OH NO! THE U.S. LOST! Oh wait, it's soccer? Then why do I care?

In the words of Otto on trying to get a license, "I tried. Oh how I have tried"...to give a rat's ass about soccer.
It started with this year's phenomenal run by the Marquette women's soccer team. I went to a few of their games, including the two home playoff games, and had a lot of fun watching them and cheering the team on. With the World Cup coming up I decided maybe I should expand my horizons, become more cultured and all that, by becoming more of a soccer fan.
And after approximately eight months, I am eternally retiring as a professional soccer fan.
The first round of the Cup has proven to me that I personally, as well as this country in general, will never find soccer worth watching (especially not when it means getting up before 9:00 a.m.). A few reasons...

1. Flopping As Nick Poethig (the one soccer enthusiast in our house) pointed out, there are acting jobs in every "American" sport, specifically basketball. But the amount of overexaggerated injuries and flops in your average soccer game simply makes it unwatchable. Today a Ghana player got carried off the field on a stretcher for what appeared to be a side cramp. The deciding goal in the game was on a penalty kick that was essentially a result of a guy losing his footing.

The reason that this will always be a part of the game is because the rules of the game encourage it. I have never seen so many late whistles in any sport as I did in the first round of the Cup. If you get fouled and don't writhe on the ground in pain, don't expect the refs to call anything. On the flip side, if you get touched on hip and fall to the ground screaming and grabbing your leg, the opposing player gets a yellow card. Another rule that encourages acting jobs is limited subsitutions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these don't apply to injury replacements, so if you're running out of energy and don't want to waste one of your team's subsitutions (or if your team is already out of them) you wait until you're touched and fall to the ground until a stretcher races out to take you into the locker. Another motivating factor is that if you turn the ball over, the other team is apparantly obliged to give you the ball back if you get "hurt." Two times in this morning's match the U.S. stole the ball and had a chance to break away, but the player guilty of the turnover laid in a heap of vag sand until the U.S. intentionally kicked the ball out of bounds.

As far as the flopping goes, the refs are absolutely horrible, and no one seems to mind that much. If an NBA player tried hitting the floor every time they were touched (or looked like they might have been touched) the refs would simply let the game go on. If you want a foul in the NBA, you have to draw serious contact. That doesn't mean that players don't flop, but they at least draw some actual contact to exaggerate. Exaggerating a shoulder to the chest is not nearly the same crime as exaggerating a dreadlock to the back of your head. So are soccer refs retarded? Can they actually NOT TELL the difference between a hard foul and an obvious flop? Probably not the case. More likely, in the game of soccer, a foul depends on the (faked) result more than the contact.

2. Running clock For some reason, the rest of the world has a boner for a clock that never stops. But here in the U.S. we want drama in our sports. And how the hell can you have drama when you don't even know how much time is left at the end of the game? A sport without last-second shots and buzzer beaters can hardly be considered a sport in this country.

3. Yellow cards This especially comes to play in the third game of the elimination round and every game here on out. Since yellow cards don't carry over into the next round, a player who has not received one yet is free to preserve his team's lead via tactics that are against the rules...with no consequences. For example, Ghana willingly delayed the game at the end of this morning's match and received a yellow card. Whoop de doo. In America, penalties directly result in an advantage for the other team.

4. Low scoring Now well I personally can enjoy a 1-0 baseball game, a 7-3 football game or a scoreless hockey game, the average American sports fan cannot. That is why all of those sports (most recently hockey) have changed rules to encourage scoring. The reason people can enjoy low-scoring baseball, football or hockey games are because they're a rarity, and a display of incredible pitching/defense. Can you imagine the ratings baseball would get if every game were 1-0, and a 3-1 game were considered a shoot out? Soccer does not attempt to increase scoring, because it has plenty of fans around the world who like it just the way it is. But in this country, it will not fly.


Soccer will never change these things, and I don't want soccer to change these things. If they did, it would just be another reason for the rest of the world to hate the U.S. (for ruining their sport). I say let the rest of the world have their futbol. I'm perfectly happy with baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis and golf.

The media have tried so hard to generate interest in the U.S. soccer team, and advertising works. I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who would not have watched a single World Cup game had it not been hyped the way it was. But in the end, getting the average American sports fan to watch a few days of soccer just proved to them what they had always suspected: soccer is boring, and soccer players are pussies.