baseball is boring? Yes. Do I think golf is boring? Yes. Do I slam those who watch it? No.
Come on, FReepers. Let's see some toleration. After all, it's only a game.
A fun game to play as a kid. That's it.
BWAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHAAA
Wrong. Football was invented when American college boys, playing rugby, got tired of getting kicked in the face while down and losing their teeth. They ruled that play stopped when a player was down, which is sensible and which proves we're more civilized than the British. Then, to eliminate constant scrums, they instituted the down and distance system, and the rest is history. From that point, the forward pass has been the only other revolutionary departure.
Soccer is boring, but so are golf, baseball, auto racing, equestrian sports, and NBA regular season games. So I won't hold boring against it; some people seem to like tedium, and I don't have to watch.
When I put on my sports-purist hat, however, what does bother me about soccer is too many games (not to mention tournament games and championships) being decided by penalty kicks and/or those shootoffs (or whatever they're called) to break ties. It is as if basketball games routinely ended up tied and we settled on a freethrow shooting contest to decide the matter. A little more scoring would solve the problem.
I say this as a fan of defense. I loathe the designated hitter, the shot clock, the three point shot, etc. But soccer is overbalanced the other way. Probably all they would have to do is expand the goal a foot or two to turn boring 1-1 ties-with-shootouts into exciting 9-7 type games.
Hillarious. Someone who enjoys watching people drive around in a circle 500 times calls another sport gay....
I can understand someone being indifferent to a sport, but I don't understand the outright hostility that some show towards a sport.....
Soccer really is a great game. It does require some smarts and creativity, though.
You bet. A helluva lot better than 12 minutes of the ball in play during a 3-4 hour pointyball borefest.
However, soccer is not a popular spectator sport in the USA because, in my opinion, soccer has been "solved." The fact that the woman's world championship soccer game was decided on a penalty kick after a 0-0 tie proved to me that professional soccer teams have learned to be skilled enough, strong enough, and have enough endurance to prevent the other team from winning. They have simply figured everything out, and that's about it. Soccer has simply become to easy for the pros. Thus, I think the solution is simply to make the field smaller and force the game to be more fast paced. Hockey operates on the same principles as soccer, but it doesn't suffer from the same "slowness" stigma.
The lack of popularity among Americans when it comes to international play is simply that you can't really go to see any of the "away games" to root on the USA. It's easy for the British football hooligans to travel from country to country in Europe cheering on their country. In the USA, you're stuck hopping on a flight across the Atlantic if you want to do that.
Do baseball and golf fans write editorials criticizing people who are not fans of the sport? No. Do they criticize and belittle people who dont like the sport? No. Do they question the mental capacity and "culture" of those that don't like the sports? No.
Do soccer fans do all of the above and more? Yes.
A very close friend is Dutch by birth (came to Canada 20 years ago) and I watched the recent European Cup matches with him at the local pub. The team from his hometown won in the end so he was a very motivated viewer. With the help of someone who could explain the game as it was being played I realized that soccer, like Formula 1 racing, can be very exciting if you pay attention to the nuances of on-field play, the strategies employed to set up breaks, substitutions etc. I agree that it doesn't posses the raw excitement of North American sports, and I can never imagine a game having the intensity of playoff hockey, but there's a lot there if you're willing to take the time to watch.
Only real issue I still have with the sport is ending a tied game with penalty kicks. I say make them play till they drop.
Any mediocrity can play and look good; thats why its so popular with housewives; their kids can play and run around and suck and not stand out.
It's simple, monotonous, beauracratic, mundane. Its socialistic.
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