Penalty kick
I can't watch the World Cup games because the groups watching the games here at work are pulling that annoying sports fan thing where they're spending less time watching the game and more time trying to convince everyone in the room that NO ONE could POSSIBLY be MORE INTO THE GAME and MORE STRESSED OUT ABOUT IT than they are.
There's also the inevitability of someone in the room having to enjoy soccer by leveling some complaint against the United States and American football, and I don't need that argument today. I've said it before and I'll say it again: every sport has it's pros and cons. No sport has exciting endings anywhere near as often as baseball. No scoring in any sport can compete with the exitement and anticipation of a goal in soccer. No game's intricacies go as deep as American football. Very few sports are as much on ice as hockey.
In other words, the brain's still moving slowly and I can't coax anything decent out of it yet. Nothing good to say here today. Move along.
In other news, the new Futureheads album is really good.
12 comments:
I hate that. Why is being a fan competition for who is the BIGGEST?
I've noticed that soccer snobs can be the most insufferable of all sports snobs. What jerks.
As for the Futureheads...it's not as immediate as the first one. It's growing on me though. Really reminds of the Jam in places.
ah, but who is worse? the soccer snob OR the people who go OUT OF THEIR WAY to let you know how much they hate soccer and the world cup. Like, say, our local sports columnist/hack/redneck.
we get it. you hate soccer, it's not a sport to you, and you probably wrote the same fucking article 4 years ago. jerk.
Unfortunately, the people here at work are more anti-American than soccer snobs. And I don't actually mind people being snobs as long as they know what they're talking about. But like Doug pointed out, a lot of people basically just criticize what they don't know and don't watch. Someone who watches a sport for years and then finally gives up on it because it's boring? Fine. But someone who watches half a game of something and then calls it stupid is stupid.
People. They're the WORST.
If you think the intricacies of baseballdon't run as deep as those of football, then you've obviously never heard of the balk rule. That shit is more intricate than the entire game of cricket!
I'm talking about the intricacies of the game, though, not the rules. For instance, the game of basketball is fantastic, but the rules make it increasingly difficult for me to watch.
But back to the balk: it's a complex rule, but so is the tuck rule in football. I still have a hard time figuring out the offsides rule in soccer, and basketball fouls seem almost totally arbitrary to me sometimes.
It's going beyond penalties and the nitty-gritty of what's allowed and what isn't and looking at the game itself: strategy and movement. Every game can be dissected, but I'm just amazed at the depth of football: the movement of the lines when coordinated with a running play, the movement of recievers who aren't even supposed to get the ball on the play.
Don't think that I'm saying that all other sports are stupid. That was the point of this: that every sport has something that others don't. And it's not at all that I'm saying that American football is the only intricate and deep sport. I'm just saying that, as far as I've seen in my years of sports spectating, that's what puts football ahead of everything else: the complexity of the team movement.
I have been obsessing on the Cup this week and it's been a total blast. The snobs of whom I speak are the one's who frequent places like the bigsoccer message boards and spend the whole week bellyaching about how terrible the ESPN broadcasters are (ok Shep Messing is pretty insufferable I must admit). Or those in this country who seem to take glee from watching the US fall on its face on the pitch. Hey, I understand it if you happen to be from another country with a more proud and storied soccer past...by all means, root on your home team. But I heartily show my middle finger to anyone who actively roots against our progress in this regard. I'm really really glad I'm not in your office this week, Reid!
man, I'm glad you weren't in my office on Monday, 'cuz Whitman was rootin' for the Czech's something fierce. He must have some ancestor from Prague or something.
Gotta say, it got pretty nasty at times between he and uber-patriot Sage. ugly. The taunting by Whitman during that last goal was the WORST.
Well, Sage can always get back at Whitman by putting Whitman's head in her mouth.
This probably all sounds a little kinky for people that don't know who Whitman and Sage are...
In other news, what's up with all these World Cup games being tied at 0 until the NINETY-FIRST minute?!! That's THREE in the last two days!!!
Yeah, but the ties would be more exciting if they counted *down* the clock instead of up. You're sitting there looking at a tie at minute 89:00 and thinking "wow, only 1 minute left to score. Or maybe 3-5 minutes, if there's penalty time. Nobody besides the ref knows for sure." Could you imagine watching an NCAA basketball tourney game, tied up near the end, and the coach having to say "there might be 1/2 a second left, or there could be 30 seconds left...so hurry up and take the shot, but try not to leave too much time left for the other team to score."
That would still be better than how basketball is now: "There's only a minute on the clock, but both teams still have three timeouts, so it's actually going to take about 20 minutes to play that final minute, and thanks to all the fouling, the ball will never be in play for longer than about five seconds of the clock."
I'd love it if basketball was more like soccer, and there were no timeouts at all. They just had to keep playing the entire time.
Time-outs aside, you still know how much *playing* time is left. In soccer, it's just anyone's guess. If they insist on counting up, at least when there's a penalty they should change the clock back rather than add on time to the end, so you know the game ends at 90:00. Or post the ending time somewhere on the scoreboard.
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